Gimme an A!

NOW I understand why in recent High School movies kids get so depressed when they get a C.
I thought C was meant to be "average".

It was in my time and us getting into the place to start with that, in my city, was difficult. I put the date of change as 1965, but stuff started before that, pass fail.

Not that I'm against pass fail (haven't thought about it for years, it was just after my time) but I'm bemused. I once had the highest grade in a class - taught by a famoso electron microscopist, with me writing notes phonetically - and I got some kind of B.
A lot has changed.

Anyway, C was average. That's changed.

The prof I had for Organic Chemistry gave the same number of A's as F's, B's as D's, and C's were around 50%. Premed students lived in terror of him. I was at the top of the class and was known as one of the curve breakers consequently I had to watch my labs like a hawk lest they be sabotaged.

The next year I became his TA--revenge was sweet.

Rap

Damn. I had at least two errors in my writing of that post. Give me a C.

I remember all that.

My labs were so-so, but I was good with rules. I had a one page notes of 30 or so common lab synthesis rxns, naming, constants, and molecular orbitals and learned to processes to build molecules like geometry constructions. I still have that page.

After this prof saw that PChem really clicked too, halfway through my junior year he got me interested in ChE.

I found that even ChE's hated Organic, but most loved PChem. The nerds.

Rap

This thread is based on flawed logic. The only evidence presented of the alleged "grade inflation" is the fact that grades are improving. Since when is improved performance a bad thing?

Over the past several decades the rate of infant mortality has plummeted. Is this evidence that we have changed the definition of "mortality"? No, it means we are getting better at saving lives

Running a 4 minute mile was once an impossible feat. Now it is a losing performance. Does this mean we have changed the definition of "mile"? Or, has the length of a minute changed.

There is a myth that students are performing worse than the students of the past. This myth has been around for a long time, each generation venerates the generations before it.

Yet all evidence is to the contrary. In spite of our 100 year hysterical hand wringing about how kids haven't learned math and science over the past 100 years, we are still advancing physics, building technology, sending robots to mars and launching the information age.

There has yet to be any real evidence to back up the claims that the sky is falling in our education system.

I see nothing wrong with more students getting A's.

I never took pchem, that separated the wheat and chaff back then. I did have women friends doing ok in pchem, though not in great numbers, but we weren't in great numbers in the first place.
So it went, but back then I didn't think stuff was rigged. I deserved to be cut off. (well, I worked a lot of hours, but I'm not thinking I would have been better if I hadn't.) I still don't think stuff was rigged then.

I do wonder about the presence of frats and their test compilations, but if I was smarter, even if that was going on, it wouldn't have mattered.

Grades inflated around 1965. Big change.

I won't say what year I graduated from college, but according to your stats, I didn't do too poorly!

You haven't provided any evidence of this. But let's say you are right.

The people who graduated since 1965 were the people who built the space program from moon landings to the space shuttle to the Mars rovers. We discovered quarks, figured out how to stuff hundreds of thousands of transistors into a small piece of silicon and built the Internet.

Even if you are right, I fail to see how it hurt us.

I'm not sure the impetus comes from the parents, although that may explain part of it. The biggest driver of change, as I saw it when I was enmeshed in academia, was from the students, who came to view college not as a place for education but as a steppingstone to career advancement. For them, college was simply another investment, and getting anything less than an A was like buying a product that didn't work properly. The attitude was: "I (or more precisely, my parents) pay a lot of money for me to be here, and I need good grades to get the kind of job that I want, so I should be getting better grades." There was very little connection between actually do A quality work in order to get A's-- rather, students took a far more transactional approach to education. "I pay enough to get an 'A,' so that's what I should be getting."

Another factor in collegiate grade inflation is high school grade inflation. Students who got A's in high school expected to get A's in college -- in fact, they frequently demanded to get A's in college. It was a shock to many of those who had been valedictorians in their high schools to come to a prestigious state university where pretty much everyone else in their classes was also a high school valedictorian. They had never experienced that kind of academic competition before, and couldn't understand how come they weren't outperforming their classmates like they used to do with regularity in high school. Some adapted, but some just bitched and moaned about how unfair life was.

Joe,

You seem to have a very poor view of students for someone who was in academia.

Colleges aren't prisons. People who are motivated, intelligent and curious go to college. And people who went to college are the ones with the creativity and genius that have driven our progress for decades.

I am curious about what kind of student you were? When I was a student I was very interested in education as were most of my peers. I majored in physics yet enjoyed classes in psychology, philosophy and religion.

There is a theory that education involves beating students over the head. I think this is a counter-productive to anything close to real education.

And that's another example of flawed logic. Specifically, it's a form of equivocation.

I wouldn't say poor. Just realistic.


That certainly describes some of them, but not all of them.


Plenty of very successful people never attended or never graduated from college.


I was exceptional in every respect.

Sometimes the bottom of the curve just gets cut off. I was in a summer accounting class (never again) that started with eighteen students. Three finished. Our school had a later than normal drop date. I'm reasonably sure all three of us made an A. The others sort of self selected.

Not an option in high school, so far as I know, though who knows what changes might come about in fifty some years.

It's a credit to teachers that so many students get the A.

Yeah, and all the smart students.

Who knows, maybe once they get past the admissions requirements for the most elite schools, A's predominate.

The question that no one has addressed is what's the big deal? Society has done quite well since 1965 (which is when this supposedly all started).

The underlying question is what is the purpose of education? It seems to me that colleges are there to serve the students. They are businesses and students are paying customers. The idea that half of the students should get bad grades is laughable.

Part of the problem is that some of the underlying assumptions in our education system were developed during the industrial revolution. Creating citizens for an economy based on assembly lines means teaching people to follow process and procedure and to do what they are told without questioning.

Smacking down factory workers through constant, often negative, evaluation is a standard way to run an assembly line. But modern society has moved on, at least for the educated middle class.

Maybe the change in education, or at least the perception of education, is really a change in our society and economy. Educated people now want to be creative in their jobs and to have ownership over the work they do. Likewise, employers value workers who can innovate and think critically about processes. Colleges should adapt to modern times rather than sticking with a mentality of forcing students to learn.

I still see no evidence that society has suffered in the past 50 years as our education system has modernized.