Tuesday, September 10, 2013
The trouble with grade inflation: It works
Boston.com: If you’re a high school senio r applying to college this fall, you’ll be getting loads of advice about which school to choose. Your parents and guidance counselors will most likely tell you to challenge yourself, to select a school that will prepare you for future greatness by pushing you to study, to learn, to grow. But if you’re really interested in success, a new study suggests something more cynical: Go for the school that pumps up your grades.
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9 comments:
Just coming from high school, the frustrations of grade inflation are fresh in my mind! Although I understand that grading policies cannot be standardized across the multitude of public and private high schools across America, it is still incredibly annoying to hear of stories where students earn good grades for consistently poor or mediocre work.
This article, more than ever, reaffirms my belief in the value of standardized testing. The Collegeboard may not be the best organization, at least their SAT and AP exams provide a truly level playing field for high school students to compete on. Although standardized testing, by itself, does not tell the whole story about a prospective student, neither does a high GPA.
It's interesting that they conducted a serious study on this.
I guess you can't really argue too much with the findings of the study, and they do make some sense.
However, I think that this study doesn't apply to the really exceptional schools. Some schools like Harvard, MIT, Yale, CMU ( :P ) are known to be very hard and selective schools and I think that just receiving a degree from such a school is sometimes enough to get you into grad school.
I guess that with schools that don't have any special reputation, the only information that the grad schools have is your grades.
It's unfortunate but how else are they going to decide who to accept and who to decline.
I think one part of these scenarios that this article is missing is the overall effect of grade inflation on not just the student's graduate school prospects, but on the student themselves, in grad school and beyond. It is all very well to get into grad school, but succeeding after acceptance is a different story. A student used to easy A's might be shocked by difficult work. After college, a student who is used to working very hard at a non-grade-inflated school will continue to be a hard worker and use those skills that allowed them to succeed in a difficult school. A student from an easy school will not come out with the same work ethic and will not be able to succeed as well.
Many employers look less at your education than at your work experience and your references, and a student who went to a difficult school is more likely to do well in work. I feel it is likely that in the end, a student will benefit more from a difficult school and from the learning experience there than from an easy entrance into grad school.
Articles like this sadden me because the sole emphasis on grades. Our society today is becoming obsessed with receiving A's, whether or not they actually learned the material. Here, the outcome is more important than the actual knowledge. To me, this is complete and utter... well I can't think of the word, but it has a negative connotation so just take it as you will. Furthermore, I really like the idea of adding class rank to the transcript. That gives the admissions officers better insight into where you are on the spectrum of the students. A 3.25 GPA might not look as lesser if you were in the 13th percentile. That shows how difficult your classes are (or if everyone is slacking off with you). I still have a problem with basing everything off of number quantities, because you can't quantify people.
Many of my friends who go to Ivy League schools tell me that the work and effort it took them to get into the school exceeds the work and effort they actually have to put into their college classes. My friends' testaments are interesting to consider after reading this article. I also think that the information in the article does not hold true for every profession. While some professions may determine an applicant based on a GPA, many professions do not. I also do not know if I believe in the attitude where the simple, easy, but well done tasks are more valued than the more difficult tasks. In the scene shop, the person who is cutting the wood probably will not be as valued as the person who is putting together the final scenery, or the person who took the time to design the scenery in the first place. Nonetheless, it is indeed sad that we live in a world where some people determine other's success based on a number.
I think this is great. I find that people who go to mediocre schools and get better grades than everyone else are also happier than people who struggle or even do well at hard/prestigious schools. I think you should pick a school not just because it will push you but because it is the correct school for you and it will teach you the things you want to learn. This only makes my argument stronger, that it may actually get you to a better place later on in life. I do wonder though if it stops after a certain point, if the university is prestigious enough does it matter that you didn't get all A's. If you did pretty well at Harvard or Yale, will people automatically think higher of you because you went to Harvard or Yale?
Also if you read the book (or watch the movie) "Freakanomics" the authors talk all about how people think about outcome and not enough about context. They prove through statistical analysis and many different examples that we are so focused on achievement or end result that we barely think about what got that person to that position.
I'm glad I don't really think of this as a problem. As a student in the Drama program, I'm not really worried about people spending a lot of time looking at my grades. I expect that most people will be paying much more attention to my work. However I was worried about that when I was a math major. My professors refused to curve even the most challenging classes. When I took Matrix Theory the average in the class was a 43%. Instead of recognizing this, my professor failed more then half the class. At times like that you start to worry about how that looks. For a lot of those students, that F looked really bad, despite the fact that at a lot of other universities they might have been the best student in that class. In certain majors here at CMU it just seems unfair that the professors don't grade inflate. I realize the idea is to make students work harder, but if that extra effort is going to make you look less valuable to the outside world, is it actually worth it. It is hard to accept that the trade off for such a fantastic education is that after you graduate it is difficult to find a job.
This past summer I worked in the Office of Institutional Research at a local university. Our conversations included topics such as this, so I found this article to be very interesting and actually forwarded it onto one of my colleagues. I do believe that many students go to great colleges but end up paying a lot and getting lower grades and then try to enter grad schools in fields that depend highly on GPA such as business or engineering and then are slighted by the fact that they received very stringent grades. I can see where many students in other majors at CMU could have this worry but I would hope that CMU's great name would balance this out, but without seeing any data we don't really know. Fortunately, it would seem that in the theatre realm because GPA is seldom if ever considered for jobs this may not be an issue for students in the School of Drama. I have, however, wondered how graduate school programs for theatre look at transcripts from undergraduate degrees.
Whoa!! This is another one of those bizarre moments, that I just cannot seem to get over, where my drama and non-drama classes overlap. We are learning a lot about the fundamental attribution error in my social phycology class. Anyways its just part of the human condition and it sadly effects our education and workforces. It is unfortunate be we are all human here and it would just be entirely unrealistic to expect humans to make every single situation in the world one hundred percent fair, like we wish it could be. Also I am thinking that when schools started doing grade inflation they did it because they new about this and they knew it would make their school and their students look better than they actually are, which oftentimes is just the thing you need to get ahead. In our society we judge by looks first and even if we later change our opinion to be based on facts sometimes all you need in life is that one little chance to prove yourself.
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