A former colleague of mine once told me that when she taught at a for-profit institution, there was a policy where if a professor’s grade distribution fell below a 3.0 average, she could be suspended from teaching for a semester (without pay!). To combat this, many faculty members showed movies in class (it was a brick-and-mortar institution) and did little substantial grading. The students moved along happily and the faculty members just lamented, “What are we supposed to do? We’ve got to earn a living.”
Those of us in more traditional settings shouldn’t feel too haughty about such a story, though. Many of us teach in states that require students to maintain a decent G.P.A. in order to retain their scholarships and grants (especially those derived from lotteries). A professor in Georgia once lamented to me how this played out at his institution; he said that almost every student who is earning less than a “B” tries to wheedle a higher grade with the same refrain, “If I lose my 3.0, I’ll have to drop out of college completely.” I know of one institution, and it’s a highly regarded institution, where a full 98.36% of a recent incoming freshman class had to maintain a 3.0 in order to retain their grants and aid. Such a scenario feeds a common student attitude: “I’ve paid for that class. Give me my B. That’s the arrangement.”
How does this pressure to produce such grades affect you as a professor? How can we combat such an expectation with high standards?
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10 Responses to Nice ‘B’ (wink-wink)
11194291 - September 11, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I once heard first-hand about a dean of a prestigous medical school who said “We have not accepted a student with a C on their transcript in 10 years.” He went on to say: “…and, that is not good.” Let’s use multiple measures by examining other variables beyond just the GPA as we assess students for scholarship, entrance into graduate programs, jobs, etc. The way it is now students shy away from taking any risks– like taking that additional biochemistry course that might result in something less than an A or B.
handley - September 11, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I have worked for a for-profit college since 2003. We expect professors to turn in grades exhibiting normal distribution, with the median at or near “C”. It doesn’t always turn out that way –in a typical term the median grade is a “B-” — but please know that not all for-profit institutions are like the one described above.
bjhosch - September 11, 2009 at 4:42 pm
The data appear to indicate that students at for-profit colleges earn higher grades than students at public institutions. According to 2007-08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (as reported in the Chronicle’s Almanac of Higher Education 2009), students who earned mostly A’s or mostly A’s and B’s comprised the following proportions of the undergraduate population:23.3% Public 4-year33.8% Private nonprofit 4-year28.1% Public 2-year39.6% All private for-profit(http://chronicle.com/article/Undergraduate-Grades-2007-8/48025/)It seems possible that higher grades are awarded at institutions that depend more heavily on tuition dollars for revenue, but that’s speculative.
cordelia - September 11, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I’m giving more Bs simply because I’m tired of having the students who earn lower grades taking it out on my course evaluations. These are taken seriously here and have played a strong role in keeping tenured faculty from being promoted. Gotta keep those paying customers happy!
ksledge - September 11, 2009 at 5:19 pm
“These are taken seriously here and have played a strong role in keeping tenured faculty from being promoted.”And their grades don’t matter? I feel like this attitude is extremely hypocritical.
luigi - September 14, 2009 at 11:10 am
If a school prescribes a mandatory curve, student discontent should diminish considerably. Low grades are not the prof’s fault; it’s just the system.
comosifuera - September 14, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Solution: Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard law schools. Sarah Lawrence, New College of Florida, Hampshire, Bennington, and Reed colleges. Traditional letter grades are outdated.
drmink - September 14, 2009 at 7:57 pm
“C”s to students who are used to grade inflation mean faculty member who gets a bad course evaluation, which means no merit, and possibly no tenure because only “good” teachers get good “evaluations”.I miss the days of “Gentlemen Cs”
am_2009 - September 14, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Low grades make students angry at the professor, and then the prof’s tenure or promotion is at risk because the evals are venomous. One of my colleagues once wisely pointed out that we are paid to do a specific job, the way the university paying our salaries wants it done. We should not think of ourselves as paid to do our best to educate students, according to the best methods we know. The university wants happy students and positive evals and weighs those evals heavily. The university is paying us to provide this. If they wanted to focus on how much students were really learning, they’d set the whole system up differently. So just do what you’re paid to do. This is sad, and takes a lot of the passion and sense of purpose out of it. But there’s a lot of truth in it.
fossil - September 14, 2009 at 9:13 pm
What can I say? In the department where I taught for four decades, the pressure, if any, was to flunk students in the basic courses who needed flunking. In the (curiously named) pre-calc course, the outright flunk (as in “F”) rate often ran as high as 60%. In first year calc, it was about 25-35% (but these were stronger students to begin with). Grade distribution in slightly higher level courses was usually unimodal (with C the modal grade) but with more F’s and D’s than A’s and B’s.There were no unhappy rumblings from the administration that I recall.