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Grade inflation is known for a long time and really bad for students. According my teachers, when they graduated (40 years ago) the best student of my college s

Grade inflation is known for a long time and really bad for students. According my teachers, when they graduated (40 years ago) the best student of my college scored 14/20. When I graduated, the top student scored 18/20. The real problem is that public intitutions hire based on college scores so younger grads have an unfair advantage. To solve grade inflation a bell curve would work: best tests would grade A+, next ones would grade A and sucessively independently of scores itself. You would have always the same relative amount of each grade scale along the years.

MikeNomad 10y ago
When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights. Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point. I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were. I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method. Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing; Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor; My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods; My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.
- MikeNomad 10y ago
  Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the semester..." Sorry.

MikeNomad 10y ago

When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights. Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point. I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were. I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method. Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing; Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor; My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods; My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.

MikeNomad 10y ago
Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the semester..." Sorry.