A comment on the easy A

I have been reading Academically Adrift – a book that I would describe as critical of what should be expected of the years undergraduates spend in college. The core complaint in the book is that so many students show little growth in what the researcher/authors regard as a major goal of higher education – critical thinking. I have some issues with the assumption that higher level skills are discipline neutral and that the general measure used in the study should show change, but that would be a research-based analysis for another time. The point here is that the authors see the failure of growth in capabilities as a collaborative by-product of students wanting to focus their time on nonacademic issues and instructors lowering standards so that their instructional efforts are regarded more positively by students.

So, in the context of attempting to sort through what I think of the arguments in “Academically Adrift”, I encounter this new information about drastic differences in grading patterns across academic programs. The various accounts I have read are particularly critical of Colleges of Education because it appears that courses in education are far easier (or at least are graded far more leniently) than courses in other departments.

Just for the record, my academic home is a department of psychology, but I do teach graduate courses taken by education students. In the report, Psychology is claimed to be one of the more difficult programs (again based on the average grade awarded in psych courses). I must say that I was surprised by the categorization of Psychology and my initial reaction was focused more on some methodological issues in the research. I know for example that many students become Psych majors when they do not find success in other programs. It occurred to me that this might account for the lower GPA in Psych. A scan of the original study used as the basis for some of the commentary, seems to indicate that the GPA is really not the gpa of majors, but the average grade awarded in courses (seems strange to use the term GPA then because I think it implies something else). A second issue that occurred to me regarding Psych courses is that many students from many majors take large survey courses in Psych and grades in these courses are probably lower than in upper division courses taken by majors only. This would not be the case for Education students (few service courses) and probably relatively so for programs like Chemistry. Again, a possible confounding in the interpretation of the data (I always may students that it is important to consider both the statistics and the methodology when interpreting what a study means).

Whatever the department means mean (I mean research is often a matter of carefully understanding the variables that are involved and sometimes not carefully identified – too many uses of “means” here), the fact that the average grade is pretty much an A in some programs is an issue I think should concern academics. One factor that I am always amazed by in my own classes is just how variable student performance is. A consideration that occurs to me given this reality is that I would be not doing my job if I ignored this wide range in performance and awarded grades over a narrow range. Taking this position does not make you popular, but in my opinion you are doing a disservice to those at the top of the distribution if you award students performing at a substantially lower level the same grade. I think this is similar to at least one of the arguments made in Academically Adrift. I am not even certain what to call this – having high standards sounds too elitist. I am not certain this is really about standards – I would describe it as having the guts to be willing to recognize the levels of performance that are there.

Curmudgeonly or not – I think things were different in the old days.

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