Try the following experiment at your next faculty meeting. First ask, "What is the difference between those students who earn A's and B's and those students who earn D's and F's?"
You will hear a litany of responses including work ethic, organization, high-school preparation, and class attendance.
Next ask your colleagues to calculate the final grade for a student whose 10 assignments during the semester had received the following marks: C, C, MA (missing assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A. Then calculate the distribution of the final grades.
I've done that experiment with more than 10,000 faculty members around the world and, every time, bar none, the results include final grades that include F, D, C, B, and A. It turns out that the difference between the student who earns A's and B's and the one who earns D's and F's is not necessarily a matter of work ethic, organization, high-school preparation, or class attendance. The difference is the professor's grading policy.
Now change the scene from the faculty meeting to a crisp fall day in the football stadium. As the afternoon shadows fall on the goal posts, a pass is thrown to a receiver who lunges for the ball and tumbles into the end zone. One official signals a touchdown, the second official signals an incomplete pass, and the third official scratches his head in bewilderment. Faculty members, students, alumni, and trustees rise as one, complaining bitterly of the unfairness and incompetence of athletics officials who seem unable to view the same student performance and make a consistent judgment.
Professorial prerogatives notwithstanding, we ought to have a standard for grading policies that at least rises to the basics we expect of officials on the athletics field: accuracy, fairness, and effectiveness. Professors are typically granted wide latitude to establish and enforce grading policies within certain boundaries. It is not acceptable for faculty members to make mathematical errors in grading or routinely award grades that reflect gender or racial bias. But many grading policies often fall short of the three basic standards:
Accuracy. The first great assault on accuracy is the use of the zero on a 100-point scale. If the grade of A represents a score of 90-100, B is 80-89, C is 70-79, and D is 60-69, then the interval between each letter grade, A to B to C to D, is 10 points. But if a student fails to submit an assignment and receives a zero, then the interval from D to zero is 60 points, a sixfold penalty compared with the other grading intervals.
Let us stipulate that work receiving a D is wretched, and that the failure of a student to submit work at all is abysmal. The use of the zero, however, requires us to defend the proposition that abysmal is six times as bad as wretched. Students who fail to turn in work deserve a punishment that fits the crime; perhaps they should be required to do the work, suffer constraints on their free time, or be denied Facebook and Frisbee privileges. But should they lose an entire semester of credit, which can be the ultimate impact of receiving zeros for missing assignments, because of an irrational and mathematically incorrect grading policy? Even Dante's worst offenders were consigned to the ninth—not the 54th—circle of hell. Poets, it seems, understand interval data better than professors in the hard sciences do.
The use of the arithmetic mean, or average, to calculate final grades—often the consequence of computerized grading technologies—is another offense against accuracy in grading. I have reviewed math standards in more than 100 countries and noticed that most students understand early that the average is not necessarily the best way to represent a data set. They understand alternative representations, including the mode, median, and weighted averages, to name a few. They learn that politicians and marketers, among others, will use averages in taxes, employment, and income to mislead voters and consumers. But a decade later, as 19- and 20-year-olds, they are sitting in college classes in which grading policies worship at the altar of mathematical accuracy—engineering, statistics, French literature, educational psychology (the similarities in grading policies can be eerie)—and the use of the average is pervasive.
I've taught graduate statistics courses in which mathematicians are seated next to nurses, teachers, marketers, and biologists. My task was not to evaluate where they started but where they finished. For some of them, multivariate analysis was a recent memory, while for others, high-school algebra was a distant and painful one. The mathematicians soared at the start of class but were challenged a month or two later; their colleagues struggled to remember the basics of algebra at first, but reached their "Now I get it" moments during the final days of the class. They argued quite persuasively that the professor should not use the average of their scores to calculate their final grade, but rather should consider their proficiency at the end of the term. I worried, however, that the same graduate students and instructors who argued against the average in that class would return to their own students and, within a few hours, casually apply the average to calculate final grades.
Fairness. While I would not automatically extrapolate my research findings to other settings, the results are sufficiently alarming to invite introspection. I have found that faculty members sometimes conflate quiet compliance with proficiency. That sends the message to students—female students in particular—that the path to success is acquiescence rather than achievement.
My observation comes first from a simple analysis of the membership of the National Honor Society. In the high school where I volunteer, the gender balance of the student body is equal. Yet the ratio of women to men in the National Honor Society in this high school is eight to one. I have checked hundreds of coeducational institutions since that observation and found all of them to have a female-to-male advantage. A gender imbalance is also found in the college-matriculation rate of women to men: 58 percent to 42 percent, respectively. I've lost enough debates with women to stipulate that it may be true that they are smarter than men, but I doubt that they are eight times as smart. Some other factor is at work here, and it may be the societal value that elevates behavioral submission over academic performance.
I also analyzed the results of students who received A and B grades but failed external examinations in literacy and math. Those students were disproportionately female and self-identified as ethnic minorities. A cynic might label this the "bless her heart" effect, as in, "She really isn't very proficient, but bless her heart, she showed up every day, participated in class, and didn't give me any trouble."
That may not apply to your student body, but I would ask only that you find out if the dropout and failure rates of your students are equally distributed by gender and ethnicity. If not, it is at least possible that students were lured into the challenge of your institution based upon rewards for quiet compliance, and that then they were punished for not having the skills required for college-level work. Conversely, some minority male students may have never reached the front door of your institution because, as high-school students, they were not rewarded for academic proficiency but punished for abrasive behavior that was unrelated to academic performance.
The most perplexing part of unfair grading policies is that they are rarely intentional. I know of no college or school system that has an affirmative-action policy to secure more bigots and sexists on the faculty. On the contrary, the "bless her heart" effect (pronoun very deliberate) stems not from malice but from compassion.
Effectiveness. Finally, we should consider whether the impact of grading policies has led to improved student performance. A basic question that faculty members must ask is, "Were my students last semester more engaged, responsive, and successful than students in previous years?" If the answer is "yes," then present grading policies are fine. I am astonished, however, at the number of professors who complain loudly that students are disrespectful, inattentive, disengaged, and unresponsive—and yet who wish to pursue the same grading policies they have used for a decade or more.
Fortunately, the solution to the quandary of effective grading practices is close at hand. On the athletics field, I've never seen a coach with a grade book and red pencil, yet I have witnessed many a coach who provides feedback designed to improve performance. Similarly, I've noticed, while watching the conductor of the collegiate orchestra or chorale lead a rehearsal, how infrequently quizzes and tests are administered and how rarely grades are awarded. Instead, the conductor frequently provides feedback for the singular purpose of improving student performance.
The Class of 2013 grew up playing video games and received feedback that was immediate, specific, and brutal—they won or else died at the end of each game. For them, the purpose of feedback is not to calculate an average or score a final exam, but to inform them about how they can improve on their next attempt to rule the universe.
Imagine a class in any other subject, from science to classics, conducted in the same way. The students wail, "Does it count?" and the professor responds, "I'm just giving you feedback to improve your performance—try to do better next time." I have never heard students thank their Nintendo machine for its insightful feedback, but I have observed many of them respond more attentively to those machines than to their professors.
Now is the time to make modest but important improvements in grading policy. Without leave of administrators or permission from grading-system programmers, professors can stop the use of the zero. They can suspend the use of the average. They can override the deterministic mentality that drives so many grading systems and provide regular feedback designed to help students actually learn. They can, in brief, be accurate, fair, and effective. It is no more than our students demand of athletics contests and video games. As teachers, we should do no less.
Comments
1. hdibble - September 14, 2009 at 08:36 am
This article makes a number of important points about grading from the perspective of the student, i.e., what do they get from grades in terms of evaluating their own performance. The single biggest problem with grades currently, however, is grade inflation, which tends to collapse the range of grades to As and Bs (perhaps with Fs reserved for those who never show up to class). Grade inflation is not, however, something that came about out of concern for the student, but rather because faculty are increasingly being evaluated for hiring, promotion, and tenure in part on the basis of student evaluations. When that is the case, the easiest and surest way of getting better evaluations -- and avoid any complaints that may make it up to the level of the department chair or beyone -- is to give better grades. In a very real sense, therefore, grades reflect more of what's best for the faculty member than they do what's best for the student.
2. sophieg - September 14, 2009 at 08:39 am
How do you leap from empirical evidence of gender imbalance in academic achievement to the assumption that teachers are rewarding submissive behavior? Was anyone else puzzled by this, or is it just me?
3. mbelvadi - September 14, 2009 at 09:18 am
I have often been bothered by the gap between 60/D and 0/F, but I never had the courage to question it. Thank you for putting the issue out there in public.
Rather than abolish the zero, how about adjusting the entire scale to be proportional but use the entire range? Also we need to distinguish a "turned something in but it was a complete failure" F from a "failed to turn in at all" F. So the scale should have 6, not 5 levels. Something like this? Failure to turn in = 0, Turned in but failed = 20, then the rest would be D = 21-39, C = 40 - 59, B = 60 - 79, A = 80-100. Note for those freaking out at the idea of an 80 getting an A that the way work is evaluated would have to shift too, so that work you're giving a 90 to today should get an 80 under this.
And frankly, why do we bother with letter grades at all any more? Why not just give the numeric score and be done with it?
4. andrewpegoda - September 14, 2009 at 09:23 am
We need to recognize that today's students really are lacking educationally and in terms of their maturity. I frequently give students detailed feedback, only to find they did not read my comments or follow them on future projects. As far as grades go, in the end it works out. In my experience, students really do not care if they get a B+ or a B-, etc. The problem goes well beyond what this article presents.
5. willardhall - September 14, 2009 at 09:25 am
No, Professor Reeves, a "missed" assignment is not "abysmal," it is literally nothing -- so a zero grade is perfectly appropriate and defensible. If, however, a student submitted an assignment that was worse than "wretched" then it would earn an F and be awarded a 50%.
Handing in nothing, however, merits a grade of nothing.
6. obulib1 - September 14, 2009 at 09:37 am
Most of this article appears to be pure drivel. An important goal of most traditional undergraduate programs is to change shiftless party animals into responsible adults. A very effective way to accomplish this is for each student to work for a variety of bosses (professors) on those bosses' own terms. The author's expectation that academic practices should be expected to mirror athletic games is specious, at best.
If I had students who tended to finish strongly after beginning weakly, such as in the example the author mentions when discussing those with different backgrounds in a particular course, I think that I, as the professor, MIGHT WEIGHT DIFFERENT TESTS DIFFERENTLY. We do this all the time. I really doubt that most professors weigh every outcome in their course evenly (what the author calls an arithmetic mean).
This seems like yet another attempt to standardize everything that American professors do, robbing us of our uniqueness and giving stakeholders fewer choices in an increasingly plain vanilla world. Isn't it enough that we have absurd assessment, accreditation, and advising practices thrust upon us by people who have nothing of value themselves to offer up without this latest entry?
The sole valid point that the author seems to be making is about the discrepancy between grades and performance on standardized tests. I scarcely think that recommendations in the rest of article, however, will help remedy that situation.
7. bkoch - September 14, 2009 at 09:40 am
I strongly agree with willardhall. No work submitted, no credits to gain. It is, by the way, not the professor who punishes a student unfairly by this 60% difference. It's the student punishing him or herself for not turning things in. A rather different question is, and that's about fairness, whether the grading method for a particular course is obvious to the student.
8. cleverclogs - September 14, 2009 at 09:41 am
I'm no mathematician, but I understand the argument against the 100 point scale. And yet, the point of giving zero points for a missing assignment is to strongly discourage the student from blowing off assignments, presumably because the assignments, even when done badly enough to earn a D or F, teach something that the professor wants the student to get out of the class. On a smaller 50 point scale, the grades above would average a D, I believe, but that student blew off three full assignments and did mediocre work on most of the other assignments. That student *should* fail the class.
I've looked at hundreds of grading policies from across the disciplines, and I have come to believe that grading policies operate like goalies, kicking the students who would rather be doing something else (working so they can pay for school, drinking, playing football, whatever) back into the classroom so they can actually learn something. Grades are just a tool to keep students, who are often doing complex cost-benefit analyses for every assignment, coming to class and hopefully learning something.
I guess I'm saying it's more than a numbers game representing student work. It's a learning tool.
9. drcharlie - September 14, 2009 at 10:17 am
You can't give constructive feedback on a zero; the coach can't encourage the student-athlete who's a no-show. Of course many of us "weight" assignments, so a zero on a ten-point assignment isn't as painful as a zero on a hundred-point assignment. But how do you give a 30 or 40 percent grade on something that was never turned in? Does the employer give credit to the worker who doesn't produce widgets? No. It's a silly argument. The zero is appropriate.
10. 11117703 - September 14, 2009 at 10:25 am
It's been awhile (like 27 years), but as I recall when I taught in universities I used a 4-point scale throughout, with pluses and minuses, and weighting certain elements (e.g., final exam and final paper) more heavily than others. A = 4.0, A - = 3.7, B+ = 3.3, etc. Failure to turn an assignment in would be a 0, and turning in a truly rotten effort would be a 0.5. This system differentiates between poor work and no work (as it should) without being subject to the issues raised in the original post. However, the other thing I remember is giving students an Incomplete when not all work had been handed in. This grade triggered a process by which students had to finish the work during the next semester or their grade converted to an F for the course.
If I were doing this work now, I would set it all up in a spreadsheet with appropriate formulas and get rid of having to calculate endless numbers of grades by hand!
11. heathercm - September 14, 2009 at 10:25 am
Reeves' bizarre conclusions about the performance of female students (and professors' attitudes toward them) are ethically and professionally unsound. The phrase "bless her heart" belittles the accomplishments of female students.
12. dgcamp - September 14, 2009 at 10:29 am
Zero work = zero pay. The same principle holds true with assignments.
The pressure to inflate grades and bend over backwards to placate students largely comes from the administration. Administrators today are fixated one one thing... FTE (the number of students). All administrators talk about is retention and graduation, and finances. FTE and finances are tied together in the funding formulas. More students = more money for the department. Thus, we are pressured to pass, retain and graduate students (even if they are less than deserving). If an instructor fails too many students, they are released (fired) or their program/position is eliminated (and they are released). Call it what you like. If one hopes to remain employed, it behooves them to play the game and pass, retain, and graduate as many as possible. Hell... having high pass rates and retention rates often makes one a star in the eyes of the administration. But there is a price to pay for this focus on quantity. The quality of the student is negatively affected. Despite what some people say, you cannot have quantity and quality in academia. Those two form an inverse relationship. At this moment in time, quantity reigns supreme because it is tied to the funding formulas and $$$. When programs and colleges start to get funding based on the quality of their graduates (as measured by an exit exam), standards will rise, grading will return to normal (Remember when a C = Average), and student complaints about difficult instructors will cease to find a sympathetic ear from the administration.
13. frankschmidt - September 14, 2009 at 10:41 am
Nonsense, with statistics. This is possibly the worst article I have ever read in the Chronicle.
There is nothing particularly new here. Dudley Herschbach developed a different grading system at Harvard a couple decades ago. Students who got, say, a 70 on the first exam and a 95 on that part of the final dealing with the same material would get makeup points equal to 95% of 30 added in.
I tried it in my class, but found that it introduced a higher level of chance variation (one good test could give a good grade, as long as it was the final) that I didn't accept.
Two points disagreeing with the premises of the article: (1) Excellence requires consistency. Albert Pujols is a great hitter because he does the right thing every time he is at bat. Other people hit home runs, but not as consistently. (2) Woody Allen: "90% of life is just showing up." Not turning in an assignment deserves a zero.
14. unusedusername - September 14, 2009 at 10:57 am
"Nonsense, with statistics. This is possibly the worst article I have ever read in the Chronicle."
I couldn't agree more. For one thing the author confuses the tail end of a Guassian with the average. If women make National Merit Scholar eight times as often as men, that does not make women eight times smarter. In fact, the average grades of women are only somewhat higher than those of men. It's just that even with small differences in the mean, there will be large differences in the populations of the tails of the curve, which is what the National Merit Scholarships are measuring. I can't believe this guy taught a statistics course.
Oh, yeah, the mean IS a better measure than the mode or median. That is why people use it more. People who avoid using averages are often hiding something. As the saying goes, it is possible to lie with statistics, but it is a lot easier to lie without them.
15. exilium - September 14, 2009 at 11:26 am
I agree that this is one of the worst arguments I've read in The Chronicle, for the reasons cited. As a football fan, I'd also like to point out that referees do not "grade" players when they make rulings on the field. Nor does one expect more points for a particularly spectacular touchdown catch, fewer points for an easy or poorly defended one. The comparison between referees and college instructors does not make sense at all.
16. suesmith - September 14, 2009 at 11:50 am
Woody Allen's comment that 80% of success is showing up seems an accurate reflection of my experiences in the "real world." If there is any truth to this, then perhaps the difference between a D and a missing assignment should be even larger than 60%?
This is born out in one of the author's own examples. As a music major and member of a university orchestra in a past life, I know that there are salient differences between grading practices in a typical classroom and a university orchestra. First of all, the orchestra auditions students at the beginning of the term, so only the top performing students (no pun intended)are even admitted to the course. Secondly, grades are awarded in those classes largely on attendance. Missing assignments are penalized heavily, and for good cause. Barring extraordinary circumstances, missing a single performance yields a failure in the class, and missing even a single rehearsal can also yield a poor, if not failing grade.
17. elylibrary - September 14, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Soft-headed soft-hearted nonsense that a missed assignment should receive nore than a zero. For what effort?
18. intered - September 14, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Bravo to Doug Reeves!
As a measurement scientist who studied the performance evaluation skills of the professoriate for 20 years, I can only say that Mr. Reeves is being kind, and rather narrow, in his constructive criticism.
While it takes time and dedication, many conscientious instructors develop high levels of skill in teaching and evaluating student performance. Sadly, about 20% remain unskilled in one or both key elements of their profession. Some get worse as their arrogance and indifference converge.
Mr. Reeves addressed one of five major ways that some instructors lack rationality in their evaluations of student performance. I'll limit my comments to a second topic --test validity-- where the situation is perhaps most abysmal. Based on our research, it would appear that more than half of the instructors earning a living at U.S. colleges and universities are evaluating student performance with instruments displaying validity characteristics that would not pass an introductory course in measurement science. (Wouldn't this make quite a student lawsuit!)
These threats to validity refer to more than elegance in metrics and statistics. What it means is that serious errors in evaluation are being made. One example: in our sample of multiple choice test data, approximately 20% of the test items constructed (or borrowed) by more than 2,500 instructors displayed negative discrimination indices. This means that students who know the subject well and tend to score highly, tend to offer the wrong answer to these questions. Conversely, students who lack mastery of the subject, tend to answer the question correctly.
This is not the forum in which to outline the volumes of data detailing the evaluation incompetence of half of the professoriate. Yet, while I suppose it is no more than a coincidence, I note that roughly the same proportion of those commenting here display the same sub-standard understanding.
Robert W. Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
19. aedonaldson - September 14, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I notice an important difference between the realms of the orchestra, the football stadium, and the classroom; the individuals on the football team and the members of the orchestra desperately want to be there, and want to do well. Of the students in my Roman Britain history class, only a small handful seem to 'want' to be there, and not desperately. The students who want to learn, who want to be in that class, will do well; they've already got most of what they need for success. But most of them are unenthusiastic at best, and so school will always be a struggle for them. They need effort, and the will to make it.
20. jameswilliams - September 14, 2009 at 01:17 pm
It seems to me that grade inflation is a far more serious problem than the 60% difference between a D and an F/MA. At my university, some faculty state in their syllabi that students are guaranteed an A- if they just come to class. There is no assessment of work in these classes. Needless to say, among students these are the school's most popular professors. They are very popular among administrators as well. One such professor, up for tenure without any significant publications and less than a handful of published autobiographical essays in unknown journals, was granted promotion and tenure over the protests of his department entirely on the basis of having won a "favorite teacher of the year" award the previous year. Go figure.
21. cbwright - September 14, 2009 at 01:37 pm
Huh? I think the author is off-base on a lot of issues. Perhaps some people average grades. My class is out of 1000 points. A simple sum of all the student's grades. A missed assignment is a zero, plain & simple.
Here is a business analogy. If you don't show up for work and you don't call in, you are fired. Likewise, if you don't hand in an assignment, it SHOULD count against you. We need to stop babying students and ask them to do the work; their bosses will do the same.
22. d_f_b - September 14, 2009 at 01:43 pm
First, I'm with obulib1 in questioning the claim that instructors generally use unweighted averages. In fact, if Douglas B. Reeves conducted the "experiment" in paragraphs 3 and 4 with me (and most faculty I know), the answer would be "None of the above", precisely because he hadn't said how much each assignment was worth.
Second, Reeves keeps saying P and Q and so on shouldn't be done, but I notice that there were no positive recommendations. If you're going to say (falsely, but let's leave that aside here) that nearly everybody's doing specific things wrong, but then you give ideas for how to fix those problems, then you're being useful. Reeves isn't being helpful here, though, he's just ranting.
23. jkdenny - September 14, 2009 at 02:28 pm
k
24. 22203047 - September 14, 2009 at 02:35 pm
A student turns in only 70% of the required coursework, and there is even one professor who does not assign a failing grade for the course? Any student in my classes who does not turn in all required work automatically receives a failing grade for the semester. What on earth are we doing if we require anything less? Otherwise you might as well say that 30% of the work is not required, it's just "extra credit." This article is a travesty.
25. kmellendorf - September 14, 2009 at 02:52 pm
Before opposing the 60%D factor, please consider what an F is. An F indicates unacceptable work. A D indicates low level, but not unacceptable. An individual assignment can receive anything from 0% to 59% and be called an F. This does not mean that it will count as zero toward the final grade. If it earns 30%, then it will count as 30, not zero. Any course with a clearly defined grading rubric for individual assignments can make such a claim.
26. skelen - September 14, 2009 at 03:12 pm
It is true that every grade calculation system has its own biases in terms of what counts (and for how much), but if students KNOW the system, they can respond appropriately. The professor who drops the lowest quiz grade MAY be encouraging students not to despair if they have an off day, or they may be tacitly encouraging absenteeism.
If the goal is to give feedback and support for improvement, faculty members can do that, regardless of the point scale, by weighting later work or synthetic assignments more, by scheduling in ungraded drafts or concept quizzes, or by allowing revision.
The narrow concern about F=0, D=60 is solved by using a 12 point scale in calculation (F =0; A+ = 12), which weights every step between grades equally (unlike the 100-point scale cited) and which allows for a difference between the rare A+ and the A (unlike a 4.0 scale).
27. myemotan - September 14, 2009 at 04:05 pm
Then We Should Throw Dice to Decide Grades!!!!!??????
The faculty's trump card in Reeves' Procrustean-like system fades because of stains from the giant's apples and oranges. (Dr. Okhamafe)
28. occidentalir - September 14, 2009 at 04:33 pm
"Next ask your colleagues to calculate the final grade for a student whose 10 assignments during the semester had received the following marks: C, C, MA (missing assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A. Then calculate the distribution of the final grades."
This is one of the dumbest thought experiments that I have ever seen. As others have mentioned, without knowing what the assignments were, the question is impossible to answer. No way to assign weights (either quantitative ones or subjective ones). Were these equally important assignments that were given throughout the course? Was the last grade the final exam -- and was the final exam comprehensive?
One might as well ask what grade would you give to the student who received these grades: B, purple, Ford, Rainier, Biden. A totally nonsensical question, impossible to answer meaningfully.
29. ksledge - September 14, 2009 at 05:19 pm
I have to agree with the previous commenters. I was excited to read this article because I do think that professors don't think about their grades carefully and most could use a critical look on their policies. I even liked the topics "accuracy, fairness, and effectiveness." I wanted to like this article and I went into it with a positive attitude. But the article itself was a total disappointment. To the "eliminate zero" idea -- it really depends on the course whether that makes any sense. One could adopt a GPA-like point system, as suggested by someone above (0 = F, 1 = D, 2 = C, 3 = B, 4 = A). Then the 0-59 range is not so damaging. But I'll have to reiterate what others said -- F means unacceptable / lack of mastery of the course. If you don't hand in something, you can't get points for it. If you try and you answer an assignemnt 40% correct, that's better than nothing, even though it's still an F. The "better than nothing" aspect of it will be averaged into your score. You can decide that a "D" grade starts lower than 60 if you want. But many of us adopt 60 as the minimum for a reason. If a student hands something in a day late, you can also choose to give them partial credit for it (I do). Or, you can let students drop one assignment (I do that, too, so that they don't have to drop the class in order to attend a wedding, job interview, etc). But we do not need to eliminate the zero.
As for the bit about women and minorities -- I see what the author is trying to do here, but he REALLY needs some evidence. It's pure conjecture. First it appears he has equated women and minorities, even though the phenomena accounting for their academic performance are extremely different. Second, neither phenomena really has to do with "fairness" -- a heading I thought would end up with very different content beneath it. The gender and racial performance differences in college are a problem, but the author has seriously failed to identify why, seemingly due to laziness on his part. Maybe it's because this issue has very little to do with how they are graded.
I felt the same way when I got to the part about video games. Way to simplify Gen Y! I do NOT think that the "win or die" analysis is an accurate characterization of how these students are used to receiving feedback. Most of their feedback comes from school, not video games. Look to how they are receiving feedback in the classroom for your answers.
In sum, I think this piece missed a great opportunity to talk about an important topic. It hit all of the wrong or least important aspects of this issue and didn't touch upon issues such as grade inflation, which others have mentioned. Even the end could have been framed in terms of intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards, which would have been a useful discussion.
30. johnfarley - September 14, 2009 at 09:59 pm
The worst article I ever read in the Chronicle would be a tie among most of the comments posted here. I thought the article was one of the better ones I have read, though I don't agree with every single point it makes. Still, I managed to teach at the college level for 30 years without ever using the 100 point system, mostly because it made no sense to me, for the reasons the author and some critics point out. How? A slight variation of what "11117703" used to calculate grades. BTW - "11117703" was the rare exception to the general rule noted above about comments on this article. Most of the comments, though, strike me as the kind of harsh, anti-student crap I heard from many colleagues who were more interested in griping about how lazy their students were than actually helping them to learn something.
31. the_jayhawk - September 14, 2009 at 11:16 pm
There is a fundamental flaw in Mr. Reeve's discussion. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues have used the system he describes for years. Mr. Reeves assumes that most of us convert letter grades into numbers. There are a few who used the grading standards I encountered in elementary school. And it works exactly opposite the scheme used here. In that scheme, NUMBERS are converted to letters.
The letter grade F is reserved for work that falls below the minimum standards for passing a course. Let's presume F is reserved for anything lower than 60. But not all F's are equal. A student who turns in the work but gets a 59 is in far better shape than the student who fails to turn in work and receives a grade of 0 = F.
Incidentally, the hypothetical student used in the example EARNS an F in my courses. I converted the letter grades to the mid-point of my grade distributions and awarded no credit (0) for each missed assignment.
32. mdanieltex - September 15, 2009 at 11:26 am
If I have a job at $10 per hour and show up for 30 minutes, I get 50% of my pay. If I don't show up at all, I get nothing.
33. teschmba - September 15, 2009 at 04:36 pm
A missed assignment is less than a zero - it means that a course requirement was not fulfilled and thus the student fails the course, regardless of the grades for the other submitted work. Why should some students be judged on fewer criteria or data points than other students?
34. kaune - September 16, 2009 at 10:13 pm
I have to go with intered and johnfarley on this one. I might argue a few points in the article but most of us can't argue the fact that we (very few of us anyway) were taught how to teach in graduate school, and fewer still were taught anything about the psychometrics of learning. Few of us have studied any science and theory of learning. Yet we put some questions together, call it a test, and give a student an 83. If he asks what that 83 means, we will have a hard time defending it. Frankly, we can't tell ourselves what it means as the test typically was not constructed around any a priori learning outcomes. In the end, our classes and our grading practices are not designed to maximize learning in the classroom but to create a distribution of scores that reflect student performance relative to each other on a set of "tests" whose validity we take entirely for granted.
35. strider - September 17, 2009 at 12:37 am
A thought-provoking piece, but a very scattershot one. Since my own grading starts with numbers and is only converted at the very end, much of the argument was irrelevant. The thesis about women and minorities? Possibly correct, but apparently impressionistic (and amazingly wrong-headed in interpreting the prevalence of women as proof that they were eight times smarter, *ceteris paribus*).
As for the point about the equal weighting of (similar) work throughout a semester, it's well taken, but it's just an argument. And it really best applies to courses where the learning is cumulative, instead of being modular. In any event, underweighting the initial assignments would disadvantage the ones coming into the course with some background or exposure to the material or the methods. Calling that an unfair advantage makes assumptions. What if these students have an additional advantage because they invested time in taking a preparatory course that others didn't? I don't want to go all moral here, but underweighting early measurements might end up rewarding sloth and improvisation instead of rewarding learning---and this isn't entirely a moral point because the learning in question is not just supposed to be the learning of a subject matter, but the learning of learning, in which case rewarding well-prepared students is actually fair. At best, even this point is not about accuracy in marking, it's about policy.
36. 12045467 - September 22, 2009 at 06:14 pm
Re the great "zero" controversy and the pernicious decile effect:
Our institutions compute grades on a 4-point (+) scale; why don't we?
There are perfectly good formulas for doing this. All college catalogues publish decimal fraction equivalents for letter grades (B+ = 3.3, B = 3, B- = 2.7, etc). Use these values (suitably weighted for the assignment) to compute grades.
Or (my own preference), multiply the grade points by 3, making the values easily memorable integers, and then convert back to letters, with appropriate rounding.
Unsurprisingly, the F equates comfortably with 0. No abysmal false bottoms, ninth cicle of hell, no theology or moralizing, just straight grades easily translated into the tender of institutional life. Why not?
37. unusedusername2 - September 26, 2009 at 07:11 pm
This entire article is specious for the reasons already stated. Why does the author think that professors give no thought to their grading policies? Most everyone I know gives a lot of thought to grading and use grading as part of their overall package of tools to get students engaged and learning. It's worth stating again that if students aren't there, don't do the work, don't hand in the assignments, then they didn't just fail the course, they didn't even take it! I can't believe anyone would even argue otherwise! Whether that is acceptable in the overall scheme of things (the dropped quiz grade, for example) depends upon the details of the class structure. A more thoughtful article on grading would be worthwhile. This one was not worthy of the Chronicle.
38. jazjef - December 28, 2009 at 12:37 am
"Low ability predicts poor performance in most jobs, but high ability is less related to performance. Low ability means the person simply does not have what it takes to handle the intricacies of the job. However, after a minimum level of ability has been reached, everyone can perform the tasks. Whether or not a person performs well is then a function of motivation." (Gorsuch, 1983, p.17-18; Factor Analysis (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.)
This is a great article---a lot of food for thougth here. The above passage points out that student intelligence is not always that which is being measured in a course. Students in our college classes have in fact attained the 'minimum level of ability' ..... they are called the ACT and SAT tests. In my opinion the question is one of female vs. male 'motivational' factors. In addition, although it makes sense that a 0% on an assignment is an 'unfair' six-fold penalty as compared to a D of 60%, one can clearly find a good parallel example within the justice system: a first time offender might use a car to run over a mailbox resulting in a 2 year sentence for destruction of government property; this same criminal could have intentionally run over another human being rather than a mailbox' and killed them---thus receiving a 20-year sentence. The crimes are nearly identical save for one element, and yet running over a person yields a penalty 20 times that of a mailbox. The point here is that a linear 1 to 1 relationship does not exist in the justice system example----and it does not exist in the relationship between performance and grade----its curvilinear. A little effort (hand in a poor assignment---60%) goes a long way when compared to no effort at all (MA---hand in no assignment).
39. therealsparky09 - December 28, 2009 at 03:27 am
I was excited to read this article, and aside from its relatively arguable point on elimination of a zero grading policy it met my expectations.
I had a professor who completely destroyed my GPA (and, cocurrently, my on campus job eligibility) due to his subjective grading scale. On one test, 34 points of a possible 80 was a B. On another, 44 points was a D. The class grading system made no sense, and no such sensible one (or one at all) had been implemented in the class OR established at the beginning of the year in the syllabus (as my classmates and I failed to catch early on). When questioned on his method, he replied that he gives his students the grade he thinks they deserve. With all due respect to this tenured professional, he could not tell my first name from the student sitting behind me (Even though I showed up to all but two classes, he rarely elicited student response and engagement).
In short, my negative experience with a lackluster grading scale has me fired up to support a more standard (or at least consistent) grading type scale. My advice to students reading this article: secure your grade scale early and make sure you understand it, otherwise you too may fall prey to a lame or non-existent grade scale.
40. rickinchina09 - December 28, 2009 at 05:39 am
Perhaps a cross-cultural perspective can shed some light on this issue. I am an American teaching in a liberal arts program of a Hong Kong university. Our grading system demands that we limit the number of As and Bs students can receive. Note that I didn't say earn because in fact many of those with Bs should have earned As. Only 10% of my students are allowed to receive As. Note that I said that one-tenth are awarded this mark, as in they are authorized to receive it. Our department discourages us from informing students of their grades until the bitter end of the term so that we may apportion grades as we see fit. Students accept this situation because they have no choice. And to make matters worse, we are told to engage in "continuous assessment" even though we must weight the final exam 60%. So not only is the administrative (these decisions are made above department level) reasoning counterintuitive, it is grossly unethical in my view. But we should not be surprised by such distortions of what is deemed meritorious. Formal assessment, dictates everything in the taught curriculum and not the other way around. Were we to rely on performance assessment measures, which is particularly compatible with the literature courses I teach, it would necessiate a different outlook and path to marking student work.
And therein is the rub, for no one questions for a moment the need to have final exams (and these, mind you, are mostly confined to objective questions) or to evaluate students according to an artificial and arbitrary evaluative construct. It is humorous, in a pathetic sort of way, if one pauses to consider it. Worst of all, it sends the cynical message to students that learning is more a game than an enriching experience. Truly, it is a sickening situation. The late Stephen Jay Gould got it right in his seminal work, "The Mismeasure of Man." Let us hope in our earnest efforts to reign in what we perceive to be excessive generosity in grading our students that we do not veer in the direction of meritocracy. But God help us if we do.
41. historymistress1 - December 28, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Frankly, you can do all the stats you want, but at the end of the day, grading is arbitrary to some degree; it always has been and always will be. How can you possibly use stats to determine such things as attitude or noticable improvement? Are all A's created equally?
42. 11264553 - December 28, 2009 at 05:51 pm
Just a quick question: What, exactly, is the difference betweeen a writing assignment (in any class) that gets an 87, vs. an 86?
43. shark73 - December 29, 2009 at 02:18 pm
I have adjusted my grading methodology to encourage the behavior that I wanted. If they aren't taking the lab seriously then increase its worth and add a test for that. If I want more participation then add that to the grading. But, you also have to engage the students more to get more participation. You have to attack the problem from multiple angles.
44. stretch - January 02, 2010 at 02:18 pm
As I sat grading papers in the faculty workroom at the end of the fall semester, a senior tenured faculty member entered to check his mailbox. He noted what I was doing and casually stated that he was having a difficult time deciding whether or not to fail one of his students. "He rarely attended class, and did very little of the assigned work." My response: "Why is it difficult to fail a student who didn't meet the bare minimum requirements of your syllabus?" His answer: "I've never failed a student."
I think I've finally figured out how to score a tenure-track position . . .