September 5, 2008

A Statistics Professor Finds Grade Inflation a Difficult Problem

By PAULA WASLEY

While a professor of statistics at Duke University in the 1990s, Valen E. Johnson devised a sophisticated formula, called the Achievement Index, to get around differences in grading practices among professors and among disciplines.

In Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education (Springer-Verlag, 2003), he wrote about the index and about research he conducted at Duke showing that students not only gravitate to courses with higher grade distributions, but also write better evaluations

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