Recently we saw a student receive a 0 on an essay mid semester at OU, and after an investigation the teacher was relieved of her duties. They looked at previous assignments and apparently concluded that they were graded differently even with the same writing style. That’s a problem because the writing style wasn’t one you’d expect from a college student, so to me that screams “the student has been getting better grades than what they deserved all semester.” It’s not new, grade inflation, but it’s definitely becoming more apparent as people start graduating from high school and college with little to no understanding of basic concepts. So how much of a problem is this?
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Yes. We badly need doctors, nurses, accountants, mathematics, biologists, chemists, pharmacists, engineers, construction managers and pilots to meet national security threats abroad and care for a rapidly aging boomer population. Unfortunately, not everyone can do these things. Grades weed out those who just can’t.
The problem is funding tied to grades, and pressure from parents. Administration pushes to make sure kids are passing your class (sometimes at the risk of your job) and parents can't or won't believe that little Suzie is so far behind.
Students lie. Parents become hostile. Even supportive principals feel pressure from outside sources. Don't get me started on standardized treating.
In short, our education system is in shambles. Source: I used to teach high school ela
Well to be fair a lot of those positions have other certifications that aren't inflated.
Nobody is getting through med school without knowing how to be a doctor. They might have gotten a passing grade on a philosophy test 6 years earlier because of grade inflation though.
Add social workers to those lists too. We do a lot for the aging population.
We need to take education at all levels more seriously. I like the idea of trying to convince those with high level skills to go into teaching. But we need parents to take it more seriously and also pay teachers better so we can have the best.
Yes, I do think grade inflation is a serious problem - particularly in high schools and particularly in non-STEM college fields. But that has little to do with the OU situation. In that situation, there was a rubric which likely justified an extremely poor grade, but not a 0, and she was given an actual 0 because of the political leanings of the TA.
Maybe I’m holding OU to the standards of my own alma mater, but if I had turned in an essay written at a fifth grade level as a junior, I’d expect to fail. Rubric or not.
OU’s investigation concluded that this was the student’s usual writing style, and that she’d received higher grades on earlier assignments. That’s textbook grade inflation. This is a junior in college, someone likely entering the workforce in a year or two, submitting work that wouldn’t pass in middle school. If this wasn’t the first time she wrote like this, then the first assignment should’ve been a failing grade. If it wasn’t, that’s on the professor. Because at some point, a student needs to hear: this level of writing won’t fly after college.
And I think that’s why this conversation can so easily become and should become a conversation on grade inflation because we can all unanimously agree that the essay sucked in terms of writing style. It was poorly written for a college student. It was poorly written for a high school student. So the question is, why has she not been failing this class before if the writing style hasn’t changed? And that can easily lead us to grade inflation.
Rubrics do matter in terms of fairness, but I'm inclined to agree with you that it was a laughable rubric.
That's fair, as long as it's applied to every college student uniformly. One need do little more than show up and complete assignments to get a college degree in many non-STEM fields, and thus the diploma has lost / is losing its value.
It would be more helpful to have highly demanding rubrics and grades perhaps centered on a C.
If I handed in that paper for literally any of my research assignments, I would have also gotten a 0. Submitting a paper without a bibliography got no credit. The content of the assignments was secondary, the primary purpose was to establish that I knew how to research and support my conclusions with reliable sources.
Reasearching in a way that doesn't just coddle your confirmation biases is a serious skill that requires practice and feedback as you learn to do it. That is the purpose of the vast majority of undergraduate research assignments.
It wasn't a research assignment. It was a plain vanilla reaction response. I didn't see anything in the rubric that required sources.
I agree it was bad - as in, a failing grade - but based on the rubric, the only thing that could maybe justify actual zero was word count, and that wasn't mentioned in the grader feedback. Instead the grader feedback called it "offensive".
Which parts of the rubric do you think she earned points on?
The rubric is here
She should get non-zero for clarity of writing. Zero for reaction content. Possibly non-zero for clear tie to the article, but I wouldn't hang my hat on that one.
It is a bad rubric, but once published, they need to stick to it.
You think there was clarity in that writing?
I agree so how does the 469 word essay deserve credit.
Non-zero clarity, yes. If she can string together sentences, the rubric as written would give her something for that.
I could accept that as the reason if the TA had written that as the feedback. Something like "doesn't meet word count, fix and resubmit". But that's not what the TA wrote - the TA criticized the content and made no mention of the word count.
Possibly, I could see the TA fall back on word count as an after-the-fact rationalization, but then I'd want to find out the word count of all the other submissions that were given non-zero scores.
Lol "fix and resubmit". You really feel like these Christians need super special treatment.
The TA could have given her a 0 for just the word count but did her a favor by pointing out all the other shit wrong with her writing so that maybe she could improve. Instead of reflecting on the absolute dogshit she submitted and working to improve she cried to the right wing media machine that it was discrimination.
Honestly good for her, work the right wingers for her 15 minutes of fame and get the school to pass you if you cant on your own. Personally I would be embarrassed if such a sad attempt at writing of mine was ever made public.
One big question is what happened in the past, if grading was consistent. According to the student her paper was just like the others she submitted beforehand.
That said, just because conservatives intervened doesn't mean it's unjustified even if you obviously have a massive grudge on that front.
Why would her getting leniency on shit, off-topic, doesn't fulfill the assignment writing excuse it going forward? Also "according to her" is not how grades work. If that's the case she should release all her other papers and the grades and notes they recieved.
What justifies the grievance industry getting involved here?
Consistency. Maybe that concept is alien to you, nonetheless it's a valid expectation.
The grievance industry is entirely on the left. Grievance grifting and using it to create and increase the divide in society is part and parcel of the left's toxic game.
If you turn in a paper and I say this is off-topic make sure to follow the assignment next time and you don't, then it is not inconsistent to fail the next shitty paper.
I'm sure you and many others in this sub think that despite obvious examples to the contrary such as this
I talked to a couple professors I know.
They said for this level of class the paper is bad, but not uncommon.
I have a feeling there are a lot of undergrad kids turning in slop like this.
That may well be, I didn't read the paper because I'm not familiar with the grading at that level. But that's beside my point.
With that said, funtionally illiterate students are increasingly common, even actually illiterate ones. You may want to look it up. I remember seeing a clip on a young female student at a well known uni a couple years ago, she would use text-to-speech to "read", and the inverse to "write", I think this alone speeks of significant intelligence so it's not that she's dumb. She just never learned to read, and learned to manage without.
Oh I don't doubt it at all.
I think these low level college courses are basically "did you do the assignment?"
I think it's ridiculous, but we, as a society, have started requiring degrees for low level jobs. A college degree for kids today is now basically a certificate of employability, not really a judgment of their ability other than being able to get out of bed on time for 4 years.
I can't respond to that person because of their flair, but the essay is 742 words. It does pass the word count.
The student didn’t hit the word count requirement.
I don't think the rubric makes clear how it should handle word count issues, but if the paper had been returned to the student with a 0 and a simple message, "didn't meet word count requirement", I could be sympathetic. But it was instead returned with a 0 with comments relevant to a rubric item on which she definitely shouldn't have been scored 0. I don't recall the grader mentioned word count.
The prompt says "I will not give credit for papers under 620 words." That should have been the main redline note for the paper, agreed, but it's clear that being under the word count gets you a zero.
Yeah, it is a problem. Not sure how serious I'd say it is. Grade inflation that is.
Bias in grading can be extremely bad however, especially when TAs are doing it, which is what happened in this case. Getting a 0 is pretty hard to defend when I can pull something out of my ass and get a passing grade. I never tried flat-out making shit up but I bet I could make it work as long as it went along with what the TA believes
I attended a public university in the States for my bachelor's and then a public one in London for my master's. There's a lot I prefer about the higher education system in the Uk. I also much prefer the environment. In the northeastern United States, a lot of the college students are snobby twats. I've met the children of billionaires and I find them less insufferable generally.
I can’t go into this comment until I get an answer to this question.
Are you English or did you pick up “snobby twat” when you were in London?
Lol nah I'm not english and twat is a term Ive appropriated.
Last month UC San Diego published a report on the changes in knowledge but students they were admitted and it's stark, but sadly not surprising. Here's one article about it, but there are others out there. Shows pretty well what grade inflation and DEI result in at the college level and it's not good. I highly doubt that results like that are limited to math or the San Diego area and incoming class.
I think the most serious issue with our education system is the utter failure of k12 education in most cities. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, half of the students are illiterate and innumerate. The rest aren’t much better.
And this spills over into college. Because colleges want to admit certain students but they’re not qualified. So the colleges have to lower their standards, in effect inflating grades.
Do you think that might have to do with class sizes and underfunding of public schools? Which political party removed funding from public schools?
Absolutely not. Our worst school districts are also the most well funded. Chicago public schools spends $33k per pupil and they have godawful results.
I live in a suburb of Denver and my suburb spends 30% less than the city of Denver. And my district gets vastly better results.
It’s 100% pure teachers union propaganda to say that the only measure of education is funding. And according to them, it education outcomes are bad, then the only solution is to spend more.
The city of Chicago has increased education spending by 30% over the past five years and results have gotten much worse. There’s absolutely no truth to the myth that education spending equals results. No truth at all.
What are the class size comparisons? Genuine question
You are welcome to look up that information if you want. But republicans have no legislative input into anything in Denver or Chicago, yet the schools suck. Maybe the problem is democrats, you ever think that?
The worst educated states are all red.
You’re just ignoring what I’m saying and inventing your own narrative.
The fact is that blue cities like Denver, Chicago, and Baltimore are just grossly failing black and brown children. There is no fucking way to put lipstick on that pig.
Yes, grade inflation and passing students along despite even those inflated grades being too low is a serious problem where we're faking competence
Grade inflation is a much smaller problem than the lack of standards & accountability in education.
If we want to be cynically pragmatic about it, the primary purpose of an education is to A) demonstrate you can show up on time, B) that you can learn & execute new skills that you aren't particularly interested in, and C) you can complete tasks within a reasonable deadline. Outside of really high level skills like arithmetic & reading, the actual content of an education doesn't really matter that much, what matters is that future can discriminate on a high level who's likely to be a reliable employee & who isn't.
With the degradation of standards in education, primary education has lost this discriminatory function since basically everyone has a highschool diploma, and it forces employers to come up with some other high-level metric to sort potential candidates. In the recent past a bachelor's degree took over that sorting function, but even now a university education is slowly starting to erode as well, meaning one needs even more extracurriculars like internships or leadership experience to demonstrate their potential.
Education doesn't give people mobility on the socioeconomic spectrum because makes people more qualified candidates, but that it's gives people an objective platform to demonstrate their talents & ambitions. Without that platform, society will just go back to the old way of doing business which is to rely on family name & personal reference to act as that differentiator of potential candidates. That to me is a MUCH bigger problem than the specifics of grade inflation, because that's going to kill the socioeconomic mobility that the West is famous for.
Yes.
I believe that administrators lean on teachers and “encourage” them to pass students who should be held back.
Absolutely. There are school systems where students aren’t allowed to get lower than 50%, even if they don’t do the work.
This isn’t helpful. It falsely inflates the capabilities of kids, their teachers, and the curriculum.
Goes hand in hand with leftists being in charge and giving everyone participation trophies.
Grade inflation is a pretty serious problem at high school and college level, yes.
I think a big problem here is “writing style” is supremely subjective. It’s not only prone to grade inflation issues, but also political and affirmation bias.
In these fluffier studies where there is no objective analysis, there is growing ideological monoculture - and that strikes me as an even more dangerous phenomenon in universities.
A university program where grades aren’t on a little bit of a bell curve and has a pass rate of > 80% seems to me to not be especially rigorous.
We see this a lot at Ivy / top schools where some communally large percent of the class gets A’s. All that means is that 100% of the challenge of the university is the entry test; making it just an elitist / prestige business and not additive academic value.
As a hiring manager in tech I have a growing aversion to prestige colleges famous for their liberal arts. Harvard produced some of the worst people I’ve hired or worked with.
Also work in tech. Also a hiring manager. I have never hired anyone from Harvard but I have two from MIT and they live up to the hype and are actually super nice and easy to work with.
Do you have problems with written communication with new hires in the 22-30 demographic? I find that a lot of them have a very informal style in emails that just feels off to me.
I think MIT and Stanford are spectacular and produce great grads.
I don’t mean to suggest a total inverse relationship between prestige and quality. Merely that the Ivy’s (among others) with growing grade inflation issues on top of the elitist tendencies are spitting out worse candidates.
I agree that younger professionals have adopted a generally more informal writing style, yes. I found it initially jarring and childish when I had to start communicating with emojis in slack and memes in presentations.
But you know what? I think it’s fine. What’s important is that the communication is clear - and I think informality and humor brings with it human connection and transparency that’s difficult to get out of stuffy professional writing. I can roll and adapt with this one.
What I do find is that the interpersonal face to face skills can be lacking. The generation seems to really crave remote work and go video off. I think that’s counter to building culture / belonging. Too much screen time and pandemic isolation during formative years, I think.
Yes! This is exactly how it felt at first! I don't say anything because it is not unprofessional in the strictest sense. I will adapt. I want them to be happy at work.
Less than one third read, write, and do maths at or above grade level in public K12 schools. Obviously far from the entire third qualifies for college and uni. Some 10% attend private schools, obviously far from all have the wherewithall for higher education.
That leaves you with perhaps 20% ripe for higher ed. Which is a problem for the institutions, so they accept students that aren't really qualified and fill the gap with foreign students.
The outcome? It's a fullblown scam!
According to the representative Monitoring the Future survey that just came out, teens spend 4.5 hours on social media on average on an average day. There's no way this has no detrimental consequences on their development, social behavior, and of course school grades.
I've worked at the high school level in a variety of districts, and can say that administrative interference means that nobody fails any more. The system is designed such that passing students on is the path of least resistance for everybody involved.
It is common for districts to enact policies which require teachers to put in a bunch of extra work if they want to give a failing grade. That can include logs of interventions, logs of parent contact, and other additional paperwork. When you barely have enough time to plan for your preps, it becomes a lot easier to just pass a student along and avoid the headache.
Even if you do go through the effort and fail them, you'll often be encouraged by administration to offer some kind of trivial remediation to pass them anyway.
Student cheating is also handled with such a light touch by most administrators that it hardly feels like it is worth the time to try and hold students accountable. You gather your evidence and present it to the parents, and then you find yourself in some before school meeting between the parents and administrators where they say they didn't know that it was cheating, and that he is just a good kid who made a mistake. The admin approved resolution is always something like 'just have them redo it', and the student learns nothing.
So what do you do as a teacher? You likely stop fighting the system, especially when it comes to students who aren't willing to put in any effort themselves. When you only have limited time, you want to spend as much of it as you can helping students who are actually trying their best.
I feel bad for the professors at the college level these days. They are getting students who've only put in minimal work without ever experiencing failure.
In your opinion, is this on all people involved? Like admin, teachers, students, and parents. Or is one group causing the headaches more? I’ve only heard stories of teachers beings yelled at by parents and admin never helping.
There is blame to put on all parties, with maybe the exception of the students. The students are just a product of the system. I would say that putting such high importance on graduation rates certainly incentivizes administrators to do whatever results in making the numbers look good, rather than what results in good educational outcomes.
I've seen what I've described even in very wealthy districts. Hell, especially in wealthy districts when it comes to the cheating stuff. Those parents will get the lawyers out and make things hell for everybody involved.
Fixing education is hard, as school problems really are societal problems. There aren't a lot of easy fixes. Anybody who claims to have a simple fix is either misinformed, has an agenda, or is selling something.
i mean writing itself is subjective. I write but i'm not very descriptive with simile's and metaphor's or anything and not detailed, i describe exactly what i see.
But overall, grade inflation is a pretty bad problem. Especially when it's just to pass athletes so they can play. (very common where i grew up)
Social promotion, which I perceive as related to grade inflation, is a definite problem.
It is a big problem. 65% of entering Freshman have to take a remedial class because they were not ready for college level material. That is why only 45% of entering freshmen finish a 4 years college degree in 6 years. They still have to pay for the remedial courses but they don't count toward graduation.
Yes.
The problem is colleges inflate grades to give their students an advantage - which they have every incentive to do. For on-campus recruiting it doesn't matter as much since you're not competing against people who graduated 20 years ago for entry level jobs and the employers have enough resumes from your school that they can see what a good GPA is. But if you're applying just on a corporate website or something then you're at a disadvantage if your school has an unusually low average GPA. Or if you're applying to medical school and you have a school with a C average and another one where the average is a B then students from the former will have a harder time getting into medical school unless the admissions director of that medical school is aware of the former's lack of grade inflation (which they won't be). I don't know how you fix this problem other than to get people to rely on standardized tests and stop caring about grades.
I'm feeling cynical today, so I'll just repost this from X:
"The mistake so many people make is seeing university professors as intellectuals when they’re actually employees at a combination hedge fund and healthcare conglomerate that operates a small luxury resort/sports franchise where student-customers occasionally take classes."
The story you're bringing up has nothing to do with grade inflation. It was because of alleged bias in the grading due to the student's political views.
I’m aware, but it also brings up other points because if OU did conclude that this is the student’s average writing style and they have received better grades from the same professor while writing this way then one can easily conclude that the student had been receiving better grades than what was truly earned.
Why do you believe that the zero was the only "true" grade, and everything else was unearned grade inflation?
Did you read the essay? Seemed well deserving of a zero at the college level
I can guarantee you that it hit at least a few points on the rubric. A genuine zero is wildly difficult to earn
"I will not give credit for papers under 620 words"
And yet, this was literally part of the rubric. Guess how many words the essay was?
The word count was about 2/3 with rubric specifically stating essays under 620 words would recieve a zero. Further she basically ignored the assignment of reacting to the article and wrote completely off topic. So, while yes I agree a zero is hard to earn (especially on such an easy assignment) she really tried her hardest to get that 0.