9 ms·

Test Scores Down, GPAs Up: The New Angst over Grade Inflation

20 points by gnicholas 2y ago

gnicholas 2y ago
My kid was allowed to retake tests last year. She came away with the mistaken impression that she had "gotten 100% on all her tests" because that was the grade that was written down in the gradebook, sometimes after a retake. She thought this meant that she didn't need to be more careful with her work because she was already getting the top grade. I explained to her that this is not how the real world works, and that she should not expect retakes to be available in the future. Sadly, it seems that perhaps I was wrong — this may be the new normal for students (up until the doors of the operating room, at any rate).
- skywhopper 2y ago
  In the real world you don't get to correct your mistakes and improve on something after you get feedback? That's not my experience.
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    Sure, you can do that. But if you turn in a project at work and it is not good, but then turn it in later and it's better, your boss doesn't magically forget that what you handed in on the date it was due/required was not good. No one is suggesting that if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to get an A on the final. But if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to retake it multiple times and overwrite all but the last grade, as if they never happened. There are also practical considerations, like the fact that this is unfair to students who are in different classes: imagine if you have a biology test and a history paper on the same day. If your history teacher doesn't let you rewrite papers indefinitely, then you can't blow the paper off and focus on the bio test. But if another history teacher (or teachers of other subjects, which your bio classmates are taking instead) do allow for rewrites/retakes of their assignments, they can blow off everything else and do much better on the bio test. It's also hard for teachers to have to keep coming up with new test questions. If they re-use the same test questions, it becomes trivial to get a good grade since students know what the questions are (this is especially true for multiple choice, but is also true for other question types).
itronitron 2y ago
The advantage with standardized tests is that they are a less biased assessment than school grades, which can vary wildly by teacher, school, and district. The disadvantage with standardized tests is that it's an unrealistic work experience in which the student has no access to tools and reference materials that they would ordinarily be able to leverage.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  If a reference is needed to do simple arithmetic, algebra, and trig, then you never learned it in the first place.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    At least when I was in college, there was an approved formula book that was allowed in exams. Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The coefficient of linear expansion of gallium? Fourier series of a sawtooth wave? If you've somehow forgotten the formula for the mean of a sample? It's all in there. There were of course some things that weren't in the formula book - and if you had to look up every last thing, you'd face a lot more time pressure in exams.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Caltech exams were open book / open note. The books didn't help much :-/ as the exams were not about regurgitating knowledge. I never bothered to memorize anything at Caltech, yet I wound up with an encyclopedic knowledge of things like trig identities. Sort of like I wound up knowing most of the x86 opcode encodings, although since I later abstracted that, it has slipped my mind a bit.
      - professoretc 2y ago
        Prefixes come first, 1 byte each, order doesn't matter except that REX, if present, must come last. Then the opcode, 1-3 bytes. Followed by Mod R/M byte, if present. Followed by SIB byte, if present. Followed by address/immediate, 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes, if present. Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.
WalterBright 2y ago
My dad taught business and finance at a college in the years after he left the AF. The first day of class, he announced that if any of the following were misspelled, it was an automatic F on the test/paper it was on: business entrepreneur there, they're, their its, it's should have, could have The students thought he was kidding (I've seen similar pronouncements in classes I've taken). But he wasn't, and when the hammer fell, the word got around, he never had to enforce it again. The same went for term papers. They were assigned at the first session, with a hard due date. For every day a paper was late, the grade went down one letter. He said they had the entire term to do them, no excuses were acceptable. After all, in business, excuses are never acceptable. Half the students submitted the paper a day late, and about 10% 2 days late. Their grades were downgraded as announced. The next semester, there was only one paper one day late. None the next year. Expect excellence, and you'll get it.
- squigz 2y ago
  > After all, in business, excuses are never acceptable. This bit made me chuckle, as a big part of business is coming up with appropriate (sounding) excuses
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Guess what happens when I'm late on a mortgage payment! And it's even worse if I'm late filing a tax return, or heaven forbid, late on a tax payment. My property tax statement says if I do not file the form on time with the full amount, the check will be returned and I will be liable for late fees plus interest.
    - dataflow 2y ago
      Missing an apostrophe on "its" isn't remotely comparable to missing a mortgage payment, come on.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        It's just as easy to forget the tax due date. But I take precautions to not miss it, because it's expensive to miss it. That's the point.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
My old high school now has two policies in place: 1. Honors and AP courses get +7 added to grades. 2. Honors classes are on a 4 point scale, AP classes are on a 5 point scale. The school still considers 95-100 to be an A and 94-88 to be a B, so it's totally possible for an AP student to get the bare minimum B score and receive an A and a 5 for their GPA average.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
No Javascript: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/test-scores-down-gpas-up-the-new-angst-over-grade-inflation/ar-BB1myA8y https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... Text-only: links -dump https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1myA8y \ |sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,' > 1.txt less 1.txt
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  Correction: |sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,$d' > 1.txt
lindadonald 2y ago
[flagged]
uslic001 2y ago
I went to state schools in Ohio for college and medical school. There was no grade inflation that I ever witnessed. When I did my internship/residency/fellowship at Duke I was shocked at the grades given to the worst medical students that were on rotations with me by the attending physicians. I asked one attending I knew well why they gave such inflated grades for such poor students. They said the medical students paid a lot to go to Duke Medical School and they expected all A's so that they could get into a good residency.

20 points by gnicholas 2y ago

My kid was allowed to retake tests last year. She came away with the mistaken impression that she had "gotten 100% on all her tests" because that was the grade that was written down in the gradebook, sometimes after a retake. She thought this meant that she didn't need to be more careful with her work because she was already getting the top grade. I explained to her that this is not how the real world works, and that she should not expect retakes to be available in the future. Sadly, it seems that perhaps I was wrong — this may be the new normal for students (up until the doors of the operating room, at any rate).

skywhopper 2y ago
In the real world you don't get to correct your mistakes and improve on something after you get feedback? That's not my experience.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  Sure, you can do that. But if you turn in a project at work and it is not good, but then turn it in later and it's better, your boss doesn't magically forget that what you handed in on the date it was due/required was not good. No one is suggesting that if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to get an A on the final. But if you get a C on the midterm you shouldn't be able to retake it multiple times and overwrite all but the last grade, as if they never happened. There are also practical considerations, like the fact that this is unfair to students who are in different classes: imagine if you have a biology test and a history paper on the same day. If your history teacher doesn't let you rewrite papers indefinitely, then you can't blow the paper off and focus on the bio test. But if another history teacher (or teachers of other subjects, which your bio classmates are taking instead) do allow for rewrites/retakes of their assignments, they can blow off everything else and do much better on the bio test. It's also hard for teachers to have to keep coming up with new test questions. If they re-use the same test questions, it becomes trivial to get a good grade since students know what the questions are (this is especially true for multiple choice, but is also true for other question types).

itronitron 2y ago

The advantage with standardized tests is that they are a less biased assessment than school grades, which can vary wildly by teacher, school, and district. The disadvantage with standardized tests is that it's an unrealistic work experience in which the student has no access to tools and reference materials that they would ordinarily be able to leverage.

WalterBright 2y ago
If a reference is needed to do simple arithmetic, algebra, and trig, then you never learned it in the first place.
- michaelt 2y ago
  At least when I was in college, there was an approved formula book that was allowed in exams. Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The coefficient of linear expansion of gallium? Fourier series of a sawtooth wave? If you've somehow forgotten the formula for the mean of a sample? It's all in there. There were of course some things that weren't in the formula book - and if you had to look up every last thing, you'd face a lot more time pressure in exams.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Caltech exams were open book / open note. The books didn't help much :-/ as the exams were not about regurgitating knowledge. I never bothered to memorize anything at Caltech, yet I wound up with an encyclopedic knowledge of things like trig identities. Sort of like I wound up knowing most of the x86 opcode encodings, although since I later abstracted that, it has slipped my mind a bit.
    - professoretc 2y ago
      Prefixes come first, 1 byte each, order doesn't matter except that REX, if present, must come last. Then the opcode, 1-3 bytes. Followed by Mod R/M byte, if present. Followed by SIB byte, if present. Followed by address/immediate, 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes, if present. Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.

WalterBright 2y ago

My dad taught business and finance at a college in the years after he left the AF. The first day of class, he announced that if any of the following were misspelled, it was an automatic F on the test/paper it was on: business entrepreneur there, they're, their its, it's should have, could have The students thought he was kidding (I've seen similar pronouncements in classes I've taken). But he wasn't, and when the hammer fell, the word got around, he never had to enforce it again. The same went for term papers. They were assigned at the first session, with a hard due date. For every day a paper was late, the grade went down one letter. He said they had the entire term to do them, no excuses were acceptable. After all, in business, excuses are never acceptable. Half the students submitted the paper a day late, and about 10% 2 days late. Their grades were downgraded as announced. The next semester, there was only one paper one day late. None the next year. Expect excellence, and you'll get it.

squigz 2y ago
> After all, in business, excuses are never acceptable. This bit made me chuckle, as a big part of business is coming up with appropriate (sounding) excuses
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Guess what happens when I'm late on a mortgage payment! And it's even worse if I'm late filing a tax return, or heaven forbid, late on a tax payment. My property tax statement says if I do not file the form on time with the full amount, the check will be returned and I will be liable for late fees plus interest.
  - dataflow 2y ago
    Missing an apostrophe on "its" isn't remotely comparable to missing a mortgage payment, come on.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      It's just as easy to forget the tax due date. But I take precautions to not miss it, because it's expensive to miss it. That's the point.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

My old high school now has two policies in place: 1. Honors and AP courses get +7 added to grades. 2. Honors classes are on a 4 point scale, AP classes are on a 5 point scale. The school still considers 95-100 to be an A and 94-88 to be a B, so it's totally possible for an AP student to get the bare minimum B score and receive an A and a 5 for their GPA average.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

No Javascript: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/test-scores-down-gpas-up-the-new-angst-over-grade-inflation/ar-BB1myA8y https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... Text-only: links -dump https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1myA8y \ |sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,' > 1.txt less 1.txt

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Correction: |sed '1,/\"body\":/d;/\"readTimeMin\":/,$d' > 1.txt

lindadonald 2y ago

[flagged]

uslic001 2y ago

I went to state schools in Ohio for college and medical school. There was no grade inflation that I ever witnessed. When I did my internship/residency/fellowship at Duke I was shocked at the grades given to the worst medical students that were on rotations with me by the attending physicians. I asked one attending I knew well why they gave such inflated grades for such poor students. They said the medical students paid a lot to go to Duke Medical School and they expected all A's so that they could get into a good residency.