6 ms·

How do European professors and universities avoid grade inflation? Are their incentives very different?

franciscop 8y ago
That is quite more internal so I can answer only for Spain and Industrial Engineering: yes. Professors' main incentive seem to be to make sure that those who pass are those who know what they are talking about. The main reason is that if a student screws up, people die. A more political reason is because University prestige depends partly on the knowledge of the graduading students. So if someone said they studied in X and they had no idea what they were talking about it'd give quite a bad image for the university. It's not rare to see some students crying at the exam review but it mostly doesn't work.
- dasv 8y ago
  Just to clarify, Industrial Engineering in Spain is a generalist engineering degree (mechanics/electricity and electronics/fluid mechanics/materials/etc). What the rest of the world calls "industrial engineering" is called "organization engineering" here. The main difference between grades in Spanish engineering schools and the rest of Europe seems to be that the grade curve is heavily compressed between 4/10 and 6/10 (passing grade is 5/10). The amount of study needed to reach a passing grade would amount to an A elsewhere. As long as 25% (IIRC) of the students pass there are no consequences for the department. If less people pass, they just award a 5.0 to everyone from a certain grade up, they don't do curves. It is not unusual for people to retake a class for three or four years in a row. There is not much guidance from professors either, no homework or extra assignments. There is just one or two midterms and a final exam, and if you're lucky there will be official course materials to study from but that is not a requirement. Most exchange students have a pretty bad time here, but on the other hand Spanish students abroad usually ace their exams with half of the work they are used to.
Findeton 8y ago
They don't get paid more for getting more students, or if more students pass. Normally people go to public universities, which are pretty good, and their teachers have more or less a fixed salary. In general university costs money, both to the Government/State and the student, and thus incentives are somewhat aligned for both parties. Also, student loans are NOT a common thing here... When I was at uni, the cost of the studies was about 1000€/year (500€ for me as my parents have 3 children), now it's about 2 to 3k€/year, but it's still something somewhat feasible. That's Spain, in Germany for example it's free.
- simongray 8y ago
  > They don't get paid more for getting more students, or if more students pass. Normally people go to public universities, which are pretty good, and their teachers have more or less a fixed salary. There's no way you can generalise about incentive structures like that for an entire continent. In my country, only public universities exist and the incentive structure is decided politically. Currently, universities get paid a certain amount for each student that graduates, but they are also deducted some set amount if the student doesn't graduate within a specific amount of time. In addition to that, the sum of money gained from a single STEM student is double that of another kind of student, so the universities have quite clear incentives to promote their STEM degrees. Obviously, an incentive structure based solely on passing students must also inspire grade inflation. The current structure highly incentivises making STEM degrees easy to obtain. Whether that's actually the case, I can't say, but the structure certainly encourages it.
  - dasv 8y ago
    Some professors take as a badge of honour to pass only the bare minimum of students they can get away with each year, at least in Spain. If there aren't enough passing grades to reach that legal minimum, they just give everyone from a certain grade up a 5.0. On top of that, there are no limits on how many times you can retake a class, it is not unusual to be stuck with the same class for three or four years until you manage to pass.
  - flurrything 8y ago
    Do the professors on that university get paid more for having more students? Because in Germany for example, this is not the case. The university departments get different amount of money depending on the amount of students they have, but this money cannot be spent freely (e.g. on increasing professor's salaries), but must be spent for education-related things like hiring more TAs, which is something that departments that get more students need to do anyways. The professor salary is pretty much standardized (per the TVL), which does allows for sur-pluses in case that the responsibilities justify them, but university "students" do not play a role here. Things that affect these are, for example, having larger management-related responsibilities. For example, a professor with 4 PhD students and 2 postdocs gets less money than a professor with 30 PhD students, large experimental facilities, 10 mechanics, 5 middle management personell, ... adding up to 60 people under supervision. So while I agree that the universities do have an incentive to grow the number of students in STEM degrees, the professors do not really have a big incentive to make the degrees easier. The professors that "get rich" in Germany have large consulting companies on the side to which they try to attract the top talent, so if anything, the incentive is to produce more top talent. This can incentive them both ways, making things easier to attract more students to get more students in their companies, or making things harder to filter out the bulk from the top talent. But that's just supply and demand.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
watwut 8y ago
I suspect it is also because grades matter less. In America, grades are bigger deal and affects who gets academic positions. That means that if school gives C where another gives A, former will have less successful students then latter despite having similar results. There is also heightened student pressure for similar reasons. but it is not just students.
yardie 8y ago
The schools aren’t incentivized to recruit more students. And, unlike American universities, you can start and stop studying as you please. France for example, you get a certification for every level you complete. So it’s common to see job descriptions with Bac+2 or Bac+3. Your baccalaureate and 2 years of university. Unlike the all or nothing BA/BS American degree. American universities run on government and private finance. If they don’t graduate a certain percentage of students that financing gets withdrawn. So it’s easy to see where giving better grades leads to higher graduations connected to government financing.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  I've never heard of Frances intermediate achievements in University. That's great! I think one of the best things that can happen is someone not finding usefulness and meaning in their studies, deciding to work for a few years and then see how learning more would help and go back to University with a internal motivation that's truly driven by curiosity and a desire to get better. Most systems seem to discourage that. In the US most of the additional salary from studying at University comes from actually getting the degree. It's clearly all about signaling and not learning. This seems like a great step in a better direction.
  - yardie 8y ago
    Yes. When I moved there I had to convert my BS into the French equivalent. A 4-year BS == Bac+3. They also have various vocational and technical degrees that don’t have a US equivalent, like sommelier or vintner. I wouldn’t necessarily call it better. I have friends who have taken 8+ years to get their Bac+3. The lower tier universities have capacity issues. The class you need may be full and can take years to enroll. Also, with no motivation to pass students you are truly in your own. Things like office hours, tutors, study labs, and the library not being open late like we have in the US. These are surprisingly uncommon in France.
phobosdeimos 8y ago
Professional ethics? Pride? The teaching staff is removed from the commercial operations of a university. I will say however that universities in my country are heavily recruiting foreign students to the point that everything is in English.
3rdAccount 8y ago
I'm sure many degree programs in the US are inflated, but it wasn't my experience in the US where engineering professors brag about how many students they failed that semester. "You only had 1/3rd your class drop? You must be getting soft." I had AP Calculus in High School (took school seriously) and had to give 110% to pass engineering school. I never partied and basically lived in study hall. Not everyone has to put in that much effort, but I never ever felt grades were being inflated to pass us. When the highest grade on a test is a 42 from a classmate that could probably build a teleporter in their garage, you know things are tough. When we used to have to take required non-engineering courses like history and psyche, most of us felt like we were teleported back over a decade to junior high as the classes were such a joke. So the specialized classes and degrees can be astonishingly challenging, while the generic courses everyone has to take are almost remedial.
- nojvek 8y ago
  Grades really seemed arbitrary to me. People who got high grades didn’t mean they’d be more successful in life, it just they got good at gaming the final exams. Indian education has this huge obsession with grades, it’s nuts. Students commit suicides over grades, I believe it’s same with china. I’m glad my university had more focus on labs and hands on work. I pretty much aced all my labs and did okay on paper exams. Paper exams always felt like an exercise for the professor to put students on an explicit bell curve.
  - sizzle 8y ago
    I think this is due to overpopulation. Only so many seats available to pass?
- xvedejas 8y ago
  This does not seem to be the case in private universities, where high graduation rate is a strongly desired statistic. Maybe one or two people total left my Chemical Engineering class over four years, and usually to switch to something like Chemistry. I'm not sure what kinds of grades were typically passed out, but there always seemed to be strong pressure not to fail students.
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
One way this is done is to grade on a curve (a practice still carried out in many medical schools here in the US).

That is quite more internal so I can answer only for Spain and Industrial Engineering: yes. Professors' main incentive seem to be to make sure that those who pass are those who know what they are talking about. The main reason is that if a student screws up, people die. A more political reason is because University prestige depends partly on the knowledge of the graduading students. So if someone said they studied in X and they had no idea what they were talking about it'd give quite a bad image for the university. It's not rare to see some students crying at the exam review but it mostly doesn't work.

dasv 8y ago
Just to clarify, Industrial Engineering in Spain is a generalist engineering degree (mechanics/electricity and electronics/fluid mechanics/materials/etc). What the rest of the world calls "industrial engineering" is called "organization engineering" here. The main difference between grades in Spanish engineering schools and the rest of Europe seems to be that the grade curve is heavily compressed between 4/10 and 6/10 (passing grade is 5/10). The amount of study needed to reach a passing grade would amount to an A elsewhere. As long as 25% (IIRC) of the students pass there are no consequences for the department. If less people pass, they just award a 5.0 to everyone from a certain grade up, they don't do curves. It is not unusual for people to retake a class for three or four years in a row. There is not much guidance from professors either, no homework or extra assignments. There is just one or two midterms and a final exam, and if you're lucky there will be official course materials to study from but that is not a requirement. Most exchange students have a pretty bad time here, but on the other hand Spanish students abroad usually ace their exams with half of the work they are used to.

Findeton 8y ago

They don't get paid more for getting more students, or if more students pass. Normally people go to public universities, which are pretty good, and their teachers have more or less a fixed salary. In general university costs money, both to the Government/State and the student, and thus incentives are somewhat aligned for both parties. Also, student loans are NOT a common thing here... When I was at uni, the cost of the studies was about 1000€/year (500€ for me as my parents have 3 children), now it's about 2 to 3k€/year, but it's still something somewhat feasible. That's Spain, in Germany for example it's free.

simongray 8y ago
> They don't get paid more for getting more students, or if more students pass. Normally people go to public universities, which are pretty good, and their teachers have more or less a fixed salary. There's no way you can generalise about incentive structures like that for an entire continent. In my country, only public universities exist and the incentive structure is decided politically. Currently, universities get paid a certain amount for each student that graduates, but they are also deducted some set amount if the student doesn't graduate within a specific amount of time. In addition to that, the sum of money gained from a single STEM student is double that of another kind of student, so the universities have quite clear incentives to promote their STEM degrees. Obviously, an incentive structure based solely on passing students must also inspire grade inflation. The current structure highly incentivises making STEM degrees easy to obtain. Whether that's actually the case, I can't say, but the structure certainly encourages it.
- dasv 8y ago
  Some professors take as a badge of honour to pass only the bare minimum of students they can get away with each year, at least in Spain. If there aren't enough passing grades to reach that legal minimum, they just give everyone from a certain grade up a 5.0. On top of that, there are no limits on how many times you can retake a class, it is not unusual to be stuck with the same class for three or four years until you manage to pass.
- flurrything 8y ago
  Do the professors on that university get paid more for having more students? Because in Germany for example, this is not the case. The university departments get different amount of money depending on the amount of students they have, but this money cannot be spent freely (e.g. on increasing professor's salaries), but must be spent for education-related things like hiring more TAs, which is something that departments that get more students need to do anyways. The professor salary is pretty much standardized (per the TVL), which does allows for sur-pluses in case that the responsibilities justify them, but university "students" do not play a role here. Things that affect these are, for example, having larger management-related responsibilities. For example, a professor with 4 PhD students and 2 postdocs gets less money than a professor with 30 PhD students, large experimental facilities, 10 mechanics, 5 middle management personell, ... adding up to 60 people under supervision. So while I agree that the universities do have an incentive to grow the number of students in STEM degrees, the professors do not really have a big incentive to make the degrees easier. The professors that "get rich" in Germany have large consulting companies on the side to which they try to attract the top talent, so if anything, the incentive is to produce more top talent. This can incentive them both ways, making things easier to attract more students to get more students in their companies, or making things harder to filter out the bulk from the top talent. But that's just supply and demand.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

watwut 8y ago

I suspect it is also because grades matter less. In America, grades are bigger deal and affects who gets academic positions. That means that if school gives C where another gives A, former will have less successful students then latter despite having similar results. There is also heightened student pressure for similar reasons. but it is not just students.

yardie 8y ago

The schools aren’t incentivized to recruit more students. And, unlike American universities, you can start and stop studying as you please. France for example, you get a certification for every level you complete. So it’s common to see job descriptions with Bac+2 or Bac+3. Your baccalaureate and 2 years of university. Unlike the all or nothing BA/BS American degree. American universities run on government and private finance. If they don’t graduate a certain percentage of students that financing gets withdrawn. So it’s easy to see where giving better grades leads to higher graduations connected to government financing.

ajmurmann 8y ago
I've never heard of Frances intermediate achievements in University. That's great! I think one of the best things that can happen is someone not finding usefulness and meaning in their studies, deciding to work for a few years and then see how learning more would help and go back to University with a internal motivation that's truly driven by curiosity and a desire to get better. Most systems seem to discourage that. In the US most of the additional salary from studying at University comes from actually getting the degree. It's clearly all about signaling and not learning. This seems like a great step in a better direction.
- yardie 8y ago
  Yes. When I moved there I had to convert my BS into the French equivalent. A 4-year BS == Bac+3. They also have various vocational and technical degrees that don’t have a US equivalent, like sommelier or vintner. I wouldn’t necessarily call it better. I have friends who have taken 8+ years to get their Bac+3. The lower tier universities have capacity issues. The class you need may be full and can take years to enroll. Also, with no motivation to pass students you are truly in your own. Things like office hours, tutors, study labs, and the library not being open late like we have in the US. These are surprisingly uncommon in France.

phobosdeimos 8y ago

Professional ethics? Pride? The teaching staff is removed from the commercial operations of a university. I will say however that universities in my country are heavily recruiting foreign students to the point that everything is in English.

3rdAccount 8y ago

I'm sure many degree programs in the US are inflated, but it wasn't my experience in the US where engineering professors brag about how many students they failed that semester. "You only had 1/3rd your class drop? You must be getting soft." I had AP Calculus in High School (took school seriously) and had to give 110% to pass engineering school. I never partied and basically lived in study hall. Not everyone has to put in that much effort, but I never ever felt grades were being inflated to pass us. When the highest grade on a test is a 42 from a classmate that could probably build a teleporter in their garage, you know things are tough. When we used to have to take required non-engineering courses like history and psyche, most of us felt like we were teleported back over a decade to junior high as the classes were such a joke. So the specialized classes and degrees can be astonishingly challenging, while the generic courses everyone has to take are almost remedial.

nojvek 8y ago
Grades really seemed arbitrary to me. People who got high grades didn’t mean they’d be more successful in life, it just they got good at gaming the final exams. Indian education has this huge obsession with grades, it’s nuts. Students commit suicides over grades, I believe it’s same with china. I’m glad my university had more focus on labs and hands on work. I pretty much aced all my labs and did okay on paper exams. Paper exams always felt like an exercise for the professor to put students on an explicit bell curve.
- sizzle 8y ago
  I think this is due to overpopulation. Only so many seats available to pass?
xvedejas 8y ago
This does not seem to be the case in private universities, where high graduation rate is a strongly desired statistic. Maybe one or two people total left my Chemical Engineering class over four years, and usually to switch to something like Chemistry. I'm not sure what kinds of grades were typically passed out, but there always seemed to be strong pressure not to fail students.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

One way this is done is to grade on a curve (a practice still carried out in many medical schools here in the US).