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> old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare st

> old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor. Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I'd call it a good riddance!

nextos 7y ago
That is the problem with metrics. Once there is a metric, a grade or a citation count or an impact factor, people will use it for doing comparisons. For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B). If you applied to a PhD program say at MIT or Cambridge, this would put you in a pretty bad position unless the committee had a lot of insight on local grading policies or you had exceptional achievements to compensate. Not fun.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  No metric is free from this problem, but grades have a much more severe case of it than competing metrics (citations, standardized tests, competitions), and we should treat them accordingly. Even if all metrics are bad, we should try to favor the ones that are less bad. Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Isn't that an argument for grading on a curve though? Then MIT knows you're in the Xth percentile even if completely unfamiliar with the programme.
  - yifanl 7y ago
    Not really? You'd have to normalize across _all_ applicants, otherwise you're putting applicants from countries with a harder curriculum at a disadvantage. 98th percentile from X doesn't mean the same as 98th percentile from Y.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      But X and Y universities are being compared on prestige anyway, so the ancient and revered Y's 98th percentile has already beaten X's 100th. I'd have thought (with no admissions experience) that 98th percentile at an unheard of university is more meaningful than 4.3 points out of 5 from the same.
- pedrosorio 7y ago
  > For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B). That is why there are tools to convert grades from different countries into US letter grades: https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp
asdff 7y ago
My chem department prided itself in the fact that it's core courses and grading system hasn't been touched since around 1995, when they built the current online lab submission website. "You would have gotten the same grade two decades ago," they promised. Once you were handed the exams, it was obvious why this was the case. They were hard as shit, class averages would hover around 55%, curved to a C even. We would later be shown the averages of other sections, lecturers, and years, and they would never sway more than 2-3% off the median score despite different sections, professors, decades even. The only constant maintaining this consistency was the content and pace of the lectures and exams, and the grading scale. Despite all the intergenerational turmoil and educational upheaval debated over the past 25 years, here was the chemistry department throwing perfect darts. Schools need to decide how rigorous they should be, establish a very clear grading system that tests that rigor, and stick with it for decades.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  If you develop a rigorous, reliable assessment for a rigorous, reliable course then the very last thing you should want is to brand its scores in a way that invites unfavorable comparisons to degree mill rubber stamp "A"s by people who don't know or can't be bothered, yet this is exactly what you do by calling these grades, fitting them to the ABC scale, putting them on report cards, and weighing them into GPAs. It's madness. Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards. There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.

nextos 7y ago

That is the problem with metrics. Once there is a metric, a grade or a citation count or an impact factor, people will use it for doing comparisons. For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B). If you applied to a PhD program say at MIT or Cambridge, this would put you in a pretty bad position unless the committee had a lot of insight on local grading policies or you had exceptional achievements to compensate. Not fun.

jjoonathan 7y ago
No metric is free from this problem, but grades have a much more severe case of it than competing metrics (citations, standardized tests, competitions), and we should treat them accordingly. Even if all metrics are bad, we should try to favor the ones that are less bad. Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
OJFord 7y ago
Isn't that an argument for grading on a curve though? Then MIT knows you're in the Xth percentile even if completely unfamiliar with the programme.
- yifanl 7y ago
  Not really? You'd have to normalize across _all_ applicants, otherwise you're putting applicants from countries with a harder curriculum at a disadvantage. 98th percentile from X doesn't mean the same as 98th percentile from Y.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    But X and Y universities are being compared on prestige anyway, so the ancient and revered Y's 98th percentile has already beaten X's 100th. I'd have thought (with no admissions experience) that 98th percentile at an unheard of university is more meaningful than 4.3 points out of 5 from the same.
pedrosorio 7y ago
> For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B). That is why there are tools to convert grades from different countries into US letter grades: https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp

asdff 7y ago

My chem department prided itself in the fact that it's core courses and grading system hasn't been touched since around 1995, when they built the current online lab submission website. "You would have gotten the same grade two decades ago," they promised. Once you were handed the exams, it was obvious why this was the case. They were hard as shit, class averages would hover around 55%, curved to a C even. We would later be shown the averages of other sections, lecturers, and years, and they would never sway more than 2-3% off the median score despite different sections, professors, decades even. The only constant maintaining this consistency was the content and pace of the lectures and exams, and the grading scale. Despite all the intergenerational turmoil and educational upheaval debated over the past 25 years, here was the chemistry department throwing perfect darts. Schools need to decide how rigorous they should be, establish a very clear grading system that tests that rigor, and stick with it for decades.

jjoonathan 7y ago
If you develop a rigorous, reliable assessment for a rigorous, reliable course then the very last thing you should want is to brand its scores in a way that invites unfavorable comparisons to degree mill rubber stamp "A"s by people who don't know or can't be bothered, yet this is exactly what you do by calling these grades, fitting them to the ABC scale, putting them on report cards, and weighing them into GPAs. It's madness. Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards. There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.