[lit-ideas] Re: Grade inflation
- From: torgfje2@xxxxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 20:29:26 +0100
On 9 Apr 2004 at 10:19, Steven G. Cameron wrote:
> Do any of you have additional insight(s) into this??
>
> Aiming to halt widespread grade inflation afflicting Ivy League
> colleges, Princeton University officials are proposing to limit the
> number of A's that its professors award.
Well, insights, I don't know. But the sentiment is well known from multiple
educational sites (Minnesota, kwaZulu/Natal and Norway). As a
version of Moral Panic, it's basically the old Monty Python joke of "kids of
today don't know how easy they have it. We had it rough." And
since it's usually, as in this story, based on a numerical sort of argument, I
find it most efficient to counter it ditto. It goes
something like this:
Even if it was the case that each birth cohort could be predicted in terms of
their distribution according to a scale of, say,
"intelligence", it would still remain impossible to predict the exact location
of each distributed element. Perhaps ALL the A students of
one particular cohort went to the University of Minnesota? Then we would surely
agree that it would be wrong to apply this kind of doctrine
STRICTLY. It can't be applied on a class level, and clearly even university
level would be too small. Would a national level apply?
It has been pointed out previously on this list that when it is applied to such
a large social group, forms of instruction vary to the
extent that it would be meaningless to test for the same things across the
population. And then we're left with the general abstracts,
"intelligence" and "population". Perhaps it would also be helpful to remind
those who are not themselves assigning marks that these kinds
of evaluations are spurious and huge simplications of massively complex
matters. If only the world could be reduced to analytical
categories...
Best,
--
Torgeir Fjeld
torgfje2@xxxxxxxxxx
http://home.no.net/torgfje/
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