Blog – Page 9 – The Renegade Coder

What was going to be a short rant about the ongoing discussions around grade inflation has turned into a 3,000 word epic. My apologies. Falling for Engagement Bait Earlier this week, I woke up and saw this tweet (and no, I'm not linking to it; they don't need anymore attention): In a room full of actual chemical/nuclear/mechanical engineers, yall would start calling yourselves “developer” real fuckin quick @soychotic Dec 9th, 2023 Obviously, it's a bait tweet meant to drive engagement, so I shouldn't have fallen for it. However, the sentiment in the tweet is so common in our communities that I couldn't help but get a little upset. In fact, I even quote tweeted it, despite almost never engaging with this kind of content. Truthfully, the previous tweet almost made me irritated enough to write a whole article about it. That was until another annoying tweet made its way into my feed. After all, once you fall for bait like this once, the algorithm starts feeding you all kinds of content that you hate. For instance, later that day, I was hit with the following tweet: Holy cats, this is wild @SMTuffy December 8th, 2023 Or rather, I was hit with the following quote tweet: is it in dispute that the median Harvard student of 2023 is far more academically gifted than that of 1950 @JakeAnbinder December 9th, 2023 Like the first tweet, I could easily write an entire article about the flaws in the arguments that stem from grade inflation. Unlike the first tweet, I'm going to actually do it! High Level Critique of Grade Inflation as a Concept Grade inflation is a concept I've heard about at various points in my academic and professional career. In that time, I don't think that anyone has ever explicitly brought it up to me in the real world, but I've seen it cited in various places on the internet. I've also seen it permeate the culture of academic institutions through grading policies, enrollment policies, and assessment strategies that go out of their way to trick and punish students wherever possible On a related note: it's much like the way that Ben Shapiro and other conservatives claim that there are no racist laws because race isn't explicitly written into law. Yet, laws are designed to systematically oppress certain communities, such as the historical disparity between the way crack and cocaine were treated in the law. As a result, I mostly call bullshit on the very concept of grade inflation because any attempts to address it inevitably result in negative outcomes for students. That said, I wanted to take a moment today to completely deconstruct the entire concept as follows: First, grade inflation as a concept needs a CAUSE (or more likely, CAUSES); just because grades are increasing doesn't automatically mean there's a problem with grading. Grade inflation could be a result of students dropping out and only the "best" students being left. Alternatively, grade inflation could be a result of the "worst" students being pushed through. Grade inflation could be a result of improved pedagogy, meaning student outcomes are better. Alternatively, grade inflation could be a result of BAD pedagogy, where curves are needed to account for bad teaching. Grade inflation could be a result of classes getting easier (i.e., less rigorous). Alternatively, grade inflation could be a result of the overall course workload being more intense (i.e., more rigorous), requiring a more lax grading system Notice how for every cause, there is a similar but opposite situation that gives rise to the same outcome. In other words, if any change to the system of education results in grade inflation, then grade inflation is a completely meaningless concept. Further, grade inflation needs negative outcomes before anyone can complain about it. In other words, is this just another culture war issue or are there actual communities affected by grade inflation? Grade inflation could be bad because it makes it harder for grad schools and hiring committees to differentiate candidates. Grade inflation could be bad because it signals a decline in rigor of our institutions; notice that this doesn't mean there actually is a decline in rigor—though there could be an argument against rigor as a concept anyway (see Donna Riley's article). For me, it was a bit hard to come up with negative outcomes of grade inflation. The one I most often see cited is the idea that grade inflation has negative effects on hiring committees and grad schools. If grades are all these places are looking at, they probably need to reflect on their admissions and hiring practices. Don't make me link that Interstellar scene again. Finally, assuming that grade inflation is an actual problem and we know the cause(s), then solutions have to address the cause(s) and not introduce new problems. Grade inflation could be addressed by having grades fit a bell curve (as suggested in this tweet), but this just punishes otherwise good students for a handful of bad days Grade inflation could be addressed by being less selective in admissions (whatever this means) ... Naturally, for every cause, there could be a dozen solutions. However, given that I think the entire concept is bullshit, there's no real reason to invest time into brainstorming solutions. Instead, I'm much more interested in ways of disproving the entire concept. Community Thoughts When thinking about ways to destroy the whole concept of grade inflation, I obviously have my own thoughts and experiences. However, as a community, we have so many more ways of calling into question the very concept. For instance, here are some quality quote tweets from that thread. Good. Grading is a dogshit metric and serves only to gatekeep higher education from the working class; rich Business Major failsons can afford to retake classes as much as they want, after all. GPA is also utterly meaningless post-graduation. @jerkus110 December 10th, 2023 This is something I see quite often. Despite being very selective, institutions seem to think that they have no responsibility to foster students who met the hurdle of getting in. Instead, a common practice, at least in STEM, is to pass students through weed out courses. In my own experience, this causes a lot of anxiety for students who otherwise belong and results in many students dropping out or switching programs. Further, because of this obsession with grades, the students who do pass our weed out tests mostly only care about grades and not the actual learning. Congrats, you played yourself! Grade inflation isn't the problem. The obsession with grades is. Another great tweet I saw was this one: What do you think this proves? What kind of person was able to attend Harvard in 1950? Let's put our thinking caps on. @KimberlyNFoster December 10th, 2023 I really like this subtle argument as well because it gets at what has changed over the last 70+ years. White men are no longer the only people allowed to go to college! Suddenly the pool of applicants is much, much larger and more competitive. Here's yet another solid tweet: I'm sure there's grade inflation but I also think concerns about it are overblown. If elite universities increasingly select for students with a track record of freakishly high grades, it's not really surprising that those students continue to get high grades once they get in. @kareem_carr December 9th, 2023 I'm also a big fan of this one because it gets at the idea of selection bias. If you only enroll people with good grades, you're only going to get people who prioritize good grades. And as I've said before, grades don't really correlate with anything that we actually care about (e.g., learning, communication, teamwork, etc.). I could rant about this one for hours in my experience with undergraduate engineers, but let's move on. Yet another great tweet: They see people getting better grades and automatically assume people aren’t earning them. @RaraSensei December 10th, 2023 This one is huge to me! It gets at our cultural obsession with meritocracy. Clearly, not everyone can succeed, so the reality must be that people are not earning their grades. To take this point further, I think there are deeply racist and sexist elements at play as well. For instance, consider Affirmative Action. There is a wide spread belief that addressing historical discrimination through college admissions is somehow going to dumb down colleges. This is so pervasive that these policies were struck down recently by the conservative majority Supreme Court. Well, the idea that Affirmative Action is dumbing down colleges doesn't exactly correlate with the supposed grade inflation, so which one is it (hint: they're both bullshit)? I think this tweet puts it perfectly: On GCSE and A-level results days, the news reaction is either: Grades are down: "students are lazy (due to social media)! Teachers are incompetent!" Grades are up: "yes, well, exams are getting easier." Every. Damn. Time @concretebadger December 10th, 2023 This is something I see in my own experience. When my students grades are high, no one ever sees that as an indication of my ability to teach, my willingness to connect with students, or my efforts to build out community. They immediately call into question my grading, and even students who don't have me as an instructor see me as the "easy" professor. Of course, it's all complete nonsense, and I would pit any of my students against anyone else's because I believe they have a genuine understanding of the material—not some superficial understanding of the traps that are expected to show up on an exam. Again, these conversations are silly. Looking at a Specific Scenario At this point, I've rambled for like 1,500+ words, so I should probably call it a day. That said, I thought it would be fun to think about what it would look like to actually research grade inflation. And to be fair, you can just plug "grade inflation" into Google Scholar to see the thousands of articles on the topic. So, feel free to do that rather than watching me imagine some study. At any rate, taking all of this together, I can imagine the following scenario. First, a researcher comes along and hypothesizes that classes are easier than they used to be. Through their research, they find merit in their hypothesis. The conclusion from that study is then that we have to start making courses harder again. To me, making classes harder seems ridiculously short sighted. Instead, there needs to be a follow-up study that addresses why classes are easier. Eventually, you will identify some systemic issue that has lead to grade inflation in the first place. For example, I would be open to the argument that classes are easier if the community could concede that college in general is much harder today (e.g., students have to work jobs, resumes expect students to play sports/be involved in clubs, etc.). And even if the community concedes to this argument, I would be curious about the cause(s) of these systemic issues since they might be circular. For example, maybe classes were made easier because students are more busy because they need more credentials to standout because of grade inflation—and the cycle continues. On way I like to think about it is in terms of owning a car. Let's say you have a car and you find that one of your tires has low pressure. The very first thing you probably do is go out and fill it back up to the required pressure. Then, a few days later, you find that your tire is low again. So, you go back out and fill it. After a few iterations, I would hope that you would ask yourself why that particular tire keeps losing air. I personally would be concerned for my own safety as the cause of the low pressure could lead to enough stress on the current tire to make it explode while driving/filling. Therefore, I would probably want to find the leak and patch it or replace the tire altogether. Now, let's imagine that you go through the effort of diagnosing the issue, which indicates that your tire has a leak. Because this is the first time its happened, you patch the hole and move on. A week later, you find that your tire is losing air again. Again, you identify the issue and you patch the hole. This repeats for a while until you get fed up and replace the tire. At this point, you have identified the cause of the low pressure, which happens to be a leak. However, you stopped at this point and failed to consider what caused the leak in the first place. As a result, chances are that whatever was causing the leak might cause a leak in the new tire. I assume you can see where I'm going with this. That's sort of how I see these arguments around grade inflation. The community never seems to want to investigate the cause(s) of grade inflation and would rather attribute it to whoever their cultural enemies are (e.g., educators, administrators, universities, etc.). To me, that's akin to blaming the leaking tire on the woke mind virus and solving it by tweeting. Of course, in this analogy, at least the leaking tire exists, has negative outcomes if not solved, and can be easily addressed. Wrapping Up One of the things I love about blogging is that I can incoherently ramble for like 2,500 words and no one cares. As a result, I'll just share a few final notes that I'm not sure I could fit above in an meaningful way: If you Google grade inflation, mostly what you'll see is the folks who put together the ACT crying about it because they're going to make less money. Obviously, if you built an entire industry around standardized testing and institutions stop respecting it, you're going to lose money, and you're going to make up whatever lie you need to to get your money back. One educator I've learned to appreciate is Alfie Kohn. He has a lot of solid writings and videos that critique the way our education system works from a leftist perspective. For instance, here's an article about grade inflation. There are so many good quotes in this article, such as 'the dominant disciplinary sensibility in commentaries on [grade inflation] is not that of education — an exploration of pedagogy or assessment — but rather of economics. That is clear from the very term “grade inflation,” which is, of course, just a metaphor.' Along with the first point, if you search for "grade inflation" on Google Scholar and filter by the last couple of years, the current focus seems to be on the tie between grade inflation and student evaluations of instruction. It seems many studies have found a correlation between high grades and high evaluations. Naturally, most of these articles start with a faulty premise, grading and evaluations of instruction are an inherit good, and we should keep doing them. Instead, the problem is the corrupt educators themselves. I mean just look at this title: "Can professors buy better evaluation with lenient grading? The effect of grade inflation on student evaluation of teaching". Or how about this quote from the abstract for an article titled, "Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis": "This power can be used to reward lenient-grading instructors who require little work and to punish strict-grading instructors." I tried to skim this article, assuming I would see some sort of study, but the whole thing is theoretical and makes many claims of causal relationships without evidence. It also correlates a lot of ideas that are not explicitly connected: like easiness with poor teaching. They just handwave this away by talking about the definition of easiness without ever defining it. Further, they make the same silly claim that students are dumber because SAT scores are going down. This point has been debunked dozens of times over the last 20 years (see Alfie's article above), and it's still being claimed in a paper that's been cited 111 times since 2020. Hell, read the section on grade inflation. It's laughably bad and doesn't address a single possible counterargument. It sights the Washington Post for evidence of declining SATs scores without ever once addressing the cause(s). Also, just the idea that evaluations are even used at all in promotion and tenure discussions is laughable to me. Finally, it doesn't help that the paper is poorly organized, so information is hard to find in it. The last thing that I'll state as related to the previous point is that I have historically received very high teaching evaluations. When I switched over from a previous course in a course sequence to a later course in that same sequence, I found that my previous students performed much better on average than students I had not had previously. For example, here is an incomplete list of previous student statuses in order of best grades to worst grades (note: students have not had their finals graded): previous, previous, previous, not previous, previous, not previous, previous, not previous, not previous, not previous, previous, not previous, ..., previous, not previous, not previous, not previous, not previous. For context, I have 40 students in this section, of which only 14 are previous students. 4 of my top 5 students were previous students, and 1 of my bottom 5 students were previous students. The other 9 students were in the following positions: 7, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28. In other words, 10 of my 14 previous students were in the top half of the class in grades. A similar trend holds in another section, where I had 3 previous students, of which 2 were in the top half and 1 was just outside the top half at position 21. None were in the top of bottom 5. Meanwhile, my final section had 8 previous students, where 5 were in the top half and 3 were in the bottom half. Specifically, 1 was in the top 5 and 1 was in the bottom 5. I'm not sure what that says, if anything, but it provides a counter narrative to some of the claims made in the previous article. Okay, I lied. I had this article set to publish, but I just thought up another issue related to the "good grades == bad motivation" argument. It's presented in both Alfie's article and the article I've been ranting about. While it may be a general trend that students don't put in effort in classes they're getting good grades, that is yet another correlation without a cause argument. Why aren't students motivated? Could it be that their other classes are needlessly challenging to maintain some sort of status quo of rigor? I know if I were to make my course more lax in terms of grading, students would focus more on their other classes. That's not a result of the class being easy. It's a function of a hyperfixation on grades, an extrinsic motivator that does nothing to promote learning. At this point, this space is just someone for me to dump my thoughts. Let's talk about the purpose of grading. Grade inflation seems to be hyped up because it reduces the ability to differentiate between upper level talent. The thing is: the upper level talent doesn't need grades to differentiate themselves. They have skills, experiences, and talents to pull from. Therefore, they don't need the help. They can differentiate themselves. What I see as the purpose of grading is identifying the folks that are not ready to move on. These are the people who have been given every possible resources and all the possible support and still can't succeed. With the way that I operate the classroom, it's clear who falls out the bottom. If you fail an open book exam that's online and has extra time, then you probably should retake the class. By grading hard, you just invert the problem by making otherwise good students look bad. And so what? So you can say one top student is more "top" than another? Seems silly to me in a space where competition is manufactured. If I keep reading, I'm going to lose my mind. So, let's call it here! Hope you had fun with this one. I have to get to grading my students' exams. You can't count on me to give everyone an A because I am a poor teacher. All jokes aside, if you liked this article and want to read more rants like it, check out the following: Yet Another Rant About Teaching College Students Can I Just Rant for a Minute? Grad School Applications Suck CampusParc Has Got to Go Alternatively, you can make your way over to my list of ways to grow the site. Or, you can take off, and I'll see you next time!