Grade Inflation ... Why It's a Nightmare*,

Don't Lose Sight of Ultimate Purposes

Grades perform at least four different functions that I can think of:

1. Sending signals, getting students to work, etc.

2. Deciding  who is to be rusticated.

3. Deciding who is to go to a cognate  professional school (eg. law school).

4. Deciding who is to going to enter the discipline.

These are very different purposes, and they do need separate grading systems. The latter two are reasonably addressed by external examinations. There is nothing wrong with external examinations per se. One can reasonably critique the GRE for being a multiple choice examination which does not require the candidate to actually write things or  perform mathematical calculations, etc. One can call for an external examination to be made more authoritative, after the manner of the old University of London external degree.

It is an error to compare grade averages between disciplines, and say, "we've got more or less grade inflation than you do."

For example,  you note that at your institution, the art,  music and dance programs have comparatively high GPA's. Practically speaking, it is impossible to get into an art or music school without already being an artist or musician. They have  auditions, look at portfolios, etc. Generally speaking, the vast majority of classes are closed to nonmajors, because they would not be able to keep up, and the art and music schools have no real tradition of participating in general education. For all practical purposes, a BFA is a graduate degree, at about the same level as a liberal arts ABD. A  MFA is  comparable in  scope to a Ph.D. The requirement  is quite simply to produce an  exhibition, that is, a series of related paintings.

Now let's take Mathematics departments. Two  thirds of the classes (sections) a  typical Mathematics  department teaches  are, by it's  own reckoning,  not of college  level, ie. below Calculus.  There is  usually  a slow Calculus  course for business and biology students, and a regular Calculus course. Only about ten percent of the total classes are above Calculus level (which is to say,  above the level covered by the college board advanced placement exams). Perhaps five  percent might be upper division/graduate.  The vast majority of Mathematics classes contain students who have a history of failing Mathematics, and are resigned to failing yet again. Mathematics departments commonly have initial placement examinations, to separate out the sheep from the goats. In terms of prerequisites and class scheduling, someone who was obliged to  start in a sub-Calculus course would find it extremely difficult to meet the requirements for a Mathematics or hard science degree within four years. The placement exam, conducted before any classes, is thus the key exam. It practically closes off the the hard science fields to those who are not either well prepared in  high school, or exceptionally determined.  Physics departments are practically identical to Mathematics departments in this respect, given the close linkage between the two disciplines.

An A in College Algebra would  translate as approximately: "What on earth are _you_ doing in this bonehead class with all these meatheads. Come and talk to me so we can get you transferred somewhere suitable." There is an alternative translation which runs:  "We both know you are competent to teach this class, but the idiotic regulations require you  to take it, so why don't  you just come in for the final exam and skip everything else." One such case known to me was that of a  mathematician who decided he wanted to teach Mathematics to small children, and was therefore required to take an  even more boneheaded form of College Algebra known as  Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers.

Both of these cases are  so overwhelmingly different from History that comparison is meaningless.

[In response to a sarcarcastic query:
]

How do I know what Mathematics instructors think? How do historians know anything? Put in some time on the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and form your own conclusions. Broadly speaking, the limiting factor on Mathematics education is the availability of people who both know Mathematics and are willing to teach young children. There is an ongoing issue of the unqualified high school math teacher who is afraid of Mathematics, and projects her fear onto the students. It's rather a catch-22 situation. That means that there are limits to the extent to which you can simply order everyone to be better prepared.

  (8/7/2004)

Wagoner, Jennings L., Jr., Honor and Dishonor at Mr. Jefferson's University: the Antebellum Years, History of Education Quarterly, 26(2):155-179, Summer 1986

[Dresner retrieved a copy of the article, and seemed annoyed that i had suggested he read it.]

I'm sorry you didn't get much from the Waggoner  article. I  was originally trained as an anthropologist before I became a historian, and perhaps that enabled me to  see what he was getting at. It helps to have read Bertram Wyatt-Brown as well, Waggoner only touches briefly on the "primal honor" discussion. You have to be careful not to uncritically impose your own values on an alien society.

    The way the social system was set up in the Old South, the vast majority of students had what they wanted once they had been to the University of Virginia, even for a short period of time. The whole  point of going to the University of Virginia was to become known to the members of the southern elite (see p. 170). The situation was very much the same at  Oxford or Cambridge, of course, or Eton and Harrow, for that matter. Being sent down for a spectacular prank was as good as graduating. If the prank was stylish and original enough, it would  be widely remembered.  What would have really hurt would  have been to simply  refuse admission in the first place.

    In the Ancien Regime, of which the Old South was an offshoot, the basis of wealth and  power was property, either in the form of land or slaves. Someone who went to the University of Virginia had to have property in the first place, of course (a handful of grinds and scholarship boys excepted, of course).  However, if a planter had   gone there, it  meant that twenty years later, one of the southern grandees might remember him, and the planter would then be able to gain power by mediating on behalf of his neighbors.  The other side of the coin was that it was very bad to be seen to submit to insult. That would be the behavior of a shopkeeper. It  would result in shunning, or ostracism.

     Parenthetically, I can think of a boy at my old prep school, thirty years ago, whom I remember not for any positive achievement, but  for "streaking," ie. running nude in a public place with the intent of creating a disturbance. He was at pains to take twenty dollars worth of bets in advance, which, in terms of schoolboy economics and the subsequent  inflation, was a meaningful sum. I don't say that I admire Wayne ____., but if I had a job in my gift, probably of a military character, which required audacity and steady nerve, I might very well prefer him above another man of whom I knew nothing.  There is much less chance that he will panic halfway through, and forget the  good reasons for doing whatever it is that he has to do. In wartime, there is sometimes a need for such men. (*)

   Your students, on the other hand, live in what one might call the Government Sinecure State. The way the civil service regulations are set up, a person with some kind of bachelors degree will have preference for jobs such as welfare caseworker or probation officer, the sort of job that _you_ would never want, but it beats working on an assembly line. Next preference goes to the people with a year or so of college. According to the material in a civil service  test tutor book I consulted, a college class lasting fifty minutes is credited approximately equally to an hour and a half working at McDonald s. This doesn't seem particularly just, but  there it is.  The result is a type of student who looks for gut courses. It is simply a question of where their vested interests lie. Flunking a student in the year 2004 may have many of the same implications as caning a student in the year 1840.

     Returning to the Ancien Regime, I suppose the future Duke of Wellington could have been said to have flunked out of Eton, circa 1780, not in the sense of failing grades, but in the sense of being removed in disgrace. He was a shy little boy who hid from the school  bullies in the shrubbery. When word got back to Wellington's elder brother and guardian, the elder brother angrily removed him, and shipped him off to an inexpensive provincial school in France, the sort of place no one had ever heard of.  Wellington was very happy there. The headmaster's wife was one of those  exquisitely civilized Frenchwomen, in the tradition of  the salon hostesses. It was a good place to grow up, but his contemporaries were not the kind of men who would be able to  pull strings for him  in later life. As it turned out, Wellington was not the kind of mediocre man who needed string-pulling.  Interestingly, Napoleon was attending an  approximately similar school at about the same time.

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Ref: Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, The Years of the Sword.

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(*)

    Reading Own Johnson's _Stover at Yale_ (1912), one finds an approximately similar system. Before a football game, the coach tells 'Dink' Stover that they have no chance of  winning:

[reprint 1968, Collier Books,  New York]

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"'Stover, Look here,' said Tompkins abruptly, 'I'm going to speak straight to you, because I think you'll  keep your mouth shut. We're in a desperate condition here, and you know it. There's only  one man in charge at Yale, now and always, and that's the captain. That's our system, and we stand or fall by it; and in order that we can follow him four times out of five to victory, we've sometimes got to shut our eyes and follow him down to defeat. Do you get me?... No matter what happens, no criticism of the captain-- no talking  outside. You may think he's wrong, you  may  know he's wrong, but you've got to grin and bear it. That's all. Remember-- keep a closed mouth.'"

(p. 81-82, ch. 8)

"'Dink, we're in for a  licking...  that's a great Princeton  team,' said Tompkins quietly,  'and we're a weak Yale one. We're going to get well licked. Now, boy, I'm telling  you this because I think you're the stuff to stand it;  because you'll play better for knowing what's up to you.'"

(p. 93-94, ch 9)

"'Now, boys, its over. We've lost. It's our turn; we've got to stand it. One thing I want you to remember when you go out of here. Yale teams take their medicine. '"

(p. 113, ch10)

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I do not use the word "sinecure" lightly.

A relative used to be a probation officer, about twenty years ago. She went to great efforts to get people to go straight, and had the odd success. This should have made her a stand-out in her department. She was about the only  person there who really had a vocation, and meaningful alternatives. However, unknowingly, she was at cross purposes with the effective program. The effective program was to increase the number of prisoners in the United States from about 400,000 to about  two millions, and use them as a captive industrial labor force.  The state introduced a system of questionnaires and quotas  to prevent probation officers from tempering justice with mercy, and she was eventually forced out. Her experience was analogous to that of Tom Murton, the semi-notorious reform prison warden. Toward the end, there was a disagreement about whether the probation officers should carry guns. My relative hated the idea. She thought of herself as a social worker. However, the "new class" loved the idea, because it made them almost like cops.

     Bill Clinton brought the same approach to "ending welfare as we  know it." Under this sort of regime, a caseworker who  cares very much will be driven up the wall in fairly  short order. If you want to get the desperate mother of small children away from a brutal husband, the first thing you have to do is to find her a place to live, and the money to  pay  for it. However, the caseworker's most basic job is to discourage applicants from applying.  That sort of job becomes attractive only for someone who is willing to cultivate a contemptuous attitude toward the clients. The Social Security system runs on a presumption of eligibility. That is, it assumes that a sixty-nine-year-old beneficiary is the best judge of his potential employability. If the  same principle were applied to the mothers of small children, we would have Swedish-style family allowances, and, unless the scope of benefits were to be radically expanded, the welfare bureaucracy would become substantially inoperative. What we actually have is a system designed to coerce welfare mothers to  take minimum-wage jobs mopping floors, or to put up with domestic abuse. The result is that the bureaucracy requires bureaucrats with a certain lack of moral fastidiousness.

About a year ago, the state of New Jersey tried to outsource welfare administration to India. Welfare administration, in the new regime, works out to calling prospective employers up, and asking if they have jobs open,  rather than taking the applicant's word that she could not find a job. This can be done equally well from Bombay as from  Trenton. The welfare caseworkers protested noisily, and the scheme was halted. Outsourcing was only possible because the welfare caseworkers had already allowed themselves to be maneuvered into dereliction of duty. Someone in Bombay cannot do a very good job of having a heart-to-heart talk with a thirteen-year-old Newark slum girl about her boyfriend. This "new class" of bureaucrats to manage the poor, in both its penal and welfare divisions, recruited from precisely those college students you most dislike, is in effect the same old slaveholder class in a new shape. That is why I think the experience of the University of Virginia _is_ applicable.

     By comparison, schoolteachers are a long way up the peck-order, being allowed to do good instead of harm, and elementary schools do not have to take anyone who walks in the door. Education schools have rigorized their curricula, not with classroom courses, but with very large chunks of practice teaching. The best way to find out if a student is any good is to see how she interacts with real live children. In our education school (West Virginia University), the practice teaching component of the elementary education program  is now up to about a year.