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March 03, 2008, 11:26 AM ET
Grades, Majors, and Ideology
The Chronicle has a write-up of the study of campus bias, and Robin Wilson emphasizes the conclusion that liberal students share values and interests that send them into graduate school, while conservative students do not. That helps explain the heavy ideological imbalance among professors. Conservative students just don’t care for the pipeline process.
Another aspect of the report discloses some interesting numbers comparing choice of major, GPA, and ideology. (You can see the report by going here, then clicking in the right column on “Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates—Woessner.”) A striking finding that bears upon discrimination in the classroom is the relative grades students earn. Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner examine thousands of student responses and conclude: “Variations in reported grades do not vary as a function of conservatism, but rather as a function of moderation.” The data show that the more moderate a student is, the lower the GPA. Strong opinions, apparently, make for better work.
When they compared the GPA of “merely liberal or conservative” students, they came up with “effectively identical” numbers. But, students on the far left beat out students on the far right by two-tenths of a point—not an insignificant difference.
That bit of info supports some of the claims in the campus bias debate that conservatives are, simply, dumber than liberals. Or, at least, more inflexible and narrow-minded.
There may be another explanation, though. When they examined choice of major, the researchers found that “only 9 percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals major in professional fields, as compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of the far right.” In fact, when they counted far-right students in humanities majors, they came up with only 28 students out of the nearly 3,000 total. This, in itself, is an important and distressing situation whose causes are worth further inquiry. For now, though, it raises questions about grading standards in humanities fields and in professional fields. Do the professional fields produce lower GPA’s overall, on average? Is it easier to get a B+ in an English course than in an undergrad business-school course? If so, do far-left students avoid professional courses because they’re too hard, too competitive?
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