Re:Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving a...
by mathattack on Saturday August 13, 2011 @08:31PM
(#2882394)
Although I'm not a teacher, this topic is near and dear to my heart.
My current firm recruits CS, Engineering and Financial Mathematics grads from top schools. Even in this environment, we need to give everyone a math test as part of the hiring process. We can't trust the GPA. Top software firms make developers write code as part of the interview. Even CS (which seems tougher than most majors) suffers from grade inflation. The beauty of this system is that "grade grubbers" who nag the professors for better grades ultimately don't get rewarded. People who are in school to learn do.
A prior firm that I worked for (large consultancy) did a study on if GPA was predictive of good work performance. They found that there was a pass/fail barrier of a 3.0 for technical degrees, and 3.2 for non-technical degrees. Folks who couldn't find a way to hit the lower barrier on average didn't do as well. Folks who did better were more likely - but there was no benefit for getting much higher. A 3.8 student wasn't any more likely to perform better than a 3.1 student. (Slightly off-topic - the only other predictor of success was people who worked at least part-time while in school. It didn't matter what the job was, but people who had to work doing school on average performed better than those who didn't.)
So what can be done that doesn't crush the professors? My grad school forced every non-Phd class to hit an average GPA. Want to give more As? Then give more Cs. When every professor is forced to live by this, nobody suffers in the evaluations.
My current firm recruits CS, Engineering and Financial Mathematics grads from top schools. Even in this environment, we need to give everyone a math test as part of the hiring process. We can't trust the GPA. Top software firms make developers write code as part of the interview. Even CS (which seems tougher than most majors) suffers from grade inflation. The beauty of this system is that "grade grubbers" who nag the professors for better grades ultimately don't get rewarded. People who are in school to learn do.
A prior firm that I worked for (large consultancy) did a study on if GPA was predictive of good work performance. They found that there was a pass/fail barrier of a 3.0 for technical degrees, and 3.2 for non-technical degrees. Folks who couldn't find a way to hit the lower barrier on average didn't do as well. Folks who did better were more likely - but there was no benefit for getting much higher. A 3.8 student wasn't any more likely to perform better than a 3.1 student. (Slightly off-topic - the only other predictor of success was people who worked at least part-time while in school. It didn't matter what the job was, but people who had to work doing school on average performed better than those who didn't.)
So what can be done that doesn't crush the professors? My grad school forced every non-Phd class to hit an average GPA. Want to give more As? Then give more Cs. When every professor is forced to live by this, nobody suffers in the evaluations.