4 ms·

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 wort

by 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.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  At some colleges if you retake a course and get a higher grade, that’s the grade and the old one stops weighing down the gpa calculation. This was not an uncommon route to pass a chemistry series.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    That sounds fair. Grades should assess the student's mastery of the material. If they flunked the first time and earned a B+ on the retry, why hold their initial failure over them? They already paid with the opportunity cost of retaking the course instead of having that slot freed for something else.
noqc 3y ago
As an educator, I do not consider it my obligation to provide employers with effective evaluations. I am an educator, not an interviewer. You want effective evaluations, pay for them.
- stagger87 3y ago
  What do you consider the grades you give your students if not an "evaluation" of their performance in your class? Alternatively, if you do consider them an evaluation, are you saying your grades are not effective at evaluating them?
  - verelo 3y ago
    I keep coming back to this. What about the student? “Pay for it”, how out of touch is this person? Have you seen what students are paying…I’m so frustrated by the complete lack of accountability our education system is taking for these perspectives.
- bo1024 3y ago
  Ok, but your reputation among employers may go down and that will hurt all of your future students.
  - verelo 3y ago
    Yeah, this is exactly it. Sure, don't take responsibility for evaluations...but ultimately that just hurts the school and the students.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    No, it won’t. Outside of a handful of “elite” schools, I literally could not tell you anything about the quality of most schools. I care far more that you can actually deliver value.
    - bo1024 3y ago
      Interesting, so you might be saying that you think the individual quality at a given school varies a lot more than the difference in average quality from school to school?
snakeyjake 3y ago
It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using grades as a hiring indicator.
- stagger87 3y ago
  I'm curious if you do hiring, and if yes, for how long? There was a time in my career where grades were a data point that could be used. But I agree, nowadays not so much for the engineering roles I deal with.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    I've been the SME for interviews since 2011-ish. 30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage? As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail. You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask. My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
    - verelo 3y ago
      > My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript. And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.
streptomycin 3y ago
Some of this is because young professors try to grade things fairly (such as failing students who never make any effort to learn the material) and get beaten down by the administration because failing students are a lot of extra work for the admins. Then it flows downhill to professors telling the same to TAs. I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant, included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now if trends have continued..
- verelo 3y ago
  Yeah this is similar today. No one calls a student for cheating, at least in what I’ve been observing. Students that complain get additional marks, students that get accused of anything revolt, teachers are basically scared of the “customer”, and for good reason, unfortunately.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by verelo 3y ago

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.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
At some colleges if you retake a course and get a higher grade, that’s the grade and the old one stops weighing down the gpa calculation. This was not an uncommon route to pass a chemistry series.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  That sounds fair. Grades should assess the student's mastery of the material. If they flunked the first time and earned a B+ on the retry, why hold their initial failure over them? They already paid with the opportunity cost of retaking the course instead of having that slot freed for something else.

noqc 3y ago

As an educator, I do not consider it my obligation to provide employers with effective evaluations. I am an educator, not an interviewer. You want effective evaluations, pay for them.

stagger87 3y ago
What do you consider the grades you give your students if not an "evaluation" of their performance in your class? Alternatively, if you do consider them an evaluation, are you saying your grades are not effective at evaluating them?
- verelo 3y ago
  I keep coming back to this. What about the student? “Pay for it”, how out of touch is this person? Have you seen what students are paying…I’m so frustrated by the complete lack of accountability our education system is taking for these perspectives.
bo1024 3y ago
Ok, but your reputation among employers may go down and that will hurt all of your future students.
- verelo 3y ago
  Yeah, this is exactly it. Sure, don't take responsibility for evaluations...but ultimately that just hurts the school and the students.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  No, it won’t. Outside of a handful of “elite” schools, I literally could not tell you anything about the quality of most schools. I care far more that you can actually deliver value.
  - bo1024 3y ago
    Interesting, so you might be saying that you think the individual quality at a given school varies a lot more than the difference in average quality from school to school?

snakeyjake 3y ago

It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using grades as a hiring indicator.

stagger87 3y ago
I'm curious if you do hiring, and if yes, for how long? There was a time in my career where grades were a data point that could be used. But I agree, nowadays not so much for the engineering roles I deal with.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  I've been the SME for interviews since 2011-ish. 30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage? As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail. You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask. My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
  - verelo 3y ago
    > My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript. And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.

streptomycin 3y ago

Some of this is because young professors try to grade things fairly (such as failing students who never make any effort to learn the material) and get beaten down by the administration because failing students are a lot of extra work for the admins. Then it flows downhill to professors telling the same to TAs. I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant, included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now if trends have continued..

verelo 3y ago
Yeah this is similar today. No one calls a student for cheating, at least in what I’ve been observing. Students that complain get additional marks, students that get accused of anything revolt, teachers are basically scared of the “customer”, and for good reason, unfortunately.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]