Nearly Half of All College Grades Are A's

Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's what happened to me a few years ago:<p>I created a web app at the request of one of the schools &#38; deans at the University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage departmental and eventually school reputation.<p>Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best professor for this class" rankings to naive students.<p>Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for higher ed in the future.

I attended university in the early 90s, and majored in Computer Science. On a lark, I took a class on Native American Literature (just on the name alone, I thought it would have been more Native American lore; it turned out to be contemporary fiction written by Native Americans). The entire grade was based on one mid-term and one final. The mid-term I failed. When it came time for the final, I realized there was no way I could even answer the single question and simply walked out of the class.<p>I fully expected an F for that class, but I ended up with a C, which surprised the hell out of me.<p>I was recently talking with a friend (a former English instructor for a well known university in the United States) about this, and he said I either received a "Gentleman's C" or (more likely) the instructor simply thought he lost my paper and erred on the side of grade inflation.

The NYT article on the same topic has nice graphs that show the change in grade distribution since the 1940's and the shift in the bell curve:<p><a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/" rel="nofollow">http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-...</a><p>And, Walter Russel Mead of The American Interest offers a nice summary: <i>"43 percent of all grades given in American colleges are A's. Social science grades are higher than grades in science and math. Humanities grades are higher still. Grades in private colleges are higher than grades at public universities. Northern schools give A's more freely than southern ones, and prestigious colleges have flabbier standards than their less fashionable rivals."</i>

In Norway, we have the opposite problem: Nearly half of the grades in some subjects at NTNU are Fs, and 40% of all students get an F <i>every year</i>. The institute for IT, maths and electronics implicitly says that "a high failure rate means the standard is high", and they ignore feedback and complaints about professors.<p>Luckily (if I should put it like that), the grades themselves are usually fair. It's just that some subjects require too much work to be considered as one subject, which seems to be the university's intentions.

When I was in college I had a professor offer to not put a grade on any of our work. I took him up on it and it was one of the best classes I ever had. I was so much more focused on the feedback rather than the score. I wish more college classes were like that.

I wish it was at least a little more standardized across schools and majors. A little variance is fine but i went to a school where evreryone,not just me, had to study into the night to maintain barely passing grades in any technical subject while kids at other schools and "easier" majors maintained 3.5+ without cracking open a book.

This is a good trend. The grade is binary (A or not A). It's not possible to evaluate a class of 100 students with 90% of whom you've never spoken.

For the curious, I can tell you this is certainly not a global effect. At the UK university I work at, we mark work out of 20, and only a small proportion of students get above 17 (considered excellent, probably equivalent to A).

I have no data to back this up but anecdotally I once had a professor explain how some, if not most, professors would adjust their grading to get to a specific average for exams and essays.<p>However we use numbers (1 till 10, 10 being best) here and from my understanding they would try to average it around 7.5. Having all your grades an 8 (or higher) translates to graduating cum laude, basically turning cum laude into 'just above average'.<p>I assume this is due to management tactics that involve investigating classes that deviate from grade averages rather than trying to judge based on course quality.

None of this is surprising given only straight-A students get into college, and only straight-A college students get into graduate school. The days of the "gentleman's C" have long past.

not mine...

Now that we have entered the machine thinking age, where tools like IBM's Watson can answer open ended straight forward questions, grades measuring memorization and straight forward question-answering miss the mark.<p>I predict the ability to answer a multiple choice/fill in the blank test will be dominated by the machine once IBM's Watson gets deployed to all the arts and sciences.<p>There needs to be a bigger emphasis on what you can build given the sum of human knowledge instead of "how much you can remember".<p>I'm thinking of a grading system where you measure the number of processes and tasks you can do which are useful to humanity that $10,000 worth computer can't do. High = A, Low = F. "the arts" doesn't count. I'm talking creative thinking, innovation, things like that.

A question..should not an article of on such a serious subject be devoid of errors?<p>Not just grammar, but illogical assumptions, errors in logic, etc? See how many errors you find..I find too many to rely on the article on any basis.