Posted on 07/07/2014 9:47:37 AM PDT by TigerClaws
he revelation that the median grade at Harvard is an A- prompted lots of discussion, especially among Ivy-league educated journalists. Some speculated high grades reflect intelligence. Others say professors just want their students to get jobs, or, selfishly, they want favorable teaching evaluations. As a teaching assistant in the economics department at Columbia, I too inflated student grades, but for none of those reasons. +
I just didn’t want to deal with all the complaining.
(Excerpt) Read more at qz.com ...
Yep—I knew a prof at an Ivy League school who was straight up told that she could not fail or nearly-fail a black or Hispanic student.
Say, didnt the Nincompoop-in-Chief matriculate at an Ivy League school?
That was my view.
One class, Animal Physiology, was one of those marker classes that if you wanted to go to Med School you had to do well in. The class was purposely set up for failure for the majority and the Professor very explicitly explained that to us. Now he didn’t mean failure in the sense of final grades but failure in that hardly anyone would actually pass individual tests and in the end he would adjust grades accordingly to reflect the average.
In the end only three people out of approximately 150 students received top grades, the rest were mired in B’s and C’s, and even a few fails. I was happy to get a B in that course because it was brutally tough for our level of instruction(no pre-req other than BIO101) but a few people threw conniption fits over B’s.
I faced the same problem when I graded a student’s final as B+ thinking it was a generous interpretation of her work. When I was as much as told to raise it to an A I knew I finished at that school. I resisted grade inflation pressures for about 16 years but enough was finally enough.
Of course, that's not what I said. I suggested that a failing student might be awarded a "3.4" and if such performance becomes the norm for that student then disciplinary action, possibly including expulsion, would then be justified.
The point I was trying to make is that "A" students in high school don't magically become "C" students simply because all the lower performing students are eliminated from the population. I think "grade inflation" makes more sense than "re-norming", which is what I would call it if the percentage of students in each grade category is held constant despite the fact that it is the students with the lower grades which are being eliminated from the population.
I was a student that despite being a year younger than my peers could read the text book, attend class and generally do B work without study, homework or applying myself in the least. That worked for elementary and secondary schooling.
When I hit the University level, bang — brick wall. In my Junior year a counselor looked at my mid-term grades of 8 hours of A and 7 hours of F and said, “You don't really want to be here, do you?” He was right, for that period and time in my life.
Many bright kids are poor students or pupils. In my case work experience and independent study took me from the most basic positions to a good top job in my 30s. I spent the next 35 years thereafter climbing the income ladder but it was a ladder where I could have started at a higher rung if I had been a more conforming pupil and a little less “bright.”
A lot of today's students are going to enter the business world and find they don't advance because what we get now out of the university systems are candidates that often can't understand a contract or specification, write a business letter, do simple math with consistent results or have a work ethic of any caliber.
Some years back I inherited a new hire who was had a double masters degree in Engineering and Architecture. He could not accurately count toilet partitions and urinal screens off a set of plans and document it legibly. He could not add a dimension string consisting of feet, inches and fractions and consistently come up with the right answer. He was a 3.6 student as I recall. He always had somewhere to be immediately after five o'clock.
I recall interviewing a candidate with a PhD in engineering. He was unable to answer a relatively simple question involving rotation within a two-dimensional coordinate system. Even more telling was that he didn't even pick up the pencil I supplied and didn't attempt to even understand the question. This person was evidently used to having things easy and didn't see the necessity of even humoring me during the interview.
I was actually selected late in the day to do the interview because the prior interviewers realized that the candidate was consistently dodging the technical questions. I was expected to press the issue in order to determine whether the candidate had the requisite skills or did not. He evidently did not.
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