Article about grade inflation in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Duke Professor Releases Data on Grade Inflation at 34 Colleges. Cites web site GradeInflation.com, which has some fascinating data.
The following statement is interesting in light of the academically feeble DL universities that have emerged: The author believes that the resurgence of grade inflation in the 1980s principally was caused by the emergence of a consumer-based culture in higher education. Students are paying more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the reward of a good grade for their purchase. In this culture, professors are not only compelled to grade easier, but also to water down course content. Both intellectual rigor and grading standards have weakened. This conjecture is based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove.
Difficult to prove, certainly. Difficult to believe? No. Listening to the radio recently I heard a good joke about grade inflation at Harvard (I can't remember it well enough now to repeat it). The ironic part of the story is that the joke was told by Mike Barnicle, a newspaper columnist who was fired from his job at the Boston Globe for plagiarizing the comedic writings of George Carlin. Moral of the story...everybody's cheating...Barnicle, Harvard, Enron, Worldcom, the list goes on and on. Here's an article from South Africas Mail and Guardian that might seem relevant: http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=10659 BTW, since an ox is an adult castrated bull, an oxpecker is...?detached? Just curious. Jack
But, of course, there is much more to this "the emergence of a consumer-based culture in higher education:" students inurred to a visual culture, knowing more from TV, film, and video than from books; Profs having no rationale to resist changing, givern more to relativism than any absolute notions of either truth or quality; and thus no lodestones or Pole Stars to guide dimmed ideals of standards. Ironically, perhaps DL insitutions, whose embrace of standardized testing sets a quantifiable learning benchmark, will be the only realistic brake against the trend! --Orson
You reap what you sow Orson Grade inflation and the concomitant weakening the credibility of both campus and distance learning degrees is a result of the weakening of the examination regimes of universities, aided by the dumbing down of the syllabi, sometimes by commission, sometimes by omission. This is not confined to DL programmes, because the softening of the DL exam regimes only reflects campus practice. The twist that DL adds to the problem is that the regime softening is wide open to fraud. Hence, my oft made points that the DL exam regime indicates the quality of the programme. I have doubts about the academic integrity of campus based 'continuous assessment' regimes, especially in large campus universities. In our discussions here I note references to North American practice of faculty setting the examination 'tests', teaching the subject, grading them and announcing the results without External examiners (the British model) and, sometimes without 'proctoring' (as if trust is a virtue shared by all, even when people have an large incentive for being untrustworthy, of which some will take advantage). An exam regime can never be perfect but it can be made less imperfect by assessment by final examination only, closed book, no sight of questions or hints from lecturers, the papers prepared well in advance, securely held, with solutions approved by External Examiners, papers selected randomly by administration not faculty (hence, 'hints' useless), properly proctored/invigilated by independent people, graded and subject to oversight by External Examiners (senior faculty from other universities) and results released unadjusted by 'curves' or notional pass/fail rates, and subject to appeal where marks can go down as well as up. In my experience, over 12 years now with a large DL MBA programme, with ten thousand papers per exam diet, there has been no discernible drift upwards in exam passes, the Distinciton level remains steady at 7 per cent, and cheating is minimised (not eliminated - the indepedent invigilators catch a few culprits, who are dealt with by the University Registrar's department, with a cancellation of all their exam passes if found proven). The subject cannot be dumbed down because it is published for each subject as a Text book containing the examinable material; the questions cannot be dumbed down because they have to pass scrutiny by the External Examiners and the grading standards cannot be inflated because they are scrutinised by the External Examiner, and grade drift upwards is not possible because the data base is subject to statitical analysis which would reveal it. So when I read reports of 'grade inflation' and 'dumbing down' and also details of their exam regimes, I do not feel we all share the problem: 'You reap what you sow'. Softened exam regimes - or no exams at all, which truly 'says it all' - leads directly to the problem.
Re: You reap what you sow Part of this problem is the result of Univesity bureaucracy, the complexity of some department, a lack of analysis on behalf of the Senate or Board of Regents, and the time restraints that professors face when dealing with thousands of papers and exams. I know of one such case (a work colleague) who earned an M.A. degree in Psychology for a thesis he didn't write. His thesis supervisors did not have the time to adequately investigate and analyze his research. As a result, he was awarded an MA degree with honors (and he bought the thesis from a term paper company that specialized in custom written papers). In this case, the university failed to uphold its academic rigor and requirements by allowing such an incident to happen. Was this an isolated incident? I don't think so....
