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In School, C is the new D
The debasement of American education system continues:
The solution, Simmons suggests, is to eliminate Ds altogether, because he believes many of those barely getting by will up their game to avoid failure. He pointed to a New Jersey charter school that’s already made the transition. […] “Ds are simply not useful in society,” Larrie Reynolds, superintendent at the Mount Olive, N.J. charter school Simmons referenced, told the New York Times in 2010. “It’s a throwaway grade. No one wants to hire a D-anything, so why would we have D-students and give them credit for it?”
If C is now the borderline between passing and failure — goes the thinking — then the slackers will work hard enough to get Cs, rather than the Ds they were earning before. A more likely outcome, however, is that public school teachers will be pressured to drop their standards in order to meet their performance metrics. As a signaling mechanism, it’s a lateral move. Employers and colleges will know that the C-minus student of today is as mediocre as the D-minus student of yesteryear. The end result is that Peppermint Patty gets into the C-minus Hall of Fame instead.
Yet Ds are important in education. They tell the student they’re not very good at that particular subject, either because they lack work ethic, motivation, intelligence, or aptitude. The grade system — assuming it is reasonably applied — provides important feedback. It’s fundamentally no different from any other form of measurement. Imagine a speedometer that never give you the correct speed below 20 mph; that’s the same as a grading system were Ds have been done away with.
The D-Reformers are trying to short circuit the educational feedback loop. Instead of providing real information that can be used to draw conclusions, they want to issue false information that misleads and misdirects. While this may seem kind in the short-term, it’s cruel over the long-haul. Inflated grades give students an incorrect understanding of their talents and abilities. Sooner or later, objective reality catches-up. Often this happens when the student reaches college and flunks out.
A poor grade in school can be a crushing experience, whatever soothing sounds are emitted by Panglossian teachers and parents. Yet the truth still needs to be known, especially by the student whose future rests in the balance. Whatever the immediately consequence, an important life lesson is learned: at some point you are going to fail.
There are plenty of struggling students who, nevertheless, become great successes in life, and a failure at one subject hardly precludes success in others. Even being a total academic failure is hardly an economic death knell. Even at its best, formal education only tests academic aptitude and inclination. The student who is bored hearing lectures and reading books might excel at hands-on learning.
A key reason for the shortage of skilled manual labor in North America is that too many academically marginal students — who might succeed at a particular trade — are pushed into college-track courses. The result is often failure, disappointment, and low self-esteem, the very things two generations of touchy-feely educational theorists promised to end with their reforms. Had these students been flunked in high school, they might have sought another, more suitable path.
The finger for this misallocation of talent is often pointed at the mass subsidization of post-secondary education. The cycle of grants and loans that initially made it easier to go afford college — but now make it absurdly expensive — are certainly a proximate cause. The deeper cause, however, lies in the culture of modern North America.
The big intellectual story of the 20th century is the decline of religion. In previous generations, the central measure of a person’s worth in society was his or her moral conduct. Authors, statesmen, and philosophers spoke of “virtue” and “character” as being essential to a functioning society. The early public school reformers focused as much on character formation as they did on either knowledge acquisition or skill development.
Religion underpinned the importance of the moral self in the Victorian world. Come the 20th century, however, religion was pushed to the board; morality, likewise, became a personal matter with limited remit in the public square. Saying that someone was “virtuous” or “of good character” was just a personal opinion. With religion gone, there was no universal reference point to make moral judgements anything but subjective attitudes.
Into this void steps the intelligent self to replace the moral self. The highly intelligent went from being eccentrics regarded with suspicion to technocrats destined to rule society. Unlike morality, intelligence could be measured with a test. You could even rank people along a curve. Far more precise than hazy concepts like virtue. The human need to find hierarchy had found a new standard.
Whereas before, the unintelligent could take comfort in at least being a good person, in this harsher modern light, “goodness” was just a tactful way to assuage the feelings of those on the wrong half of the bell curve. Complimenting someone’s intelligence today is far more flattering than calling attention to his or her virtue. This is the end product of the fetishization of intelligence. So is reverence for the four-year college degree, a supposedly credentialized proof of an individual’s intelligence.
But now, we can no longer call the unintelligent unintelligent, or deny them the trappings supposedly due to the intelligent. To do so is to deny them the only approved path to self and social worth. That the kind of intelligence being measured is only one particular kind — and that a college degree is hardly proof of high intelligence anymore — hasn’t changed this widespread view.
This unhealthy view of intelligence is behind the panic so many parents feel when they see that their children aren’t really college material. They hope — in the way that only parents can — that some threat or trick might push Johnny away from the terrible fate of being a mere high school graduate.
If we are to step away from our obsession with college — and the consequent desire to rig the high school grading system by any means necessary — we need to question the elevation of intelligence above all other individual capacities and traits.
Published in Culture, Education
Would it be any benefit to just change the grades into pass/fail instead of the usual system? It’s not like the letter grades mean much and are inconsistently graded by teachers anyway.
Yes. Even passing is only a marginally useful concept with the concept of social promotion. Teachers will pass anyone unless there is a compelling reason not to.
I prefer three grades: Fail, Pass, and Outstanding.
Actually he’s right. Grades are market signals. Standardizing the grades doesn’t make a difference, because the signal depends on the school which gave you the grade; i.e. relative to the peers in that institution.
Universities work this way, and I think it’s a good way.
For example, faced with 2 candidates:
A in Computer Science from MIT
A in Computer Science from DeVry
Which one is an employer going to know is a better A? Obviously the MIT one.
So an A is not an A depending on where you get it, for this reason. The same applies to HSs and everything else too.
Colleges also do this in terms of absolute grades. You CANNOT graduate with an undergrad degree with less than a C average (2.0). If you get less than a C average for a year, you get either kicked out of school or suspended for a year, or forced to repeat the classes you got Ds in.
Grad school is even worst. You cannot graduate with less than a B average (3.0).
Does this actually make people work harder? Yes and no. It either eliminates lots of people from the school (which is why dropout rates or transfer rates at universities are actually really high!)…or at the minimum it forces them to re-take the class until they get a C or more.
Under the current system Bush and Kerry would never have graduated from Harvard or Yale. Never.
At a minimum, I agree that no one should be allowed to progress with Ds.
But this also explains the mythical “grade inflation”. There’s no grade inflation. It’s simply that those which previously would have gotten Ds are either kicked out of the university, or transfer elsewhere, and hence are no longer counted. Also that those with Ds are also forced to repeat the class till they get higher grade. Which overall leads to a left-truncated distribution of grades because by definition no one with less than a C is going to graduate.
But even if you “curve”, all you’re doing is weakening the signal of the institution, if the overall body of students is “weak”, or strengthening it if the overall body of students is “strong”.
Which is why where one gets an A is just as important as getting an A. I’d rather get a B at MIT than an A somewhere else.
It’s like currency. $1 is not always $1 in purchasing power. But that doesn’t make much of a difference because everyone knows this.
I am breaking my just instituted rule of commenting on a thread with AIG.
Almost everybody here (except) AIG are way behind the times. At most universities D’s means you are failing and C’s means you are well below average.
I disagree with him about the Harvard A and a DeVry A. At Harvard an A is meaningless – they all get A’s. An A at DeVry means that you are at the top of the heap at DeVry. While you are probably safe to pick the A Harvard student over the A DeVry student – I would go with an A student from DeVry before a C student at Harvard. A C student at Harvard is so far down the bell curve as to be an unreliable employee. An A student at DeVry is at least on the right side of the curve and may be very high on the curve.
No grade inflation? That’s a good one. I taught at a university for 31 years and my son teaches at one now, and we have both seen grade inflation with our own eyes, and we have discussed what causes it and how to deal with it. It has become an intractable problem.
It seems to have started during the Vietnam War when some professors refused to give out failing grades in order to keep their students safe from the draft. It was exacerbated by affirmative action, which led universities to accept underqualified black students and do whatever was necessary to keep them from failing. These days universities often receive more funding if they increase graduation rates and retention rates (especially for minorities), which means not failing anyone. The self-esteem movement has convinced students that they all deserve A grades. Helicopter parents file “customer complaints” when their children do poorly. Academic appeals are becoming more common. God help the professor who consistenly gives poor grades to minority students, even if they came to the university woefully unprepared. And perhaps most significantly, computerized student evaluation of faculty is used as the primary input for tenure and promotion at many universities. It is widely believed by faculty (I’m not sure it’s true) that to get good evalutions a professor must give good grades.
On top of all that, in education schools in at least some states students must get at least a 3.0 average to be certified to teach in the public schools. Virtually no student in the education school does worse than 3.0, and many more than half graduate cum laude or higher.
Then, if a professor actually is demanding, he will get a reputation for being so on Ratemyprofessors.com, and students will stop taking his courses.
My preference would be to do away with letter grades altogether, and return to a 100 point scale, which could be curved if necessary or sensible in a given course.
The effect of the letter system is to compress grades that are different as if they were the same. An 80 gets the same grade as an 89. A 79 gets a much worse grade than an 80. The compressed grades, with no significant digits (a B is 3, a C is 2), are then used to compute grade point averages with several significant digits (e.g., 3.45). Mathematically, that makes no sense.
The C or D grade problem then disappears. The remaining problem is to determine how high the score must be (out of 100) to grant credit for passing the course. This does not have to be the same across the board. For example, it might be higher for passing Anatomy in medical school than for Intro to Marketing in business school. Or maybe not. Why not let each department decide what passing needs to be for each of its course offerings.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/dangerous-myth-grade-inflation/
“Grade inflation” assumes that individuals in 1965 had the same capacity to answer the same question as students in 2015.
That’s not a good assumption. A simple example is that today one can answer far more difficult questions in, math for example, than someone in 1965 due to the presence of very advanced calculators.
Students today have access to the internet, computers, calculators, making answering the same questions as in 1965, way easier.
http://www.trincoll.edu/Academics/centers/teaching/Documents/Grade%20Inflation%20and%20the%20Myth%20of%20Student%20Consumerism.pdf
Ontario, maybe. When I was a kid (in BC) D was 40-50; C- was : 50-60; B: 73-85 etc. A D meant 40-50 and E was below 40. There was a distinction between “failed but hopeful” and “hopeless”.
Today in BC passing students see grades from A-C, failing students are given an “incomplete” on the mid-term report card (and usually offered a pathway to passing.) They only see a fail after being given an incomplete warning.
But do they understand the answers that they get? My experience is that in may subjects using calculators and computers has weakened students’ understanding of what is going on inside the equations and models they are using. They often get wildly incorrect answers from the computer that they can’t challenge because they lack the understanding of the underlying problem and the solution model.
Students are coming to university with significantly lower ability levels in reading and math. This shows up in SAT scores that are only within the range of earlier decades because the scores were recentered to be 100 points higher than in those days.
If their grades are about the same that is because the courses have gotten easier with fewer books assigned, fewer papers to write, etc. Most professors will admit this. Student writing is far worse. Their general knowledge is abysmal. Their ability to reason is weaker than in previous generations.
The reality doesn’t matter as much as the faculty perception that they need to go easy on students to get good evaluations. Non-tenured faculty feel this sharply. And, as more and more faculty are non-tenured, the impetus to go easier on students increases.
That study is now 15 years old, virtually a complete generation later. Student attitudes have changed in that time, and not for the better. The study probably used data from even earlier years.
If a C grade is “average,” i.e., the midpoint of the normal distribution, then one would expect half of all students to have grades of C or worse. If this is true only of African American students then they are clearly going easy on the rest of the students.
But this is one excellent way to inflate grades. Keep taking the test until you pass it. Keep revising your paper (“Let me tell you exactly how to make it better.”) until it’s an A or a B paper. Revision is important in learning to write. But there can be too much of a good thing. I used to allow one revision, with the opportunity to earn back no more than 25% of the points lost on the first draft.
This is another method of inflating grades, not a refutation that the grades are inflated. The later in the semester a student can drop without penalty, or switch to pass-fail, the higher the average grades will be for all students.
This is simply an argument against scoring a student’s progress (limited as it is in the case of a D grade). Presumably if a D is not useful because no one wants to hire a D-anything, then an F is certainly not useful.
The reason to give a D is to accurately inform the student of where they are. This is the same as a B or an A. I think Mr. Anderson thinks it is more useful to lie to the students.
I love the clarity of the statement in bold. That is exactly how a grade should be viewed.
That is true of the modern devices only if a student knows how to problem solve and possesses critical thinking skills. Without those two abilities, all the calculators and computers in the world cannot help someone write a decent essay or know what to do when asked what percentage of 20 is 10.