10 ms·

Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

55 points by Reedx 6y ago

supernova87a 6y ago
There is not a lot of positive incentive for a school to be stringent on its own kids. Unless that school is private (for example), and has people willing to keep standards, think about the long term, and resist the relentless pressure to dumb them down. That's why independent assessment (unpopular as it may be) is the only way to keep it in check. Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass.
- watwut 6y ago
  Private schools dont have long term interest in giving worst grades. Both their long term and short term interests are in good grades for graduates. Giving easy reward or "unfair" good grade is less of risk then giving unfair bad grade.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Private schools sometimes give poor grades internally and then have good grades externally. A friend of mine went to a high school where you got a grade which went on all your interim reports and such. When it came time for report cards and transcripts, the grade was multiplied by somewhere between 1.06 and 1.2.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. It is an obvious conflict of interest for the same entity to be responsible for both training and assessment. I'm surprised how little this is recognized.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass. This approach is used for PhD thesis defences, although in that case I believe there's an additional force at play: it's not just that they want an examiner who is external and independent, it's that they want the awarded degree to appear legitimate to the rest of the academic world.
- sevensor 6y ago
  I had the opportunity to be an outside examiner for an honors exam at a private college. It was a fun experience for me; I got to ask probing questions and have them answered by a brilliant young person. I don't know if this was inflationary or not, but I voted to award honors.
runawaybottle 6y ago
I think this reaches down into high school as well. https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001 https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001 So, half the students are A students, but their SAT scores are going down? This sounds like the great fashion psychology trick of labeling large jeans as ‘small’ or larger shirts as ‘slim fit’.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  SAT scores have been inflating recently too, actually.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Inflating has an implied value judgement which might not be warranted. Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training. That’s not inflation in the sense that the gains are legitimate rather than making the test easier but it’s probably an example of Goodhart’s law where we’re seeing a focus on maximizing performance on the test itself rather than the broader skills it’s supposed to be a proxy for.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training. Practice and training have negligible effect on SAT scores. The industry exists, but in the same way that fortune tellers exist.
      - acdha 6y ago
        This is too broad a rejection. The prep companies don’t appear to have a huge measured impact, probably on the order of 30-90 points, but it is certainly the case that experience with the format and time pressure is going to help a student, with disproportionate impact on the kids who would otherwise score lower due to those factors. Remember: this isn’t malicious or cheating. It’s just saying that you get better at things you practice and every kid in the country has an incentive to practice these tests.
MengerSponge 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
kanobo 6y ago
Maybe the industry could popularize a 'normalized-grade' in applications where it simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school? Is that a bad idea?
- watwut 6y ago
  If everyone has A, it still leads to A.
  - kanobo 6y ago
    If you have a 4.0 but your school's average is a 5.0, your normalized gpa would be a 0.8 vs a 1.0. I didn't mean to imply that the divisions would use graded letters.
    - watwut 6y ago
      If everyone has 5.0, the average is 5.0. With even more pressure, since even smallest downgrade to someone has huge impact. I did not meant to imply you would average letters, they are just the usual way to express the grade.
      - kanobo 6y ago
        I think we have different priors because I definitely didn't have the best grades compared to my peers as a student. And as a teacher at a University my students have a huge range in their scores.
  - shard 6y ago
    If a C is what the average should be, then the A's would all get normalized to a C.
    - watwut 6y ago
      The algorithm is supposed to be "simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school". Yours would put students at schools with other good students at disadvantage against those who go to less competitive schools. The assumption that students in different schools should have the same average is likely wrong.
watwut 6y ago
As long as having good grades provides advantage outside of school and the school is judged by graduates achievements, there is strong incentive for school to give better grades.
alanfranz 6y ago
I don't live in the US and I didn't go to college in the US, so my experience is largely irrelevant to the topic. But in my own country (Italy), even though grade inflation is a thing both in high schools and universities, I see something here that is in stark contrast with some statements in the article: italian students definitely study a lot, far more than in the 60s/70s/80s. In those times the university, although useful, was seen "just as a school", and very often students had a part-time job or worked at their parents' small business, learning "to have a real job" and they weren't chasing the best grades all the time, just a degree. On the contrary, nowadays you can meet a lot of students who are fully dedicated to their degrees, and strive for high grades in all classes. The perceived value of university is far higher, and students commit far more to it. It may be more uncommon to fail an exam; but an high score won't be automatically granted.
- rscho 6y ago
  That's because it used to be that <30% of high-school students would step foot inside a university, _i.e._ just getting a degree meant you were ahead of the pack and well-employable. Nowadays, literally anyone can obtain a degree. You've got to have something more to show if you want to stand out. The "more" part is poorly defined by design, of course. To add even more to this already dismal situation, education fees have gone through the roof to ensure that smart people of low extraction don't get too much leverage against people who are powerful by right of birth. Education has become an industry just like any other. This decadence makes me extremely sad.
  - watwut 6y ago
    The education fees in Italy are that high?
    - rscho 6y ago
      Fees are rising directly or indirectly everywhere. In some places (Italy) it's just the beginning, in other places (USA) the situation is drawing to its finality: the complete destruction of the social ladder.
082349872349872 6y ago
During the draft period (1964-1973?) of the Chiến tranh Việt Nam, I've heard a rationale for grade inflation at the university level was to protect draft deferments.
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  But that doesn't square with the 50 year trend.
chmaynard 6y ago
My father taught a freshman chemistry course at Yale for one semester, back in the '40s. Apparently he held the students to a high standard and decided not to grade on a curve. The result was that about half the students failed the course. The Dept. of Chemistry was not happy. That was the end of his teaching career at Yale.
CincinnatiMan 6y ago
Not a fan of the graphs not starting at zero. Feels disingenuous.
searchableguy 6y ago
Maybe we should not have grades at all. Kids bullied and built a hierarchy based on grades. They would cry over simple tests or for a single mark since letter grading. They would ask other kids about it relentlessly comparing and noticing even a difference of 0.001%. The teachers relied on those numbers to decide your punishment. The opportunities to participate in school events or represent it were determined by an unrelated grade. The parents relied on grades for parenting. The outsiders taught them how to raise their kid through one of their reports. Guess what? Grades aren't fair in any way. Not even in higher standards. I was in two schools that asked the teachers to modify the student's answer sheet since they had done nothing to give them passing grades (probably illegal?) and for higher standards, schools wouldn't handout a mark that could make them look bad in addition to board exams.
- watwut 6y ago
  I did not seen a kid cry over grades nor my kids are reporting schoolmates crying over grades, so I think that there was something special about where you grew up.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I live in India so yes. It's illegal for schools to punish kids physically but it happens in practice frequently. If not school, then parents do it. There is also neighbor and public shaming.
codethief 6y ago
A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at $UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics class for life sciences majors (mostly freshmen), where I was guiding students through their lab experiments and grading their lab reports. Some memories and observations, from a European perspective: - A third to half of all the lab reports I graded every week sounded as if they had been written by grade schoolers, both syntactically and rhetorically. I, as a non-native speaker, frequently had to correct people's English mistakes. - I gave elaborate feedback on every single lab report, announced what things I'd like to see them do and what my scoring rubric looked like. All these remarks were largely ignored by at least half of the people time and again. - The head of the labs, my boss, always urged us, the TAs, to grade fairly and to deduct points where students had clearly messed up. "There must be a difference between the grades of good students and bad students," he said. Unfortunately, his actions spoke louder than his words: He had already assigned each of the lab exercises a certain number of points which left us TAs little room for our own scoring rubric(×). Basically, very easy and low-level exercises (like copying a definition from class) got them already 30-40% of the points and recording measurements correctly gave them another 30-40%. The actual evaluation of the experiments, where the students had to actually do some thinking, was practically optional. - The course material was high school level. I had learned it back in 9th grade. This is clearly not the students' fault but it speaks volumes about the US high school system. - There were many students who I would have given an F, had we been at a European university. But I couldn't, due to (×). One of the aforementioned students actually had the audacity to ask me for an A instead of the already very generous B she was going to get. - I will say that there was a small group of students who were extremely motivated and interested in the stuff I taught, asked questions all the time, took each piece of advise by heart and did extremely well overall. - Side note: I had previous TA experience and had always gotten very good grades by my students. Judging by their comments, I know how to present and explain things well. So I can say with confidence that it wasn't that I was a bad TA. - I supervised the mid-term exam and not only were the exam questions very easy and multiple-choice (with every question having precisely one correct answer), students were also allowed to mark multiple answers: Assuming they managed to at least mark the correct answer, marking two answers would give them 0.75 points instead of 1 full point, marking three would give them 0.5 points and marking three (out of five) would still give them 0.25 points. On top of that, towards the end of the two-hour exam when some few students weren't done yet, the professor extended the deadline multiple times so that they could all finish. In short: The exam was designed so that students could pass it and get good grades. Here's the kicker, though: Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that practically all other TAs were simply giving their students full points for everything. After talking to some of the TAs, I came to learn that that they had realized in previous semesters that the grades us TAs gave didn't matter at all (as they were going to get "rescaled" by the professor anyway), so why bother and put in so much work? At the same time, though, they encouraged me to speak up about it. So I emailed both my boss (the head of the labs) and the professor multiple times about it. They never responded. All students ended up getting an A for the class.
jasoneckert 6y ago
I think part of the reason for this inflation involves modern academic faculty rejecting the traditional antiquated assessment-based educational system. In other words, they're of the opinion that "marks don't matter" - what you learn and what you can demonstrate does. James Paul Gee from Arizona State University put it best when he said: We take it as completely natural that you would be in an Algebra class for 12 weeks, and then I would give you a test on Algebra …. to see if you learned any Algebra. Let’s say a kid plays Halo on Hard …. and finishes Halo. Would you be tempted to give him a Halo test? No. Not at all. You’d say the game already tested him. So let’s think - Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class.
- tuesdayrain 6y ago
  >We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class. I don't agree with that logic. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that people typically don't care about someone's halo skills the same way an employer might care about algebra skills. If that person wanted to become a professional halo player, they would certainly need to pass some form of test or prove their ability in additional ways.
- d_watt 6y ago
  Seems like a false equivalence. Playing Halo is itself the test. To have beaten the game is to have passed the test. If anything, that metaphor suggests students should be continuously tested to prove competence, and only by "beating" the test can they work on the next lesson. Which may be a good way to handle asynchronous learning, but doesn't work in a cohort.
- watwut 6y ago
  > Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo ... Actually, it is because no one cares about whether the kid finished Halo. The kid could have leave Halo unfinished half way and it would be still same thing. There is no one who would be giving the kid the "proeficient in Halo" degree. I agree also with other responses, in particular the one about Halo itself being the test. But even if Halo was not a test and allowed cheats, there still the aspect of no one caring whether kid learned Halo or not.
sheepybloke 6y ago
I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships. When I was in college, I had to get a certain grade or I wouldn't be able to afford to go to my college. I wonder if that knowledge ties into how professors grade? The other thing is that it would be interesting to see if the current generation is better test takers. So, even if they don't learn as much or are less literate, they're able to see through the test and answer the expected answer or write what the professor wants to see. Personally, I've grown up taking tons of tests and would argue I'm just a good test taker now. Same with my wife. She was a lot worse of student than I was, but was an amazing test taker. She could pass almost any test put in front of her, even if she didn't study. While I think the article has a lot of good points, I think we also have to bring some different perspectives into the conversation. The author seems to have a single focus as to why this is happening, and I think it would be interesting to see what other people think around this.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships Absolutely. You add a financial incentive to bad behavior and you're going to see more bad behavior. Given the cost of college education in the US, a little bit of grade inflation, class-rank maneuvering, and occasional blatant cheating could save you $10k a year, or more.
cycomanic 6y ago
I opened the article had a look at the graphs and closed it again. The y axis of the graph is deliberately chosen to make the effect look stronger and this sort of thing gets an immediate no from me. Yes if you want to highlight a small effect on a large number you can change the yaxis, usually you indicate this by an interruption in the axis. Bit that's not the case here GPAs go from 1 (or 0) to 4 and any significant effect would show on such a scale (it would not look as large however). The other question is, how where the years chosen, is there a lot of fluctuations year to year? Bottom line, there might very well be a significant effect, however the presentation sets of all sort of alarm bells.

55 points by Reedx 6y ago

There is not a lot of positive incentive for a school to be stringent on its own kids. Unless that school is private (for example), and has people willing to keep standards, think about the long term, and resist the relentless pressure to dumb them down. That's why independent assessment (unpopular as it may be) is the only way to keep it in check. Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass.

watwut 6y ago
Private schools dont have long term interest in giving worst grades. Both their long term and short term interests are in good grades for graduates. Giving easy reward or "unfair" good grade is less of risk then giving unfair bad grade.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Private schools sometimes give poor grades internally and then have good grades externally. A friend of mine went to a high school where you got a grade which went on all your interim reports and such. When it came time for report cards and transcripts, the grade was multiplied by somewhere between 1.06 and 1.2.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. It is an obvious conflict of interest for the same entity to be responsible for both training and assessment. I'm surprised how little this is recognized.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass. This approach is used for PhD thesis defences, although in that case I believe there's an additional force at play: it's not just that they want an examiner who is external and independent, it's that they want the awarded degree to appear legitimate to the rest of the academic world.
sevensor 6y ago
I had the opportunity to be an outside examiner for an honors exam at a private college. It was a fun experience for me; I got to ask probing questions and have them answered by a brilliant young person. I don't know if this was inflationary or not, but I voted to award honors.

runawaybottle 6y ago

I think this reaches down into high school as well. https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001 https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001 So, half the students are A students, but their SAT scores are going down? This sounds like the great fashion psychology trick of labeling large jeans as ‘small’ or larger shirts as ‘slim fit’.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
SAT scores have been inflating recently too, actually.
- acdha 6y ago
  Inflating has an implied value judgement which might not be warranted. Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training. That’s not inflation in the sense that the gains are legitimate rather than making the test easier but it’s probably an example of Goodhart’s law where we’re seeing a focus on maximizing performance on the test itself rather than the broader skills it’s supposed to be a proxy for.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training. Practice and training have negligible effect on SAT scores. The industry exists, but in the same way that fortune tellers exist.
    - acdha 6y ago
      This is too broad a rejection. The prep companies don’t appear to have a huge measured impact, probably on the order of 30-90 points, but it is certainly the case that experience with the format and time pressure is going to help a student, with disproportionate impact on the kids who would otherwise score lower due to those factors. Remember: this isn’t malicious or cheating. It’s just saying that you get better at things you practice and every kid in the country has an incentive to practice these tests.

MengerSponge 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

kanobo 6y ago

Maybe the industry could popularize a 'normalized-grade' in applications where it simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school? Is that a bad idea?

watwut 6y ago
If everyone has A, it still leads to A.
- kanobo 6y ago
  If you have a 4.0 but your school's average is a 5.0, your normalized gpa would be a 0.8 vs a 1.0. I didn't mean to imply that the divisions would use graded letters.
  - watwut 6y ago
    If everyone has 5.0, the average is 5.0. With even more pressure, since even smallest downgrade to someone has huge impact. I did not meant to imply you would average letters, they are just the usual way to express the grade.
    - kanobo 6y ago
      I think we have different priors because I definitely didn't have the best grades compared to my peers as a student. And as a teacher at a University my students have a huge range in their scores.
- shard 6y ago
  If a C is what the average should be, then the A's would all get normalized to a C.
  - watwut 6y ago
    The algorithm is supposed to be "simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school". Yours would put students at schools with other good students at disadvantage against those who go to less competitive schools. The assumption that students in different schools should have the same average is likely wrong.

watwut 6y ago

As long as having good grades provides advantage outside of school and the school is judged by graduates achievements, there is strong incentive for school to give better grades.

alanfranz 6y ago

I don't live in the US and I didn't go to college in the US, so my experience is largely irrelevant to the topic. But in my own country (Italy), even though grade inflation is a thing both in high schools and universities, I see something here that is in stark contrast with some statements in the article: italian students definitely study a lot, far more than in the 60s/70s/80s. In those times the university, although useful, was seen "just as a school", and very often students had a part-time job or worked at their parents' small business, learning "to have a real job" and they weren't chasing the best grades all the time, just a degree. On the contrary, nowadays you can meet a lot of students who are fully dedicated to their degrees, and strive for high grades in all classes. The perceived value of university is far higher, and students commit far more to it. It may be more uncommon to fail an exam; but an high score won't be automatically granted.

rscho 6y ago
That's because it used to be that <30% of high-school students would step foot inside a university, _i.e._ just getting a degree meant you were ahead of the pack and well-employable. Nowadays, literally anyone can obtain a degree. You've got to have something more to show if you want to stand out. The "more" part is poorly defined by design, of course. To add even more to this already dismal situation, education fees have gone through the roof to ensure that smart people of low extraction don't get too much leverage against people who are powerful by right of birth. Education has become an industry just like any other. This decadence makes me extremely sad.
- watwut 6y ago
  The education fees in Italy are that high?
  - rscho 6y ago
    Fees are rising directly or indirectly everywhere. In some places (Italy) it's just the beginning, in other places (USA) the situation is drawing to its finality: the complete destruction of the social ladder.

082349872349872 6y ago

During the draft period (1964-1973?) of the Chiến tranh Việt Nam, I've heard a rationale for grade inflation at the university level was to protect draft deferments.

jimhefferon 6y ago
But that doesn't square with the 50 year trend.

chmaynard 6y ago

My father taught a freshman chemistry course at Yale for one semester, back in the '40s. Apparently he held the students to a high standard and decided not to grade on a curve. The result was that about half the students failed the course. The Dept. of Chemistry was not happy. That was the end of his teaching career at Yale.

CincinnatiMan 6y ago

Not a fan of the graphs not starting at zero. Feels disingenuous.

searchableguy 6y ago

Maybe we should not have grades at all. Kids bullied and built a hierarchy based on grades. They would cry over simple tests or for a single mark since letter grading. They would ask other kids about it relentlessly comparing and noticing even a difference of 0.001%. The teachers relied on those numbers to decide your punishment. The opportunities to participate in school events or represent it were determined by an unrelated grade. The parents relied on grades for parenting. The outsiders taught them how to raise their kid through one of their reports. Guess what? Grades aren't fair in any way. Not even in higher standards. I was in two schools that asked the teachers to modify the student's answer sheet since they had done nothing to give them passing grades (probably illegal?) and for higher standards, schools wouldn't handout a mark that could make them look bad in addition to board exams.

watwut 6y ago
I did not seen a kid cry over grades nor my kids are reporting schoolmates crying over grades, so I think that there was something special about where you grew up.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I live in India so yes. It's illegal for schools to punish kids physically but it happens in practice frequently. If not school, then parents do it. There is also neighbor and public shaming.

codethief 6y ago

A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at $UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics class for life sciences majors (mostly freshmen), where I was guiding students through their lab experiments and grading their lab reports. Some memories and observations, from a European perspective: - A third to half of all the lab reports I graded every week sounded as if they had been written by grade schoolers, both syntactically and rhetorically. I, as a non-native speaker, frequently had to correct people's English mistakes. - I gave elaborate feedback on every single lab report, announced what things I'd like to see them do and what my scoring rubric looked like. All these remarks were largely ignored by at least half of the people time and again. - The head of the labs, my boss, always urged us, the TAs, to grade fairly and to deduct points where students had clearly messed up. "There must be a difference between the grades of good students and bad students," he said. Unfortunately, his actions spoke louder than his words: He had already assigned each of the lab exercises a certain number of points which left us TAs little room for our own scoring rubric(×). Basically, very easy and low-level exercises (like copying a definition from class) got them already 30-40% of the points and recording measurements correctly gave them another 30-40%. The actual evaluation of the experiments, where the students had to actually do some thinking, was practically optional. - The course material was high school level. I had learned it back in 9th grade. This is clearly not the students' fault but it speaks volumes about the US high school system. - There were many students who I would have given an F, had we been at a European university. But I couldn't, due to (×). One of the aforementioned students actually had the audacity to ask me for an A instead of the already very generous B she was going to get. - I will say that there was a small group of students who were extremely motivated and interested in the stuff I taught, asked questions all the time, took each piece of advise by heart and did extremely well overall. - Side note: I had previous TA experience and had always gotten very good grades by my students. Judging by their comments, I know how to present and explain things well. So I can say with confidence that it wasn't that I was a bad TA. - I supervised the mid-term exam and not only were the exam questions very easy and multiple-choice (with every question having precisely one correct answer), students were also allowed to mark multiple answers: Assuming they managed to at least mark the correct answer, marking two answers would give them 0.75 points instead of 1 full point, marking three would give them 0.5 points and marking three (out of five) would still give them 0.25 points. On top of that, towards the end of the two-hour exam when some few students weren't done yet, the professor extended the deadline multiple times so that they could all finish. In short: The exam was designed so that students could pass it and get good grades. Here's the kicker, though: Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that practically all other TAs were simply giving their students full points for everything. After talking to some of the TAs, I came to learn that that they had realized in previous semesters that the grades us TAs gave didn't matter at all (as they were going to get "rescaled" by the professor anyway), so why bother and put in so much work? At the same time, though, they encouraged me to speak up about it. So I emailed both my boss (the head of the labs) and the professor multiple times about it. They never responded. All students ended up getting an A for the class.

jasoneckert 6y ago

I think part of the reason for this inflation involves modern academic faculty rejecting the traditional antiquated assessment-based educational system. In other words, they're of the opinion that "marks don't matter" - what you learn and what you can demonstrate does. James Paul Gee from Arizona State University put it best when he said: We take it as completely natural that you would be in an Algebra class for 12 weeks, and then I would give you a test on Algebra …. to see if you learned any Algebra. Let’s say a kid plays Halo on Hard …. and finishes Halo. Would you be tempted to give him a Halo test? No. Not at all. You’d say the game already tested him. So let’s think - Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class.

tuesdayrain 6y ago
>We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class. I don't agree with that logic. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that people typically don't care about someone's halo skills the same way an employer might care about algebra skills. If that person wanted to become a professional halo player, they would certainly need to pass some form of test or prove their ability in additional ways.
d_watt 6y ago
Seems like a false equivalence. Playing Halo is itself the test. To have beaten the game is to have passed the test. If anything, that metaphor suggests students should be continuously tested to prove competence, and only by "beating" the test can they work on the next lesson. Which may be a good way to handle asynchronous learning, but doesn't work in a cohort.
watwut 6y ago
> Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo ... Actually, it is because no one cares about whether the kid finished Halo. The kid could have leave Halo unfinished half way and it would be still same thing. There is no one who would be giving the kid the "proeficient in Halo" degree. I agree also with other responses, in particular the one about Halo itself being the test. But even if Halo was not a test and allowed cheats, there still the aspect of no one caring whether kid learned Halo or not.

sheepybloke 6y ago

I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships. When I was in college, I had to get a certain grade or I wouldn't be able to afford to go to my college. I wonder if that knowledge ties into how professors grade? The other thing is that it would be interesting to see if the current generation is better test takers. So, even if they don't learn as much or are less literate, they're able to see through the test and answer the expected answer or write what the professor wants to see. Personally, I've grown up taking tons of tests and would argue I'm just a good test taker now. Same with my wife. She was a lot worse of student than I was, but was an amazing test taker. She could pass almost any test put in front of her, even if she didn't study. While I think the article has a lot of good points, I think we also have to bring some different perspectives into the conversation. The author seems to have a single focus as to why this is happening, and I think it would be interesting to see what other people think around this.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
> I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships Absolutely. You add a financial incentive to bad behavior and you're going to see more bad behavior. Given the cost of college education in the US, a little bit of grade inflation, class-rank maneuvering, and occasional blatant cheating could save you $10k a year, or more.

cycomanic 6y ago

I opened the article had a look at the graphs and closed it again. The y axis of the graph is deliberately chosen to make the effect look stronger and this sort of thing gets an immediate no from me. Yes if you want to highlight a small effect on a large number you can change the yaxis, usually you indicate this by an interruption in the axis. Bit that's not the case here GPAs go from 1 (or 0) to 4 and any significant effect would show on such a scale (it would not look as large however). The other question is, how where the years chosen, is there a lot of fluctuations year to year? Bottom line, there might very well be a significant effect, however the presentation sets of all sort of alarm bells.