Rates of inflation

So, my institution requires us to submit midterm grades (which I have done, only 30 minutes past the deadline, so I feel pretty proud of myself!). In theory it's a good idea, and I don't know that my midterm grades have been wildly different from my final grades, so I don't suppose it causes any problems. I try to be very frank with my students about what the midterm grades are based on, and that they may not reflect very much of the students' work yet. (For instance, two of my upper-level courses entail a large percentage of the grade coming from a substantial research paper that students write over the course of the semester. Well, I haven't seen ANYTHING from those papers yet.)

I'm writing this not so much to talk about the practice of midterm grades (though if anyone has any comments, throw them out there!), but the issue of grade inflation. I wrestle with this issue almost every time I assign grades, because my grades, well, they're not the lowest out there. I don't think I reward mediocre work - I'm genuinely impressed with the work that my students do. Do I think students create better work for my classes than for others people's courses? No, I would never claim that. But here are some things that I think are going on.

1. I rarely teach history courses that are primarily first-year and second-year students. Because of my non-history teaching commitments (and my grades are probably lower for those courses) and various vagaries of the scheduling process, I often teach upper-level courses in my fields of specialty. If I'm teaching a seminar made up of junior and senior history majors, don't you think they SHOULD do well, by that point in their studies?
       
2. As a corollary to this: my classes are pretty small. My seminar is nearly full at 14, and my women's history course has 9 students (I need to change the title, because it's really boring). If small classes result in better learning (as people have been arguing quite a bit), I do get the chance to connect very individually with my students, and offer them a lot of personal assistance. (And students here take advantage of such assistance.) Granted, this isn't much different from other courses in my department. But in the grand scheme of grade inflation, it's worth considering.
       
3. The Americanists out there may not like this comment, but I think that American history courses tend to accumulate more of the lowest-common-denominator students than European history courses do (or at least, European history courses that aren't about tanks and trenches and guns; maybe I just really mean medieval history courses). This may not be a universal phenomenon, it may be limited to my campus. But (some of) my Americanist colleagues agree with me, that when you have a kid who likes a good story about a great leader, and battles and wars and such, and doesn't want to think very hard, they're going to default to American history. At Rural Utopia, one of the students came up with the AWESOME distinction between "history majors" and "history channel majors." With all due respect to Americanists, and recognition of the many wonderful brilliant American history students out there, I'd submit that the majority of history channel majors will, when possible, default to taking US history. Hence, you have a slightly higher percentage of good students in medieval history courses, resulting in higher grades.
       
4. This is really a variation on #2, but I think women's history students tend to be the best students, collectively, at least in my experience. Studying women's history is entirely self-selected; you don't take it unless you're really interested. (There's also my one male student this semester, who said he was taking the class because he didn't know anything about it; that's way cool.) Most of these students are women's studies minors, and they're taking from two to three OTHER courses on women/gender this semester. They regularly bring up such outside material in my class (including, one memorable day, phallologocentricism). They're doing the liberal arts thing of making connections between their courses, and they're doing it really well. They believe seriously in the importance of the topic. This semester, I have at least three students who plan to go to graduate school to study something related to women's history. How can they NOT get good grades?
         
5. And it's entirely possible that my expectations have been lowered by working at institutions where there was a wider range of students, whose basic skills in reading, writing, and thinking weren't as polished as those of the students here, and that I'm not grading strictly enough.

I suppose in many respects this post is rehearsing the arguments I'd make, should anyone raise any complaints about my grades (it hasn't really been a problem so far, though there has been some note of my grades being higher than average). Still, it's something that I think about everytime I calculate grades.

Comments

[sheepish]

Our 3rd and 4th year classes for majors average a whole letter grade more than our 1st and 2nd year service courses. That makes sense to me. The higher you go, the more filtered your sample becomes. It doesn't make sense to keep removing the lowest part of the Gaussian curve and renormalizing at each level.

[Dr M]

I'm an Americanist and you are absolutely right. I had an EUH section last semester that was one of the best classes I've ever taught. They read and wrote on a very high level and it truly was a pleasure. I could even make a further distinction with EUH students. If they are really, really interested they take EUH 1 (ancient stuff to Middle Ages). The nerdiest of the nerds! If they are going through the motions but still are quite interested, they take EUH 2 (~1500-1945).

[Dr. Moonbeam]

There's something to that. I just input some grades this morning in one class, and there are presently 10 in the A range, 10 Bs, 4 Cs, 0 Ds, and 6 Fs -- one of the last is one of those "disappeared without dropping" kids, and the rest have not turned in at least one assignment. They've turned in two paper-related assignments and had two quizzes so far, as well as attendance etc., so I have a reasonable basis right now. If I end up with this distribution at the end of the semester, I'll be okay with that; there are a number of majors in the class, it is upper-div, and some of them have had me before and know my expectations. So perhaps high-ish grades, but I don't think wholly unjustified.

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

I love the "history channel major" idea! And I'm wrestling with this too... I think the grades I assign have slowly gone up over the last few years, but this isn't necessarily that I'm being a softer grader - it's that I'm paying more attention to what students need to work on. With each semester I get better at tackling their weak spots and leading them through the steps they need to learn the material for each course, and if that works, their grades go up. I guess that's inflation, but perhaps of a good kind?

[squadratomagico]

You're very lucky that you are able to teach small classes with a self-selecting enrollment. That sounds to me like a perfect recipe for getting motivated students who perform at a high level. You're entirely justified in thinking that you might get more "history majors" rather than "history channel majors" in that context.

Sadly, at my institution all majors are required to take a certain number of non-modern history classes. While as a medievalist, I might be expected to applaud this, I actually hate it -- it means that I get a fair proportion of those "history channel" types when I might otherwise have a classroom full of students with an active interest in the material. I cultivate a reputation as a tough grader in part to scare away the ones who come only because of that requirement.

[Scrivener]

I think about grade inflation every time I turn in grades too, but then I look at the statistics and I have the lowest awarded GPA in my department, so then I tell myself to just shut up and give higher grades. The thing is that my engineering student are hyper-motivated by grades and, speaking in general terms, they take the class more seriously and work much harder when they are afraid of getting a low grade. So I'm trying to balance a desire to be perceived as tough and a desire to follow the trends in this insitution. Peraps a bit like squadratomagico, I've earned a reputation as a tough grader, which seems to be having its effect because my classes have gotten better each year.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

SOunds perfectly reasonable to me. Also, your upper-division majors are more likely to have taken classes with you before, and know how you want things done. My UD class last semester had one C, two As, and 6 Bs. The students who would have done less than C work dropped.

[Clio Bluestocking]

I will forever again use "history channel major"! Especially if the subject has anything to do with the Civil War or World War II.

In the places where I have taught what you say about American history is true. The lower-level survey courses were required to graduate, so they attracted everyone. If the section was a large lecture section, with (and I kid you not) up to 500 students, you aren't just getting the lowest-common demoninator, you are getting everyone. The smaller the class, however, the lower the failure rate probably because of the increased attention for the students. The higher the level of the course, the smaller the class, and the lower the failure rate because of both the more attention and the self-selection. Additionally, many failing students just dropped the class.

I've always despised feeling like a certain percentage of my students should be failing. I hated that assumption that, mathematically, I should have as many Fs as As to keep everything statistically correct. I was always horrible at math.

[PhilosopherP]

I think your general theme of a variety of factors influincing grade distribution is very correct. It sees to me that the key combination for you is optional courses and perception of difficulty.

For me, since we have no optional courses nor do we have majors, the difference seems to be the scheduling of the class and thus the numbers of adult students. That is key for a couple of reasons -- First, if the time is inconvenient (early morning or late afternoon) more of the good students stay long enough to get a grade other than W. Also, those inconvenient times tend to attract adult students, who come either before or after work. Adult students, when they complete the course, tend to have higher grades.

[History Geek]

I love the "history-channel major" bit. I think I've run into them before (several in my research class at the moment) and they drive me nuts.

Also I'm rather glad my U doesn't require midterm grades. There's a section for it on the website but I've never had any grades posted there. With midterm grades I think sometimes it creates the pressure to have busy work grades just to come up with some sort of grade.

[Nic McPhee (Unhindered by Talent)]

While we don't require mid-term grades, we do strongly encourage some sort of mid-term feedback, esp. for first year students and students who are struggling. I'm not great at the paperwork part of teaching, and I have an especially mixed relationship with grading, so I'm certainly not inherently thrilled about doing mid-term alerts. When I do them, though, it's almost always a useful exercise, and can make important things clear to me or a student that increases the chances of success down the road. That said, I think they're least useful/important in the kind of small, self-selected upper level courses you describe. When I only have 8 students, and I've known them all for several years, I'd hope that issues would come up fairly quickly and be addressed promptly.

Unfortunately I have a pile of that to do that I'm behind on. Sigh.

There is occassional grumping here about the grade distributions in different disciplines and divisions on our campus, and I think many of your comments apply there. Our Education Division, for example, requires an additional application to get in, and teaches almost exclusively small classes to motivated upper division students. Given that, it seems hardly surprising that their grade distribution looks very different than what we get in large intro chem courses.

I'm teaching freshman comp, and we're actually coming down to the end of the quarter. I have just posted current (in-progress) grades online, and I have to say that I'm alternating between pleased and dismayed at how high they are. I have yet to grade the final paper, which is worth a quarter of the grade and which will undoubtedly bring some of those A and B grades down a bit. But I'm already worried that the final grades will be too high and that the PTBs will take an extra-close look at me and ask me what the heck I think I'm doing.

I made this class pretty challenging, but I also have put quite a few compensating factors into it to tame my very strict way of grading papers. I'm impressed with how most of my students have taken hold and really put their hearts, and a great deal of effort, into their work.

With all of that said, I'm still worried that the average final grade will be too high. But I think I can honestly say that when an instructor challenges students, many of them will shine.

Historically, in the third and last course in the sequence, I have always seen a higher average grade. I naturally assume that this happens because the first two courses act as a filter and because we still have a pretty high freshman dropout rate. Many students probably drop out or are kicked out before they get to the third course. So the people who are left are the best overall students. But here's the catch: I'm not teaching the third class in the sequence; I'm teaching the second class.

Whether my department is aware of this phenomenon (in which the third course yields noticeably higher grades than the first two courses), I cannot say. But this term at least, I'm awfully grateful for a couple of MIA students who will be receiving failing grades. They will bring the curve down a bit. I don't know that this effect justifies the absurd number of B grades that I might be rewarding this term, but it seems to me that I get at least one of these MIAs in every class every term and that the department must be expecting them. So everyone else can get a proportionately higher grade than if we didn't have the no-show students. I've worked out the math on this. Our classes are so small that one no-show has a statistically significant effect on the overall GPA for the entire class. Having two no-shows in one class results in a much more dramatic effect.

I'm still pretty stingy with A grades, so that's something...and I have a bunch of very smart and persistent students, so what am I going to do? Change my way of grading just so that they are getting lower average grades? I don't think so.