A great article on grade inflation

[Balog]

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/08/grade_inflation.html

Some of the statistics (especially on the sudden rise of narcissism) are surprising but really shouldn't be.

[Physics]

As someone who does a fair bit of teaching in my day to day life (I'm a TA and teach general physics labs), if I didn't inflate my grades, everyone would fail, with the exception of a few actual motivated students.  I'm starting my third year of teaching in September.  For the past 2 years, I have been strongly emphasizing 2 main ideas in my labs.  I hammer these ideas home for a full year on these students.  These 2 things are: units and graphing.  I spend a year trying to teach students how to put units next to their answers and how to get some information from a linear line.  And they don't get it.  y=mx+b.  So simple, yet beyond the reach of 75% of my students.  At least they start putting units next to their numbers when I start taking points off every time they forget. 

This last round of summer labs, I told my students what the first question on the final would be ahead of time, multiple times.  90% of them got it wrong.  I would absolutely love to give them the grade I feel they deserve (failing of course, you took a year of physics and don't get ohm's law?), but I would be in some deep poop if I failed all my students. 

I've had students cheat on a lab final that would take an average APS member 5 minutes to ace, and they still failed.

[AmbulanceDriver]

Heck, I remember my gen physics courses there where you teach.....   And yeah.  The labs were a joke for the most part, basically trying to get people to learn how to do a lab journal with a little physics thrown in.  I was bored out of my skull, had most of the lab done before I even showed up, just needing the actual data from the experiment to fill in the blanks, as it were.  People hated that I was done with the lab usually within 10 minutes after I got there....  And had the TA's permission to leave as soon as I had the data I needed.

He threw me a curve once though.  He "sabotaged" my experiment to see if I would pick up on it.  Don't remember the exact experiment we were doing, but I picked up on it during the set up of the experiment that something wasn't right.  Finished the set up, ran the experiment, and saw data that was WAAAAY out in left field.  Started tearing through it, found what he'd switched ( I think it was an LC circuit lab, and the capacitor was entirely the wrong value)...  Walked up to his desk and dropped the cap on his desk....  He looked up at me, smiled, pulled the *correct* cap out of his drawer and handed it to me.....

[Zardozimo Oprah Bannedalas]

I suspect that most college students, once they graduate, will live out their lives never needing to know more than 5-10% of the total information relayed to them in dozens of courses. The rest, for their purposes, is drivel. Once that sinks in, it's bound to affect motivation.

I remember sitting in a darkened theater, watching some weird modern dance performance. I don't know about all MD, but what I saw was slow and terribly boring. It didn't help that it was required viewing for a course on 'Fine Arts.' The only interest was when the mother of one dancer randomly screamed out "YEAH! THAT'S MY BABY!" like she was at a football game with a thousand other screaming fans. It happened three or four times. It was jarring, but at least it was a point of interest.

[Physics]

You know, that actually hits another nerve for me.  A well rounded education.  As part of my bachelors degree, I had to spend time taking classes like "environmental economics", or "becoming an effective change agent", or "meditation for global healing" (The first 2 I actually took, the other is offered).  WHY?!?  In my opinion, these classes hurt a scientist, because they could be spending valuable time in a lab as an undergrad, learning what research is about.  If a kid wants to be a scientist, don't push these touchy-feely-hippy classes on them, give them a strong science background.  Put them in a lab so they can get experience.  Hell kids should be looking at getting lab experience in high school.  I've had high school kids come into my lab who are better than some undergrads. 

Now some of those classes were actually good for my field (public speaking, technical writing, etc...), but most were a waste of my time.  I did not come to school to learn how to freaking meditate, I came to do some physics.  Of course, then the physics department would have to get their heads out of their butts and actually offer some classes, but that's a whole other complaint. 

This is all coming from people who seem to think that a scientist should be volunteering at the local soup kitchen.  Hello!  The scientist can benefit you as a society a lot better if he's in a lab!  It's all a waste of time and money....

[Zardozimo Oprah Bannedalas]

You could cut out a year easy by wiping out most of the 'core curriculum'. I figure one reason students were smarter back in the day is because they spent more time actually doing stuff that was part of their stated degree, instead of being well-rounded. I didn't come out of college well-rounded in a real sense. I came out as a well-dressed barbarian with male-pattern baldness.
I felt that my B.S. was big on breadth and short on depth. Perhaps that's why they call it a BS. It bothered me how few courses there were regarding electricity in a program called electrical engineering.

[CNYCacher]

I had the best physics prof in college.  He and the chemistry professor were in competition to make lectures entertaining.  He once demonstrated pendulum motion and conservation of energy by hanging a bowling ball on a cable from the 25-foot ceiling.  He then pulled it back about 10 feet from plumb, held it right up to his face and let it go.  He stood there motionless as it swung 20 feet across the front of the lecture hall, and all the way back to just barely stop before smashing him in the nose.  He probably could have puckered up and kissed the thing it came so close.  This was of course met with a chorus of gasps, breath sucked in between teeth and whimpering from many of the students.  One person shouted "How do you not flinch?" to which he replied "Oh, I had my eyes closed the whole time."  

[MicroBalrog]

The idiocy in that article regarding everything having to do with history, history essays, and writing, is mind-blowing.

[MechAg94]

You could cut out a year easy by wiping out most of the 'core curriculum'. I figure one reason students were smarter back in the day is because they spent more time actually doing stuff that was part of their stated degree, instead of being well-rounded. I didn't come out of college well-rounded in a real sense. I came out as a well-dressed barbarian with male-pattern baldness.
I felt that my B.S. was big on breadth and short on depth. Perhaps that's why they call it a BS. It bothered me how few courses there were regarding electricity in a program called electrical engineering.

I felt the same way about my mechanical engineering degree.  It seemed to me that if you had little practical experience going in, you weren't going to have any going out.  I still feel that a series of courses on practical applications in industry would be a very idea (including visits to actual industrial plants).  The most entertaining teachers from my memory were the ones that did include practical stories and examples in their lectures.

I do think some of the problem is that more of those students should be exposed to those physics principles in high school, but they are instead force fed a bunch of other crap.

Writing skill was also mentioned.  I don't recall much of anything in high school beyond a few rare reports that really taught writing skills or even practiced it much. 

[Physics]

Heh, I know Applied Physics PhD students who can't solder.

[MechAg94]

Heh, I know Applied Physics PhD students who can't solder.

I doubt I had ever soldered anything pre-college.  Never came up.  I had played at welding once or twice.  I probably could have worked on cars and such more than I did.  The most I ever did was play with model rockets and mess with battery operated motors stripped out of broken toys.  One I guy I graduated with got into post-grad at MIT.  He was older and had done all sorts of construction jobs from running wiring to installing windows.  He was a bit ahead on some of the little things.  Experience is a big help in grasping a lot of the basic engineering principles. 

There was one class I took as soon as I got to A&M.  It was an intro to engineering class.  It was held in a big computer lab with (dating myself) a bunch of brand new 386 computers running Windows.  First time I had ever used Windows.  Part of the class taught us basic Excel and Word stuff.  I likely would have been a bit lost with Excel and Word for a while had I not gotten that start with it. 

[CNYCacher]

Heh, I know Applied Physics PhD students who can't solder.

I could almost give that a pass, except shouldn't someone with a great understanding of physics just be able to intuit the proper way to solder?

[Hawkmoon]

And I thought, based on the thread title, that the topic was going to be "No Child Left Behind" and all the massive cheating that's being discovered in various public school systems all across the country as a result. It's a different slant, but I believe it relates to the cited article.

The notion behind NCLB is laudatory: Find a way to ensure that more students learn better. Kewl. The problem, of course, is ... how do we DO that? The classic answer is TEST!

So the system is set up. Each school (or system, if a municipality has multiple schools) has a baseline derived from test results. The goal is for the school/system to improve every year. The fallacy, of course, is that you're dealing with different kids every year, and some years you get a bumper crop of dummies. It's unrealistic to expect scores to continually improve ... every single year.

Aside from that, how long can improvement continue? Schools and systems started out "gaming" the progarm from the git-go ... they set their baseline so low that a classroom full of chimpanzees making random marks on test score sheets would probably result in an improvement over "baseline." But then what? If the student body really IS a bunch of unmotivated dummies (as so many inner city students are), the system can only improve in small increments, and not very far. Yet the program demands that every school continue to show improvement ... every year.

Solution? Cheat, of course. So the faculty has "fix the test" parties to boost the test scores. Marvelous. The principal (or superintendent) wins accolades for being an innovative and effective educator, the parents are overjoyed because the school their kid goes to won an award for being the best school this side of Alpha Centori ... and the parents themselves are too dumb to see that their kid is still as dumb as he/she was last year and the year before.

But wait ... it gets worse. What happens when a school or system cheats its way up to superlative (apparent) results? The NCLB program STILL demands continual improvement. So having cheated their way to the top, they now have to cheat even more to become "better than best."

And that's essentially what happened in Atlanta, GA, and in the system my nephew attended a few years ago (now under investigation for rampant cheating on the NCLB tests), and other schools/systems around the country.

Now who could ever have anticipated that schools might cheat on these things?

[MicroBalrog]

The very simple answer to the failure of the school system is this:

The school system in the western, industrialized, world, is based on two ideas which have then given way to horrific corruption.

The first is: everybody is capable of learning. This is true. I genuinely believe far more people are capable of learning given hard work, improved educational technique and better-organized schools. Bell-curve grading will never tell you this, but we have today a greater percentage of technically 'intelligent' or 'gifted' children (not 'geniuses  with 200 IQ', but children with an intellectual capacity slightly above what used to be the 'norm') than we had before. However, this has been corrupted in two important ways:

One, intelligence is not permanent. A person can become dumber, or smarter, over the course of their lives. I have seen some truly sad cases of the former and some spectacular incidents of the latter. I am sure so have you.

People take everybody is capable of learning given hard work and transform it into let us just make the exams easier. Why is this? Because the educational system is run – in many, not all, cases – by, and for, educators. Which brings me to the second point:

Public education exists to ease the burden of working parents. Far, far too many parents believe that since 'the school will teach the children', they can just shove their children into the school gate, pick them up eight hours later, and the children will 'learn' by some mysterious process.

The thing is, if you treat people like indolent, irresponsible morons, they will become these morons.

So we have people – at the early college level – who do not know how to write an essay. Or what a paragraph is.

Here is a fact: For civilization to continue to exist, these skills need to be taught in the same way you teach basic science skills. So we will end up teaching them in college. We will take away time from teaching about Jeffersonian-era foreign policy, the Shakespearean sonnets, and other things which are important to the creation of a humanities B.A. and we will have to teach college students what a paragraph is.

Of course, the colleges could shove a stick up their rectums and avoid accepting students who do not know what a paragraph is, and kick people out if they don't. But then [a] The colleges would be bankrupt, and We would have a problem in a few years as nobody would know what a paragraph is.

So, since the basic skills are not taught in school they are taught in college, because someone needs to teach them.

[wmenorr67]

When it comes to NCLB I can tell you it is a joke.  I have friends that are teachers or were and they say now all they do is "teach" for testing.  The days of being to actually teach students is over.

Also about grade inflation, there are a couple of studies out there where they go around and ask college who really support wealth redistribution but when asked to give up their 4.0 to benifit a 1.0 student they say no.  And most still don't get it.

[roo_ster]

If the test is on the material and reasonably constructed, "teaching to the test" is fine.

[wmenorr67]

If the test is on the material and reasonably constructed, "teaching to the test" is fine.

The problem is that the tests don't test what kids need to learn.  Granted it deals with math, reading comprehension and some science but ignores most science, history and art.

[Balog]

If the test is on the material and reasonably constructed, "teaching to the test" is fine.

I disagree. School should not be a process of learning disjointed factoids which can be regurgitated on demand to satisfy a test. It should teach how to think logically. I see little evidence that this is the case.

[MicroBalrog]

I disagree. School should not be a process of learning disjointed factoids which can be regurgitated on demand to satisfy a test. It should teach how to think logically. I see little evidence that this is the case.

And you cannot imagine a test that tests that?

[Balog]

And you cannot imagine a test that tests that?

I cannot imagine a test generated by the modern American educational system that tests that, no.

[Scout26]

Well certain things are "little factoids" that children need to be able to regurgitate upon demand. Like basic math skills, basic reading skills, basic writing skills and some basic science skills.

I spent most of the last year teaching my son that Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman did NOT win the Civil War at Gettyburg causing Lincoln to write the Emancipation Proclamation.   

Factoids like dates in history are important because they are the building blocks.  We can't win WWII until we beat the British at Yorktown.  Same with Math, Reading, Writing and Science.  And that's what NCLB is for, the reason the teacher's union is all up in arms about it is that is cuts into "Womyn's Studies" time.

I want my kids to learn the basics.  I'll handle the political indoctrination, thankyouverymuch.   

[RoadKingLarry]

The bottom line is that our public education system is broken, probably beyond repair. It has been broken for a very long time.
I've known "educated" adults that couldn't tell you the time period of the American civil war. Years ago I was working for Memorex-telex and was friendly with the engineering group. During a lunchtime bull session the civil war came up and none of them knew when it was. I through out a BS date of 1899-1904 and they just accepted it and went on.

[Fitz]

The bottom line is that our public education system is broken, probably beyond repair. It has been broken for a very long time.
I've known "educated" adults that couldn't tell you the time period of the American civil war. Years ago I was working for Memorex-telex and was friendly with the engineering group. During a lunchtime bull session the civil war came up and none of them knew when it was. I through out a BS date of 1899-1904 and they just accepted it and went on.

I don't think that particular "fact" is a measure of intelligence, especially in a group of engineers. Engineers and tech people tend to throw out things that don't pertain to them.

For example... my initial thought was "Mid-late 1800s, right?" and I had to hit wikipedia to check. Does that make me dumb?

[RoadKingLarry]

Not a measure of intelligence of course, but a measure of education for sure.

[birdman]

The best schools teach how to learn, not what to learn, and this includes colleges....if I meet two engineers, I can tell you by how they work the quality of the school on this basis...good engineering schools teach how to do things, great school teach how to expand beyond the basics by learning efficiently--the good engineer will solve the problem, the great engineer will solve it, AND determine why the problem exists, and likely come up with an even better solution--it's the ability to break things down to basic principles, an build it back up into a solution that makes a great engineer.  Take the doctoral qualifiers I had to take...the written was closed book (stupid), and relied on knowing things ANY engineer would look up in the real world, as relying on memory is a quick way to make a mistake, while the oral exam was based on the ability to critically think--the results are astonishing...the people I know to be great engineers annihilated the oral exam, and did "okay" on the written, while those who crammed for weeks did great on the written, and very poor on the oral exam--guess which group was more successful when actually doing their thesis, and later in work?  The first, because memorization and rote calculation doesn't help when actually solving a new problem.

I used to give some interesting problems when interviewing engineers that relied on critical thinking--one I stole from the novel "core"--"what is the deepest hole that can be drilled into the earth, how, and why?"

It's the ability to solve a new problem, not an old one, that needs to be taught.