Grade compression and elite schools

There is also pressure from the parents footing the enormous bill that their child is not disadvantaged by having relatively poor grades. Don’t underetimate that effect. However, even with the grade inflation, dad might still have to write a check to Harvard to get little Jared accepted…

That is a very plausible hypothesis.

I had previously assumed that it was because the elites collect the students (and parents) with the greatest sense of entitlement and grievance, so that the elite schools hand out A’s in order to avoid complaints and lawsuits.

But this is a good hypothesis, too, and perhaps both factors are at work.

Seems plausible to me too, but then how do we explain the pursuit of very high level individual accolades at elite schools? For example there is tremendous institutional support at elite schools to help students win Marshal and Fulbright scholarships. They also provide elite training for individual sports and debate competitions. If they wanted to enforce a pooling equilibrium shouldn’t they avoid doing this? And if they have to, because the students demand it, why don’t the elite students also demand grade differentiation?

If your entire class is former high school valedictorians

I would doubt that this is the case at these elite schools, simply from the numbers. More and more, it takes serious $$ to go to these schools; hence, the kids come from upper-crust high schools, of which there are few (merely b/c they’re upper-crust), and hence, lots of these kids aren’t valedictorians, eh?

Also: let’s be honest — I remember taking the SAT in 1981, and back then there was no test-prep. And then in 1985, I took the GRE general, and my friends and I were marveling that it was easier than the SAT. If you want tests that produce a larger dynamic range, just do what the French Grands Ecoles (and, I presume, the IIT system) do — insanely difficult exams that require years of study to even get close to passing.

In short, the “compression” started long before college — it started in high school, and you can see that in the SAT itself.

I lay all this at the feet of the malign influence of money and inequality. It’s nothing that steeply confiscatory progressive taxation wouldn’t fix.

Rampell doesn’t take the pedagogical benefits of grade elimination seriously, seeing it as merely strategic obfuscation, which is too bad.

Preoccupation with grades can be a huge obstacle to good teaching and real learning. Every negotiation a teacher has over whether a paper really deserves a B minus or not is a missed opportunity to discuss the actual object of study, or the student’s interests or concerns, or their strengths and weaknesses. Since learning is an activity one must take up for oneself, eliminating grades can help by moving the question “am I learning?” to the fore, displacing the question “what grade am I getting?”

I wonder if even grade inflation might be a (less principled, less effective) way for teachers to diffuse preoccupation with grades, in order to make room for learning.

Haven’t read it but doesn’t that assume everyone is competing in the same ‘game’? Aren’t there situations when a non-elite graduate can get hired just on the strength of being a graduate and also ones where even graduates of elite colleges need to stand out from their oeers? Maybe not.

Having just had a child go through the process of college admission, I would add a couple of points here. One trend in some elite colleges and universities is to make test scores (SAT/ACT) optional, with the rationale that high school grades by themselves are the best predictor of college success. Now we are being told that those grades, which were supposedly the best indicators, draw invidious distinctions between students. This seems yet another way for affluent students to game the system. When you add to this that many elite colleges use class rank as an indicator, for schools that rank, but obviously cannot require it for those that don’t, it would seem to confirm the pattern the article suggests. Almost all private schools have given up using class rank, since it tends to highlight comparisons between students, rather than the name brand of the school. Grade inflation hides comparative academic strength in ways that might be revealed if private schools actually ranked students in their classes. Many public schools, on the other hand, rely on class rank (which is often calculated in an arcane way), which obviously situates students in relationship to their peers, even if there is relatively little actual difference in GPA between students in the top 20% and the top 50% of the class. In Texas, where I live, public schools are compelled to rank students because the University of Texas provides admission to the top 10% of students in their particular high schools. This is beneficial for those high-performing students from low-income districts, and has created greater economic class diversity at the public universities; naturally, families from affluent districts are trying to get rid of this. But as beneficial as the 10% law is for admitting students to state institutions, the practice of ranking has negative consequences for students competing with private schools for admission to elite private colleges and universities. And the same people who seem to be in favor of not having class rank in private high schools, are very interested in the rankings (as in U.S. News and World Reports) of the colleges to which they send their students.

some of my graduates are competing with Harvard graduates, others are competing with the higher ranked graduates of comprehensive regional universities

If that’s true then by Rampell’s logic wouldn’t the ones that are competing with Harvard grads be advantaged by a grading system that highlights relative positon whereas the others would be better served by one where noone stands out—so pace Rampell neither seems obviously preferable…

Game theory arguments frequently tend to be “just so” stories; I’m sure there is a game theory argument that would sound plausible had the data come out the other way. For example, a finding of less grade compression at elite schools could’ve been hypothesized to signal which students are legacy admissions such that they don’t impugn the elite status of the school. Someone else probably can come up with a better one.

But “elite” schools could simply admit a set of students that are harder to differentiate from each other via grades.

If that’s true then by Rampell’s logic wouldn’t the ones that are competing with Harvard grads be advantaged by a grading system that highlights relative positon whereas the others would be better served by one where noone stands out—so pace Rampell neither seems obviously preferable…

No, because unless you’re at the very top, you’re competing with people from Harvard who themselves are also not at the very top, but have the signal scrambled relative to everyone else. In other words, if the 50th percentile student at Harvard has an A- average, and only the 90th percentile student at State U has an A- average, then the Harvard pedigree wins almost every time.

Also, I don’t know about you, but as contingent faculty, my teaching was evaluated completely by student evaluations – and guess what? “Hard graders” don’t get perfect scores. Classroom prep, peer evaluations, curriculum development did not factor in at all. Contributing factors to why I left academia – it was a rigged game against contingent faculty and a lifetime of contingency is no way to build a career.

I transferred from a very non-elite college to a fairly elite college. (For perspective, a 32 on the ACT was enough to get a full academic scholarship at my first school; a perfect score on the SAT wouldn’t have guaranteed admission to my second.)

It seems to me that there are two dynamics at work in grade compression at top schools. One is the above-mentioned signalling effects. The other is that the students at my second school were in general better students; they were smarter and better prepared, but they also spent more time studying, drank less heavily, were more likely to be focused on learning and better at choosing where within classes to focus their attention. I would guess that 90% of the students at my second school would have been straight-A students at my first school.

I am in favor of grades that are set on a consistent basis across schools (one of my pie-in-the-sky education reform ideas is to separate instruction and assessment entirely at the college level), and that are sufficient to identify the most capable students. See my longer argument here. But that will mean that most students at non-selective colleges get C’s and D’s.

Not necessarily. Because (1) it can be assumed, I think, that at least some employers are sophisticated enough to know about grade inflation and how it differs from place to place; and (2) there are jobs, again I think it can be assumed, where a lot of different factors go into a decision, and grades may often not be the main one (or even all that important).

Certainly. This matters a lot more for entry-level jobs obtained directly out of school than it does for mid-career professionals. But counteracting (1) is the fact that a lot of the people responsible for hiring at a lot of the places where elite school graduates tend to go (e.g. banking) are themselves products of those elite schools, skewing the balance in the other direction.

There are of course a lot of positions where this just doesn’t matter; even in our decadent times, there are still far more jobs than there are graduates of the Ivy Leagues. It’s just that if you want a job with actual influence, well, those are reserved for a certain kind of person who went to a certain kind of institution.

The phenomenon is clearly real. But the proposed explanation seems fanciful. At the very least, I’d like to see some evidence that the overall grade distribution is under the deliberate control of administrators at any of these schools, elite, or non-. Rampell provides none, just “game theory predicts it.” (Which should probably be counted as less than no evidence.) Grade decisions are made by individual instructors, in accordance with policies set by individual schools or departments, based on various vague, conflicting or poorly articulated principles. I wouldn’t rule out that some administrator has, on some occasion, made the argument that it’s important to combat grade inflation because that way the stars really stand out, but the idea that the consistent application of this policy across thousands of colleges and universities is what explains the lower average grades at less selective schools, is preposterous.

There’s a much simpler explanation: many students at elite schools have the resources — social or otherwise — to make giving low grades costly to the instructor. (At the least, they are vastly more likely to complain about their grades than students at less elite schools, as I think anyone who has taught at both kinds of places will agree.) So you don’t give bad grades — why put up with the hassle? While the students at places like the one where I teach have mostly been socialized to put up with whatever sh*t people in authority drop on them.

This actually bothers me quite a bit. Rampell’s idea that stricter grading standards at less selective schools helps their best students is frankly stupid. The vast majority of people looking at a transcript of a CUNY vs a Columbia student are either going to think “an A is an A” or else they are going to think that an A at the more selective school is more impressive since the material is more challenging there. No one ever says that the CUNY A is actually more impressive because we give them to so many fewer of our students (tho they should.) Not to mention the bizarre idea that Rampell seems to have that in an across-the-board policy of harsh grading the few high grades will reliably go to the “superstars”. Does she even spend time in a classroom?

Personally my policy is to aim for a Harvard type grade distribution in my own classes. The way I see it, when people teaching at less selective schools puff their chests out about imposing standards and fighting grade inflation, they are just feeding their egos at the expense of their students and reinforcing the advantages of students at elite schools.

You do have to hand it to Rampell tho — it’s a nice trick to argue that the fact that when grades are curved to favor the privileged, that’s just a rational choice we non-elite educators are making for our students’ own good.

Also, where does this idea that ” lower-ranked schools really want superstars to stand out, lest they get written off because of the less-elite brand” come from?

You know what, Cahterine Rampell? I actually care about the outcomes for all of my students. I actually don’t want to deliberately harm the job prospects of most of them to give a marginal boost to a couple of favorites.

What kind of awful person would take this stuff seriously?

I used to recruit grad and PhD maths and physics for my UK-based quant team. We soon gave up bothering about what grade people had from which university and went for ‘A’-levels as the standard we would use as this was a common level of achievement across the country. We also used a numerical reasoning test to filter, and the results of the numerical tests compared to qualifications showed a number of things – it effectively excluded women (which is a whole other topic), it correlated well with A-levels and university, and post-doc mathematicians often did quite badly. We ended up dropping the numerical reasoning test for the posts which required harder maths as it excluded people who by all other measures were very good, but keeping it for the computer-developer roles.

Having abandoned university grades as meaningless we could have filled all our roles by simply recruiting from about six UK universities, but the numerical reasoning test allowed us to bring in “outsiders”. Examples were graduates from Scottish or Northern Ireland Universities who had stayed there to study for cultural/family reasons.

We also increasingly recruited from non-UK universities. This was more difficult as we had little knowledge of the universities, the grades, and what they meant. It took us a while to understand what was important for each country, e.g. Australian universities where people tend to go to Universities in their own state, so what grade people get in their university is more important than which university they went to, which is the opposite to the UK.

Finally we did the obvious – you can recruit your mates, provided they are smarter than you. This was understandably easy for me, but successively harder for each recruit. We got a stream of really good people who were looking to get off the academic post-doc roundabout (note this route also allowed us to recruit people from a wide range of nations and also recruit women). The carrot we dangled in front of them was not money (although there was plenty of that for people who did well) but the opportunity to spend all day working on difficult problems with the prospect of these ideas being put into practise by the trading desk and if they worked then the researchers would get some of the profits, which was something not available to post-docs in academia where they seemed to spend all their time worrying about grants and their next contract.

Re the OP, what seems to be forgotten here is that the people recruiting graduates from universities have been through the same system themselves and are well aware of how relevant the grades are, or aren’t.

I can’t comment on grades at non-elite universities, but grade compression at elite universities has a simple sociological explanation – the strong tendency of elites to pretend to equality within the charmed circle (“all gentlefolk here”). As for the effect on competition either within the elite pool or with outsiders, around 85 per cent of jobs are filled through networking (probably more at elite levels). I doubt the friends and relatives recommending the person pay great attention to grades.

The other side of the coin is that minority students from elite universities might be believed to have benefited from grade inflation, while well prepared honors students from heartland flagships, usually white, are believed not to have.

As an Ivy graduate from a modest background, I have to periodically reassure myself, in these discussions, that my average was probably not, actually, as well below average as my high school and hordes of Internet commenters might suggest, if I graduated with honors.

Hampshire College (MA) has been doing this for a long time (no grades, qual evaluations). I suspect it’s a lot of work for the profs and much more meaningful for the students.

Yes, I have a couple friends who teach at Hampshire and this is definitely their experience.

Which think gets at the underlying reality that Rampell’s piece is trying to deny: People at schools across the spectrum really do want to educate their students. Only someone steeped in the culture of economics could imagine that the sort of rankings-games Rampell talks about could motivate you to go into a classroom every day. Teachers really want to teach, they want students to learn.

There’s good reason to think that qualitative evaluations support learning better than letter grades do. But these kinds of evaluations are expensive — they require more time from instructors, and instructors motivated to do them. So only the best-resourced institutions can afford them.

(Ok, schools like Hampshire and Evergreen — which also uses only evaluations — are not especially wealthy by the scale of elite private colleges. But they are wealthy enough to go this route if it’s a priority for them.)

If you are worried about the quality of student emerging from the elite schools of the USA or, for that matter, the UK, then you can always choose to recruit from the French Grandes Ecoles, easily the best education system for STEM graduates in the world.

I hate to break the bad news to the many academics here, but as a regularl hirer of college grads, for the most part grades don’t mean a lot once they are above some threshold level (each organization has one maybe its 3.0, maybe 3.2 whatever).

Likewise, big recruiting firms have some number of “go to” schools where they consistently have found good graduates – naturally the traditionally ‘elite’ Ivies and near-Ivies are on the list, but large state schools are also highly represented – in the Mid-Atlantic it would be schools like Penn State, Virginia, VA-Tech, several North Carolina schools (among others) for example.

Below a grade threshold and outside of the preferred schools a candidate is disadvantaged not so much by grades as that there just aren’t many slots left to fill. If a recruit class is planned at 10 kids, probably 9 slots will wind up coming from the go-to schools, maybe even all 10. Organizations learn what they can expect from kids from a certain school, the thought is (even if not empirical) is that there’s more downside than upside coloring outside the lines.

Interview, evidence of work-ethic and to the extent possible relevant internships or experience is what wins the competition. I appreciate those things can also be the product of privledge, but it also means the grades are much less relevant than might be expected.

I likewise think learning and evaluation of learning is threshold based rather than “curved” if every kid in a class can demonstrate proficiency at X, Y and Z… all of them should get an “A.” If they can’t then they should get an “F.” Everything else is just nuance.

Law and medical schools historically have used grades and test scores heavily in their admission process. This was a major driver of grade anxiety at elite schools as the perception is that those programs do not fairly account for undergrad program difficulty. I tend to wonder about that assumption, but premeds as a group are really big worriers. But my experience is about 15 years out-of-date. I imagine this has been a major driver of grade inflation at elite schools from the student body side. Students not planning to go into those careers still care a lot about grades at elite schools, but just not nearly as much.

as a regularl hirer of college grads, for the most part grades don’t mean a lot once they are above some threshold level (each organization has one maybe its 3.0, maybe 3.2 whatever). Likewise, big recruiting firms have some number of “go to” schools where they consistently have found good graduates – naturally the traditionally ‘elite’ Ivies and near-Ivies are on the list, but large state schools are also highly represented

This all seems right. (And it fits my more limited experience as someone who’s occasionally participated in the hiring process for non-academic jobs.) Which shows how silly Rampell’s story is. To the extent grades enter into the hiring process, it’s in a very coarse-grained way. “Good enough” or “not good enough,” assessed in a couple seconds. The idea that people are going through some kind of precise conversion metric — “a GPA of 3.9 from this school is equivalent to a 3.2 from that school” — is just absurd. At the margin, if students at school A get higher grades on average than students at school B, students from school A will be favored in hiring.

passer-by @44
Completely anecdotal data point for those wondering about how the “administration” at elite schools could have much influence on “individual instructors”, based on my very superficial experience as a TA at an Ivy League during my PhD:
– as far as I can remember, most of the grading at the undergraduate level was done by TA’s, not tenured faculty. Not only were TA graduate students acutely aware of the importance of student evals and had exactly zero incentive to antagonize students…

This provides an example of how things have changed from approx. 4 decades ago, when I was an undergrad. Then, as now, much of the grading, at least at this sort of univ., was done by grad students, but I can’t recall ever filling out an evaluation for any of them (or for any of the professors I encountered in the classroom, for that matter). In some/many cases the grad students taught; in other cases they were simply faceless graders and in the latter case no evaluation of their teaching wd have been possible even if evals had been routine which, as mentioned, they certainly weren’t.

The result back then to my recollection was that, and this of course is very anecdotal, some (not most I wd say, but some) grad students were not interested in ‘coddling’ undergrads but, if anything, in the opposite, i.e. finding reasons to be, relatively speaking, harsh. For ex., I recall a paper about Gladstone that I did in a British history course; it was read and graded by a grad student TA, who as I recall didn’t lead a discussion section (as I recall, the course didn’t have them), but I knew very well who he was and even remember his name. One of his comments chided me for neglecting a point that in fact I had made in an endnote, which he hadn’t bothered to read. B/c the paper was undistinguished anyway and b/c I almost never complained about or queried my grades, I never went to him and pointed out that I had made the very point he criticized me for overlooking.

The other side of the coin is that — not having to worry about student evaluations and perhaps not quite so consumed with worry about their job prospects as they typically are today — grad students in those days quite often took the time to write detailed, candid, and critical comments on papers. If done fairly and constructively rather than simply to find fault, these often could be very helpful and/or interesting. At least, that was my experience. Perhaps grad-student graders today still write detailed comments on papers, but my guess is that the norms have shifted toward brief and banal praise as the default mode (except maybe if an undergrad student is truly exceptional and the grad-student grader wants to engage w him/her as a scholarly peer).

I haven’t read all the comments here, but I want to strongly support, by way of anecdata, this point of Josh Mason’s at 29 above: “There’s a much simpler explanation: many students at elite schools have the resources — social or otherwise — to make giving low grades costly to the instructor. (At the least, they are vastly more likely to complain about their grades than students at less elite schools, as I think anyone who has taught at both kinds of places will agree.) So you don’t give bad grades — why put up with the hassle?”

When I was a grad student, teaching my own course at Yale, I gave what is by Ivy League standards a horribly low grade to one student: a C+. The amount of grief I got—not from the student but from a flotilla of deanlets (not the Dean of Yale College but a sub-level of administrators who seem to populate these places and whose titles I can’t remember)—would make even the most seasoned and confident instructor blanch. If you give anything less than a B, you really have to be ready to go to war with the institution.

By contrast, whenever I give a comparable or lower grade at CUNY, not a single person from the administration reaches out. Students are completely on their own. A few of them have the wherewithal to ask, ever so tentatively, but that’s it. I try to build a lot more iteration and feedback into my writing assignments, and often require meetings with the students, so I think most students have a clear understanding of what went wrong. But if I’m unfair or they perceive me as being unfair, they just don’t have the institutional resources or social clout to fight it.

Isn’t a large part of grade compression at elite schools due to trying to find a curve that will differentiate a bunch of highly gifted kids that work really hard, but also fairly measures their ability?

I’d think a school like MIT or Yale is like the Olympic qualifiers for track and field. You’ll have dozens of athletes who are all within .3 seconds in the 100 meter dash. Even the very worst sprinter, the woman whose country barely even has a team, is still really, really good compared to the average person. Every now and then somebody sneaks in who’s not up to par, but that’s pretty rare. You could have a curve that gives these athletes 20% As, 20% Bs, and so on, but we all know that they’re all so far above A+ compared to the average person that that sort of curve is meaningless.

@54: People who get into elite schools are exceptionally good at taking tests and getting good grades. It’s not a moral judgment: it’s something that they’ve gotten into those schools for.

The Ivy League does have some pathologies (e.g. the difficulty in giving low grades is real), but the students who get low grades are still quite capable, just typically disinterested or lazy. Teaching at a non-ivy, you really do encounter students who just don’t understand the material even though they are trying very hard.

I am down to my last six papers and six exams after teaching for over 40 years at an elite SLAC. A few observations:

Cranky Observer @34 is correct, in my experience. Today’s students, including the increasing number of first-generation college students and of black and brown students, are better prepared for college today and, once they are here, work much harder in their courses than most students did thirty and forty years ago.

JW Maston@39 gets to an essential point: “Which thin[g] gets at the underlying reality that Rampell’s piece is trying to deny: People at schools across the spectrum really do want to educate their students. Only someone steeped in the culture of economics could imagine that the sort of rankings-games Rampell talks about could motivate you to go into a classroom every day. Teachers really want to teach, they want students to learn.” True not just of my SLAC colleagues and my husband and his colleagues at a small state college, but also of most colleagues at Ivy Leagues and other elite universities, at least in my discipline.

A few random observations related to various comments above.
– Organized sports, sponsored by the college or university, became important starting after the CW. Their history is more complicated than someone suggested above, referring to Harvard’s interest in minimizing the number of Jewish students decades ago. In my years at my SLAC, sports have often provided an important entry for working class and minority students who otherwise would not have been admitted but were still capable of doing well here. A lot more could be said about sports….
– At my SLAC almost half the students play a varsity sport. I think 25% would be about right for the number who participate in two varsity sports. These figures don’t include the numerous sports clubs, from rugby to frisbee to broomball. I expect there will be a kubb club or league soon. I would add that probably at least half the students take music lessons and/or perform in musical groups and/or participate in theater productions and/or spend a lot of their time in the studio art building…. Not to mention a thousand other things students do that are of value for their own educations and for others (e.g., tutoring local middle and high school students, volunteering at local food banks — out of genuine commitment, btw). Cf. Cranky Observer’s observation.
– Never in over 40 years has anyone from Admissions ever uttered a peep about faculty grading — it is unimaginable that they would. College deans (who are drawn from the faculty) regularly exhort us to be careful about grade inflation, and grade ranges are published each semester for each division and department (though I think few faculty pay much attention). There are a lot of reasons for so-called grade inflation, including that students really do perform better in their courses than they used to.
– It took me only a few years to realize that businesses, banks, and most employers are usually not interested in a student’s grade point average, so long as it’s decent. I’d note that many employers are impressed by athletic achievement and especially by participation in a team sport. (On the other hand: a musician friend of mine was part of a successful digital start-up years ago, in Cambridge. On one occasion the secret ingredient they were looking for in a new hire was a good cellist, who could fill the recent vacancy in their string quartet. The world is a funny place.)
– Grade point averages matter to most grad school departments, but just as important are letters of recommendation. An advantage elite schools may have, not mentioned above, is the name recognition of their faculty on letters of recommendation.
– Professional schools, especially medical schools, are deluged with applications, so they use artificial cut-offs, knowing full well that they may be overlooking excellent candidates. So what? They will still have a huge pool of excellent candidates from whom to choose. I suspect the same reality governs lots of hiring practices in law and business. Understandable (admissions and hiring are enormously time-consuming) but problematic: that’s how white, class, and gender privilege insinuate themselves into everything and why counter pressures (e.g., affirmative action) are important. But I don’t think we should conflate these types of (usually) unintended discrimination with a snotty, smug self-satisfaction of an elite class. The latter exists, of course, but less than some commenters here seem to think.

First, unsurprisingly the professors in this thread are right about the behavior of professors, who are the people responsible for grades in almost every university.

Second, having been a student at Chicago and Northeastern, and a professor at Northeastern and Indiana, it’s not at all the case that grade inflation is a fancy school phenomenon.

Third, while TAs do most of the grading and get evaluations, those evaluations count for approximately 0 in any context in the department. This of course isn’t the case when the grad student actually is the instructor, but that’s a quite different role.

Fourth, there’s something deeply weird about the whole “grade inflation” discussion. If everyone started doing well on the SAT, we’d celebrate. If all my students got A’s, I’d be overjoyed.

Long-time big firm hiring partner here. Grades matter only when you are screening resumes. At that stage, the criterion is indeed “good enough to merit an interview.” What is “good enough” does vary a bit based on the prestige of the school , but after the paper screening process grades matter very little. We hired relatively lower-ranked students all the time based on personality.

Make that “hardscrabble.”

I agree with virtually everything Josh Mason has written here, but want to point out that Evergreen State College, where I teach and which uses narrative evaluation rather than grades, is a public institution that is horribly short of funding and gets by on a shoestring. One reason for this is that its costs are high by comparative standards—because it uses the highly interactive teaching methods that are required by its system of evaluation. (And also because it pays adjuncts nearly the same salaries as tenured and tenure-track faculty, but that’s another story.)

Does qualitative evaluation have a compressive or obscuring effect on the reported performance of graduates? Not in my experience. Our narrative evaluations tend to be highly concrete, discussing specific skill and knowledge acquisitions (good on the historical and institutional aspects of political economy, still grappling with the quantitative aspects, as evidenced by blah blah blah, etc.) and describing in some detail student work products like research projects, along with evidence of the work ethic or lack thereof that these outcomes reflect. I believe this is an important reason why *all* of my students who apply for grad programs get in to one they’re willing to accept. Whatever it is that recruiters and admissions committees are looking for in order to filter, they’ll find in a well-written narrative eval.

At the same time, I have to admit that the grade inflation phenomenon has taken root at Evergreen and is having a deeply detrimental effect on the institution. Many faculty, either for philosophical reasons or a desire to preserve their bond with students (and the less hassled teaching and positive faculty evals that this protects), are lavishing undifferentiated praise on a broad range of student performance. This tends to feed back into teaching methods, which become less demanding. The college’s reputation in the wider world suffers as a result.

The point is that a shift from letter grades to narrative evaluation is not intrinsically less differentiating. The wider forces (including evolving faculty conceptions of the role of comparative performance assessment and sorting in education, which is a big factor not mentioned here yet) that have been promoting compression operate equally in both systems.

Just to say, if we were a high-cost department, relative to the numbers of students we teach, that would be entirely reasonable and understandable. But typically these students major in units that are higher cost per-student taught than we are.

Jonathan Gilligan@68 makes a good point, I think, though I haven’t read Larreau. Teaching more economically disadvantaged students in recent years, I have been struck by their tendency to less resistance and arguing back, at least in class (though not on the larger campus). A clear exception to this generalization, though: economically disadvantaged students from Roman Catholic schools. Kind of interesting, that (says this old Protestant lady). Lots of cross-currents on a college campus. (I’ll miss the confused and confusing melee!)