13 ms·

Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading

103 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

malfist 3y ago
Why is it always assumed when grade averages go up, it's the professor grading easier? Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps it's students that are improving
- throwaway098479 3y ago
  My thoughts exactly.
- 1980phipsi 3y ago
  Average ACT scores have declined six years in a row and are at their lowest level in 30 years. This isn't necessarily the strongest argument because of potential changes in the composition of the test takers. Particularly as schools go test optional. However, I think that is broadly in line with what other test scores are showing. You can pair that with surveys of how much college students are studying and it is down significantly from 30-40 years ago. You might make the case that they are better prepared now, but the other side of that would be that less may be expected of them.
  - surge 3y ago
    I also believe this is a side effect of "everyone has to go to college", you're no longer getting the most academically gifted (of which I am not a part either). It's far more likely with a larger portion of the populace or diverse populace going to college you're going to get several students that struggle because in certain majors you can't coast through college like you can many high schools.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      And when "everyone" goes to college, you get people that aren't really able to do college-level work. A college can fail them out, often leaving them with some amount of debt from the time they were there. (Worse, it can string them along for as much as they can afford, but never let them graduate, maximizing their debt as they chase the carrot of a degree.) Or it can use grade inflation to get them to "pass", but at the price of making the degree meaningless. The better answer would be not to admit them in the first place. But there are people who, after not doing well in high school, find motivation or grow up or whatever, and are able to do college-level work, and do it well. They need a place to go. So there's not really a great answer. But I think that grade inflation might be the worst answer, because it destroys the institution, not just the individuals.
      - surge 3y ago
        I think, the top schools should remain academically rigorous, even if that means some kids even those from disadvantaged backgrounds don't cut it, I'm of the opinion they're probably better off going to a more average school anyway, being the first in your family to get a degree, for instance is a huge leg up. There's kind of an expectation that some schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc) have more academic rigor. As you said it makes the degree meaningless, if an A at a community college is the same as an A at Stanford, what is even the point of all the added tuition and debt?
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        > They need a place to go. That place, in the US at least, is community college with a setup to transfer once they've established themselves and acquired basic study habits and so forth, also there is much less non-academic distraction coming from greeks, athletics and campus lifestyle organizations. This is actually better for everybody at all levels because it's hard to justify paying full tuition rates, even at a state school, for lower div classes offered at a community college for one fifth the cost or less. Interestingly, at this level community colleges are in some ways even -more- rigorous than "real" universities because classes are very cheap so the financial penalty of retaking is much lower, and at the institutional level there is no ranking pressure to get students to graduate in 4 years. On the other hand the peers that students will be mingling with are a much wider spread from highest to lowest in terms of ability, than at a school that has at least a minimal selection funnel. There will be a small group capable of work at the very top (ivy/MIT/cal etc) echelon who attend community college to save money or for other practical (commute, unpredictable family situations, etc) reasons, and of course a much larger cohort of people at a barely functional level of ability, but these tend to discover that they may not be a fit for college after the first year or so.
  - 20239uejd 3y ago
    On the other hand, GPAs remain about as predictive of later criteria as standardized scores. In some studies they're even slightly more predictive. Each have their issues. Even with grade inflation, GPA is reflective of a long-term process that unfolds over years. ACT is an afternoon when who knows what can be going on.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      It's pretty simple: use both GPAs and standardized scores. To prevent rampant grade inflation, normalize each school's GPA (and for ones where the top-end indicates significantly less rigorous coursework than other schools', use the standardized tests to fill in the gaps). That'll outperform both GPA alone and SATs alone.
1980phipsi 3y ago
Generally not a fan of the bolding in the article, but the broader point raised by this one is worthwhile. "Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards." Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal of student achievement.
- clusterhacks 3y ago
  Wish I could upvote more "to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school." I taught as an adjunct at a great public university. Undergrads seem to think there are two grades - A or failing. But that attitude starts in high school. As a parent of kids there now, rampant grade inflation and an "infinite re-do" approach to assignments and tests really sets the tone for kids to feel quite bad about themselves for a B+. I'm bullish on standardized tests becoming more, rather than less, important for admissions to competitive (or more honestly, limited-number-of-student-slots) universities at the undergrad and graduate level.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Imo the standardized tests should be designed by the majors and not be standardized at all. Many like the language dept have already designed great ones to place people into the correct level language class based on what they offer at that university. This model expanded to the rest of the school would encourage learning without gaming the test or wasting time studying just for the test like we see in standardized tests and the predatory market surrounding that industry.
    - Robelius 3y ago
      The school I went to had a common Dynamics exam. It was considered the first “real” engineering course you took, and was the foundation for a lot of upper div classes. Regardless of your teacher or class time; all students took the same exam at the same time. Professors would grade other professors students. It was also normal for a double digit % of the students to fail the exam and retake the course (me included). Its not exactly what people think of as a standardized test, but it ensured all students in the school had the same acceptable level of comprehension on the subject.
odyssey7 3y ago
The achievement of course objectives is a measure of instructional quality. Why add insult to injury when the customers don’t get what they paid for?
xyzelement 3y ago
This is an obvious phenomenon. A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar. 50 years ago it was for the more ambitious. Today it’s for “everyone.” But the average person has not become more scholarly or ambitious. Just that the umbrella of “what is acceptable for college” has become broader. As a business it makes sense. You don’t want your product to be hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor goes against that goal. So it’s obvious that there’s infinite pressure to lower the bar in admissions and grading so the university can pass more customers through, collecting 4 years tuition. I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly from education. There are benefits, but the average college for the average student today is a scam.
- dwallin 3y ago
  > A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar. A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men so I would be very careful throwing around words like "rare breed". Education in general was something reserved for the elite, why would you bother educating someone who would probably be working a factory line? The general population is far more educated, providing massive well-documented and widely-studied societal benefits. What has changed is we have moved (slightly) away from viewing education as a way of stratifying our society and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    > A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they discriminated against.
    - dwallin 3y ago
      I think the point stands. Education at the time was highly discriminate regardless of who was considered the in-group and who was the out-group by any particular country.
    - 3y ago
alephnerd 3y ago
The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023 compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone. Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%. This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school. The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve. A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023 than it was in 2013. 2013 -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.pdf https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p... 2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/riverside/freshman-admission-profile.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
- mathattack 3y ago
  Could there be grade inflation in HS grades (likely) or ACTs (maybe)?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > grade inflation in HS grades (likely) Unlikely, as grade inflation would imply less need to take AP Classes, but proportion of students who have taken AP classes and tests has risen from 2013 [0] to 2021 [1]. Also, GPA is based on UC HS A-G classes, which are regulated at the state level. > ACTs (maybe) Unlikely, it's the same damn test (source: took it in the early 2010s, and helped prep family friends in 2021-22). ------ The main difference is California had a baby boom in the 1990s-early 2000s due to tech and immigration from Asia+Latin America [2][3]. In the 2009-11 period you wouldn't see portable trailer classrooms in top Californian HSes, but by 2011-15 they were everywhere, as the 1995-2005 cohort began entering middle and high school. By 2020-21, the glut was largely over, and Californian school districts began shutting down elementary schools due to low attendance. California in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2021 had a TFR of 2.5, 2.0, 1.95, and 1.5 respectively. [0] - https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-advanced-placement-rises-again/ https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-... [1] - https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of-2021 https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of... [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growth-in-1990s-exceeded-baby-boom-in-1950s.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growt... [3] - https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-slower-population-growth/ https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-sl...
verelo 3y ago
Grade inflation is legit and absurd. As an employer it makes me mad because i cannot use them as an indicator at all, they were never great but now they’re worthless. My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i listened to them say: “That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10” “This kid is going to complain, let’s give them 9. I don’t think they deserve to pass but i don’t want to answer their emails.”
- sevensor 3y ago
  > i don’t want to answer their emails This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about slipping standards in education, nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
- me_me_me 3y ago
  This was not an issue, as all institutions used to had their own entry exams. Then they got together and convinced government to create standardized test that would allow to create standard that they can trust and judge entrants by. When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
- 20239uejd 3y ago
  Fair enough. I misread your post initially but as a professor I can say it's definitely not always like that. One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much. I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not infrequently have pressure from administration to give students better grades. They have multiple stories of the college getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor, complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade" or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult. Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious awareness all the time. Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and they are reasonable, students don't complain. Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it, they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic screening process to flag students who might not do well, with check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.
softwaredoug 3y ago
Counterpoint: grades put too much emphasis on performance, and not the joy of learning. Being a hardass and stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life. adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was forgotten. Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
  - azemetre 3y ago
    What kinds of tests are you acing? Also for learning wouldn’t it be better to actually challenge yourself and exercise the brain muscles when learning something new? I’ve met too many first year college students who breezed through high school but never learned how to study. When the first calculus exam comes around they all tend to fail then get very anxious/depressed. Sometimes they’ll drop out entirely. I’m sure this story isn’t uncommon for others either.
    - softwaredoug 3y ago
      Some people enjoy trivia, tests, etc. It's not just about the knowledge, its about thinking about what the test-writer will ask, and how they will assess knowledge. And the fun of performing under pressure. I have always enjoyed tests. My son does too... Honestly it helps in other pursuits in life where you're evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). So its not a terrible thing.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        > it helps in other pursuits in life where you're evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). It depends. It doesn't do much to overcome social challenges. ex: Son #1 studied for nothing but freezes hard in job interviews. Conversely, I've talked my way into a number positions for which I wasn't a good candidate. We've learned that interview-skills are more highly prized than being qualified. Usually far more.
lightedman 3y ago
I would suspect (as a local to the University in this article) the inflation is higher than one sees. For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright. We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even know their own address and have been in the same student apartment for several years. The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)
bsder 3y ago
What about the numbers for the engineering departments? I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).
bradley13 3y ago
Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I would happily give out nothing but A's (those would be 6's here), if all students deserved them. On the other hand, I have taught classes where 3/4 of the students failed, because they deserved to. Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments. Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.
- ecf 3y ago
  > Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had. Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
  - tekla 3y ago
    Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them. All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
    - gloryjulio 3y ago
      > All the best employers had 3.5 or bust. Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
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SamuelAdams 3y ago
This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely continue for the next 10 years. Part of this is due to there being less people 15-18 years old compared to previous years, so colleges need to be more competitive to retain the same number of students. The other part is rising costs of colleges, to the point where many who would normally consider it are pausing and asking if it is worth it. In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student. For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above. So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to. You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less. So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  >For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), I went to one of these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of thought: 1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress. 2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs) I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.
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vonzepp 3y ago
During COVID in UK alot of grades were given by teacher assessment not by an exam. There was grade inflation. For one reason I didn't see was, people mess up exams, run out of time, spend too much time on an answer, misread a question, panic, don't turn over a page, feel ill on the day. Predictied grades don't predict non knowledge based exam performance. I wonder have there been studies covering how many grades are lost due to such failings.
currymj 3y ago
I don't think it is just pressure from above. I think a lot of professors would sincerely prefer to not give out any grades (as is done at some universities), or at least to give them an extremely low importance, and grade inflation is a way to approach this within the current system.
daxfohl 3y ago
Why not pass/fail everything? I've never looked at a transcript when hiring someone. It's not a strong differentiator in industry. Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there are likely far better indicators of potential success.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  You haven’t. But lots and lots of firms do. It might be better if they didn’t, but that isn’t the world these grads are entering today.
neilv 3y ago
I would love it if grades kept improving because students kept getting smarter.
vmilner 3y ago
Returning to a Uk university after 30 years recently to do a taught masters (STEM subject) I noticed that modules were either marked on a curve or (more dubiously) had a “revision lecture” where essentially the lecturer described what questions would be on the exam paper to a close approximation.
lumost 3y ago
Ultimately, this is because employers and grad schools care about the GPA, and schools want to ensure that most of their student body is above the arbitrary thresholds set by those institutions. Otherwise, students and alumni would devalue the university. If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a degree. Hence we have grade inflation.
hbcondo714 3y ago
> I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this information. For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel: “an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief” Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/
aidenn0 3y ago
What does "DFW" stand for?
- enjoyyourlife 3y ago
  D grade (unsatisfactory), F grade (fail), Withdraw (course dropped) See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-week-dfw-rates/ https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...
downrightmike 3y ago
Its just a required piece of paper with $100k debt at this point.
Imnimo 3y ago
The author observed that there is little change over time in the percentage of students getting Ds and Fs. If it were the case that the source of the pressure was maintaining graduation rates, wouldn't we expect the inflation to be focused there, and not at more students getting an A instead of a B?
vondur 3y ago
I work at a large public university. There’s tremendous pressure on professors to make sure students pass. This is especially true on courses that tend to filter students, such as Chem, Physics and some math courses. They will remove tenured faculty from teaching courses where they are failing too many students. These courses will be handed to lecturers who will be more sympathetic to passing more students. Also, they’ve also changed a course like Organic Chemistry from upper division to lower division. They have also started allowing high school level math courses to count for college credits.

103 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

Why is it always assumed when grade averages go up, it's the professor grading easier? Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps it's students that are improving

throwaway098479 3y ago
My thoughts exactly.
1980phipsi 3y ago
Average ACT scores have declined six years in a row and are at their lowest level in 30 years. This isn't necessarily the strongest argument because of potential changes in the composition of the test takers. Particularly as schools go test optional. However, I think that is broadly in line with what other test scores are showing. You can pair that with surveys of how much college students are studying and it is down significantly from 30-40 years ago. You might make the case that they are better prepared now, but the other side of that would be that less may be expected of them.
- surge 3y ago
  I also believe this is a side effect of "everyone has to go to college", you're no longer getting the most academically gifted (of which I am not a part either). It's far more likely with a larger portion of the populace or diverse populace going to college you're going to get several students that struggle because in certain majors you can't coast through college like you can many high schools.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    And when "everyone" goes to college, you get people that aren't really able to do college-level work. A college can fail them out, often leaving them with some amount of debt from the time they were there. (Worse, it can string them along for as much as they can afford, but never let them graduate, maximizing their debt as they chase the carrot of a degree.) Or it can use grade inflation to get them to "pass", but at the price of making the degree meaningless. The better answer would be not to admit them in the first place. But there are people who, after not doing well in high school, find motivation or grow up or whatever, and are able to do college-level work, and do it well. They need a place to go. So there's not really a great answer. But I think that grade inflation might be the worst answer, because it destroys the institution, not just the individuals.
    - surge 3y ago
      I think, the top schools should remain academically rigorous, even if that means some kids even those from disadvantaged backgrounds don't cut it, I'm of the opinion they're probably better off going to a more average school anyway, being the first in your family to get a degree, for instance is a huge leg up. There's kind of an expectation that some schools (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc) have more academic rigor. As you said it makes the degree meaningless, if an A at a community college is the same as an A at Stanford, what is even the point of all the added tuition and debt?
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      > They need a place to go. That place, in the US at least, is community college with a setup to transfer once they've established themselves and acquired basic study habits and so forth, also there is much less non-academic distraction coming from greeks, athletics and campus lifestyle organizations. This is actually better for everybody at all levels because it's hard to justify paying full tuition rates, even at a state school, for lower div classes offered at a community college for one fifth the cost or less. Interestingly, at this level community colleges are in some ways even -more- rigorous than "real" universities because classes are very cheap so the financial penalty of retaking is much lower, and at the institutional level there is no ranking pressure to get students to graduate in 4 years. On the other hand the peers that students will be mingling with are a much wider spread from highest to lowest in terms of ability, than at a school that has at least a minimal selection funnel. There will be a small group capable of work at the very top (ivy/MIT/cal etc) echelon who attend community college to save money or for other practical (commute, unpredictable family situations, etc) reasons, and of course a much larger cohort of people at a barely functional level of ability, but these tend to discover that they may not be a fit for college after the first year or so.
- 20239uejd 3y ago
  On the other hand, GPAs remain about as predictive of later criteria as standardized scores. In some studies they're even slightly more predictive. Each have their issues. Even with grade inflation, GPA is reflective of a long-term process that unfolds over years. ACT is an afternoon when who knows what can be going on.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    It's pretty simple: use both GPAs and standardized scores. To prevent rampant grade inflation, normalize each school's GPA (and for ones where the top-end indicates significantly less rigorous coursework than other schools', use the standardized tests to fill in the gaps). That'll outperform both GPA alone and SATs alone.

1980phipsi 3y ago

Generally not a fan of the bolding in the article, but the broader point raised by this one is worthwhile. "Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards." Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal of student achievement.

clusterhacks 3y ago
Wish I could upvote more "to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school." I taught as an adjunct at a great public university. Undergrads seem to think there are two grades - A or failing. But that attitude starts in high school. As a parent of kids there now, rampant grade inflation and an "infinite re-do" approach to assignments and tests really sets the tone for kids to feel quite bad about themselves for a B+. I'm bullish on standardized tests becoming more, rather than less, important for admissions to competitive (or more honestly, limited-number-of-student-slots) universities at the undergrad and graduate level.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Imo the standardized tests should be designed by the majors and not be standardized at all. Many like the language dept have already designed great ones to place people into the correct level language class based on what they offer at that university. This model expanded to the rest of the school would encourage learning without gaming the test or wasting time studying just for the test like we see in standardized tests and the predatory market surrounding that industry.
  - Robelius 3y ago
    The school I went to had a common Dynamics exam. It was considered the first “real” engineering course you took, and was the foundation for a lot of upper div classes. Regardless of your teacher or class time; all students took the same exam at the same time. Professors would grade other professors students. It was also normal for a double digit % of the students to fail the exam and retake the course (me included). Its not exactly what people think of as a standardized test, but it ensured all students in the school had the same acceptable level of comprehension on the subject.

odyssey7 3y ago

The achievement of course objectives is a measure of instructional quality. Why add insult to injury when the customers don’t get what they paid for?

xyzelement 3y ago

This is an obvious phenomenon. A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar. 50 years ago it was for the more ambitious. Today it’s for “everyone.” But the average person has not become more scholarly or ambitious. Just that the umbrella of “what is acceptable for college” has become broader. As a business it makes sense. You don’t want your product to be hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor goes against that goal. So it’s obvious that there’s infinite pressure to lower the bar in admissions and grading so the university can pass more customers through, collecting 4 years tuition. I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly from education. There are benefits, but the average college for the average student today is a scam.

dwallin 3y ago
> A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar. A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men so I would be very careful throwing around words like "rare breed". Education in general was something reserved for the elite, why would you bother educating someone who would probably be working a factory line? The general population is far more educated, providing massive well-documented and widely-studied societal benefits. What has changed is we have moved (slightly) away from viewing education as a way of stratifying our society and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they discriminated against.
  - dwallin 3y ago
    I think the point stands. Education at the time was highly discriminate regardless of who was considered the in-group and who was the out-group by any particular country.
  - 3y ago

alephnerd 3y ago

The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023 compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone. Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%. This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school. The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve. A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023 than it was in 2013. 2013 -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.pdf https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p... 2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/riverside/freshman-admission-profile.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...

mathattack 3y ago
Could there be grade inflation in HS grades (likely) or ACTs (maybe)?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > grade inflation in HS grades (likely) Unlikely, as grade inflation would imply less need to take AP Classes, but proportion of students who have taken AP classes and tests has risen from 2013 [0] to 2021 [1]. Also, GPA is based on UC HS A-G classes, which are regulated at the state level. > ACTs (maybe) Unlikely, it's the same damn test (source: took it in the early 2010s, and helped prep family friends in 2021-22). ------ The main difference is California had a baby boom in the 1990s-early 2000s due to tech and immigration from Asia+Latin America [2][3]. In the 2009-11 period you wouldn't see portable trailer classrooms in top Californian HSes, but by 2011-15 they were everywhere, as the 1995-2005 cohort began entering middle and high school. By 2020-21, the glut was largely over, and Californian school districts began shutting down elementary schools due to low attendance. California in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2021 had a TFR of 2.5, 2.0, 1.95, and 1.5 respectively. [0] - https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-advanced-placement-rises-again/ https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-... [1] - https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of-2021 https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of... [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growth-in-1990s-exceeded-baby-boom-in-1950s.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growt... [3] - https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-slower-population-growth/ https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-sl...

verelo 3y ago

Grade inflation is legit and absurd. As an employer it makes me mad because i cannot use them as an indicator at all, they were never great but now they’re worthless. My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i listened to them say: “That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10” “This kid is going to complain, let’s give them 9. I don’t think they deserve to pass but i don’t want to answer their emails.”

sevensor 3y ago
> i don’t want to answer their emails This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about slipping standards in education, nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
me_me_me 3y ago
This was not an issue, as all institutions used to had their own entry exams. Then they got together and convinced government to create standardized test that would allow to create standard that they can trust and judge entrants by. When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
20239uejd 3y ago
Fair enough. I misread your post initially but as a professor I can say it's definitely not always like that. One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much. I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not infrequently have pressure from administration to give students better grades. They have multiple stories of the college getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor, complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade" or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult. Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious awareness all the time. Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and they are reasonable, students don't complain. Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it, they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic screening process to flag students who might not do well, with check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.

softwaredoug 3y ago

Counterpoint: grades put too much emphasis on performance, and not the joy of learning. Being a hardass and stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not resemble real life. adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was forgotten. Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
- azemetre 3y ago
  What kinds of tests are you acing? Also for learning wouldn’t it be better to actually challenge yourself and exercise the brain muscles when learning something new? I’ve met too many first year college students who breezed through high school but never learned how to study. When the first calculus exam comes around they all tend to fail then get very anxious/depressed. Sometimes they’ll drop out entirely. I’m sure this story isn’t uncommon for others either.
  - softwaredoug 3y ago
    Some people enjoy trivia, tests, etc. It's not just about the knowledge, its about thinking about what the test-writer will ask, and how they will assess knowledge. And the fun of performing under pressure. I have always enjoyed tests. My son does too... Honestly it helps in other pursuits in life where you're evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). So its not a terrible thing.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      > it helps in other pursuits in life where you're evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). It depends. It doesn't do much to overcome social challenges. ex: Son #1 studied for nothing but freezes hard in job interviews. Conversely, I've talked my way into a number positions for which I wasn't a good candidate. We've learned that interview-skills are more highly prized than being qualified. Usually far more.

lightedman 3y ago

I would suspect (as a local to the University in this article) the inflation is higher than one sees. For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright. We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even know their own address and have been in the same student apartment for several years. The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)

bsder 3y ago

What about the numbers for the engineering departments? I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).

bradley13 3y ago

Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I would happily give out nothing but A's (those would be 6's here), if all students deserved them. On the other hand, I have taught classes where 3/4 of the students failed, because they deserved to. Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments. Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.

ecf 3y ago
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had. Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
- tekla 3y ago
  Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them. All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    > All the best employers had 3.5 or bust. Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.

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SamuelAdams 3y ago

This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely continue for the next 10 years. Part of this is due to there being less people 15-18 years old compared to previous years, so colleges need to be more competitive to retain the same number of students. The other part is rising costs of colleges, to the point where many who would normally consider it are pausing and asking if it is worth it. In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student. For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above. So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to. You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less. So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.

mhuffman 3y ago
>For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), I went to one of these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of thought: 1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress. 2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs) I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.

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vonzepp 3y ago

During COVID in UK alot of grades were given by teacher assessment not by an exam. There was grade inflation. For one reason I didn't see was, people mess up exams, run out of time, spend too much time on an answer, misread a question, panic, don't turn over a page, feel ill on the day. Predictied grades don't predict non knowledge based exam performance. I wonder have there been studies covering how many grades are lost due to such failings.

currymj 3y ago

I don't think it is just pressure from above. I think a lot of professors would sincerely prefer to not give out any grades (as is done at some universities), or at least to give them an extremely low importance, and grade inflation is a way to approach this within the current system.

daxfohl 3y ago

Why not pass/fail everything? I've never looked at a transcript when hiring someone. It's not a strong differentiator in industry. Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there are likely far better indicators of potential success.

compiler-guy 3y ago
You haven’t. But lots and lots of firms do. It might be better if they didn’t, but that isn’t the world these grads are entering today.

neilv 3y ago

I would love it if grades kept improving because students kept getting smarter.

vmilner 3y ago

Returning to a Uk university after 30 years recently to do a taught masters (STEM subject) I noticed that modules were either marked on a curve or (more dubiously) had a “revision lecture” where essentially the lecturer described what questions would be on the exam paper to a close approximation.

lumost 3y ago

Ultimately, this is because employers and grad schools care about the GPA, and schools want to ensure that most of their student body is above the arbitrary thresholds set by those institutions. Otherwise, students and alumni would devalue the university. If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a degree. Hence we have grade inflation.

hbcondo714 3y ago

> I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this information. For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel: “an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief” Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/

aidenn0 3y ago

What does "DFW" stand for?

enjoyyourlife 3y ago
D grade (unsatisfactory), F grade (fail), Withdraw (course dropped) See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-week-dfw-rates/ https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...

downrightmike 3y ago

Its just a required piece of paper with $100k debt at this point.

Imnimo 3y ago

The author observed that there is little change over time in the percentage of students getting Ds and Fs. If it were the case that the source of the pressure was maintaining graduation rates, wouldn't we expect the inflation to be focused there, and not at more students getting an A instead of a B?

vondur 3y ago

I work at a large public university. There’s tremendous pressure on professors to make sure students pass. This is especially true on courses that tend to filter students, such as Chem, Physics and some math courses. They will remove tenured faculty from teaching courses where they are failing too many students. These courses will be handed to lecturers who will be more sympathetic to passing more students. Also, they’ve also changed a course like Organic Chemistry from upper division to lower division. They have also started allowing high school level math courses to count for college credits.