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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 exampl
by 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 agoNo 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 agoIsn'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 agoNot 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 agoBut 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