News of the Times: FED Taking Strong Action to Curb Grade Inflation

Originally published at: News of the Times: FED Taking Strong Action to Curb Grade Inflation | Boing Boing

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One of my forced T.A.-ships was for a professor who set the average grade of the class at ‘C’ (2.0), warning (to his credit?), at the very first class, that that was “meant to be an average grade, after-all”*. i attempted to argue for trends over many classes (“couldn’t one class be an especially good class?”) but he gave me ‘the hand’, and said that “grade inflation” will ruin the system in time -sigh-

*never having discovered any document of ‘original intent’

Good comic!, by the bye

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OK, I don’t know at all what is going on here, but college was over 20 years ago for me…

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Yeah, I thought this was a satire of the Fed’s use of interest rates to manipulate the economy, but it’s an actual thing.

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I never had him because I wasn’t in the ceramics program, but I heard from grad students that the head of ceramics at K-State was from Japan and he was a hard ass on grades.

He would be like, “Very good. Nice form.Good wall thickness. You get a C-.” - and that was considered high praise from him!

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How about Universities just requiring that professors lower grades?

Everyone gets upset when you do that. (e.g. Penn, but I’ve been told that they may have tried to do it in a particularly bad way.) Students want you to justify every point, administrators send out memos comparing grades between departments, etc.

There is no constituency for lowering grades.

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It’s an old argument-- are grades meant to show mastery of class material, or, are grades a way to differentiate among students. Students (and their parents) generally want the former grade philosophy because it makes the student look like a stand-out just for mastering the material. But in the latter philosophy, you have to be way above and beyond basic mastery to get even an A-. Pretty much the only one I can think might want the latter system are graduate program admissions committees.

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