posted on November 24, 2001 07:38:59 AM new
Excerpt from NY Times article.....
"Nearly half of the grades at Harvard University last year were A or A-minus, a steep increase from just 10 years earlier, a university study of grade inflation has found.
"The report, issued on Tuesday, charted grades for the last 15 years and found that A's and A-minuses grew to 48.5 percent last year from 33.2 percent of grades in 1985. Failing grades, D's and C's accounted for fewer than 6 percent.
" 'With such a narrow range of grades available, faculty find it difficult to distinguish adequately between work of differing quality; they may also be unable to make such distinctions clear to students,' " wrote Susan Pedersen, dean of undergraduate education. "
I am surprised that the percentage of A or A-minus grades is so low. I would have expected it to be in the range of 75% or higher.
Graduate school grades are probably even more inflated than that. One of my daughters received her graduate degree from Yale
and undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. At both schools anything less that A is considered unacceptable.. A grade of B or B+ in both of these colleges was equivalent to C-minus in high school.
So, George was a failure. HaHaHa.
My other daughter graduated from the University of Maryland. There, the grades are not inflated in undergraduate courses but like ivy league schools still inflated in graduate school.
If I were evaluating a cadidate for a job, for example, I would consider the grades from a state school as an indicator of success
but I would need other criteria to judge the ivy league graduate.
posted on November 24, 2001 09:09:38 AM new
And another related problem is the fact that some teachers become known a "tough graders" if they attempt to break this all A cycle. When I was at the University of Maryland many years ago, the students published a booklet, rating the grading policy of teachers. As a result, some good teachers found themselves with very small and unpopular classes.
posted on November 24, 2001 10:43:22 AM new
From when I began teaching in 1967 until I retired in 1997, the reading/writing/thinking skills of the average high school senior in 1997 were probably comparable to those of the average sophomore in 1967. Though the average grade point in 1967 was still 2.0, the average grade point in 1997 was approximately 3.0.
