"A" = Average

lol.......

 

Dang, I'm, off the charts!

Oh wait, we all are. lol

Of course we can't prove a link, but I seriously believe it's a money-thing. Call it what you want, blame who you want, but at the end of the day, money is changing hands. Flunk-outs don't generate revenue --> create less flunk outs.

 

Interesting read:

• I (Dan Ferris) watched my stepdaughter graduate high school last night, along with about 300 other seniors from the local public high school. At one point, the principal bragged that 25% of the class was straight-A students.
  
  My father-in-law and I looked at each other with looks that said, "HUH?!"
  
  I don't live in Lake Wobegon (author Garrison Keillor's fictional town where all the children are "above average")… 25% of the class shouldn't be getting straight "As." Whether she realized it or not, the principal was letting us know the teachers aren't worth much. (Please don't write in and tell me I'm insulting all teachers. I'm clearly not.) My only solace is that I pay for schools via property taxes and property taxes are low here. So I got very little out of the public education system, having paid very little into it… a just outcome.
  
  And guess what… College will be even easier than high school for these kids. According to a blog post by Mark Perry on his finance and economic blog, Carpe Diem, the most commonly assigned grade in U.S. colleges is not a C, which is what it should be if that grade truly reflected "average" performance. It's an A.
  
  U.S. college professors are handing out "As" to anyone with a pulse. Back in 1940, "As" were about 15% of all grades, and the average grade in U.S. colleges was a little over 2.0 on a 4.0 scale. In other words, "C+" was average. By 2008, 43% of all grades assigned were "As."
  
  The "A" became the most commonly assigned grade starting in about 1998… the year most U.S. stocks peaked in the biggest equity bubble in history. Talk about the good old days… Everybody was rich AND smart in 1998!
  
  Chalk up grade inflation at U.S. high schools and colleges to yet another massive U.S. government failure – the doctrine that says every kid ought to go to college. After all, if every kid has to go to college, the system has to start cranking out stellar intellects like pancakes at a church social. The best way to do that is by lowering standards.

 

I don't want to debate grade inflation, but I will say that as an educator, I don't view a grade of "C" as average. I look at a grade of "A" as the mark of someone who has mastered a given set of material. I'm not sure if these definitions have changed in the last 60 years, but that may account for some of the changes over the years.

To quote Paul Dressel, a grade is "an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite material.” I guess we might as well just give everyone an "A" if that's the case.

Peace,
db

 

I think we're padding reality a bit too much for kids. We recently had an awards ceremony for our underclassmen. We had so many kids getting recognized for being on the A-B honor roll. While the names were being read off, I was getting the cake ready. The other teacher who was helping me heard one of the names and asked me how that student could be on the honor roll when she had an F in one of her classes. The kicker is that our A-B honor roll is calculated by GPA, so a student could actually have F's and D's. Back when I was in school, which wasn't that long ago, we actually had to get all A's or A's and B's to be recognized on the honor roll. Now things have changed where everyone has to get some type of award so that no one's feelings are hurt. It's the stupidest thing I've seen.

Of course, this whole grade thing might not matter in few years anyway in public schools. There's a movement towards having standards-based report cards. If that ever happens, students won't get grades anymore. They'll simply get checks in boxes to show they've met a standard. I wonder how college admissions will work then when everyone's transcripts say they exact same thing...

-Matt

 

I have a friend who is a dean at a private, regionally accredited, college. I was shocked at the percentage of incoming first time students (>15%) who cannot pass the basic Math course for entry into the college. It's like the equivalent of 7th/8th grade math and these people are high school graduates. Another large percentage did not even know how to create an "outline" before writing a paper. Not the paper, but just an outline. My friend showed me a letter a student sent her to request an appeal to re-take a class. Almost everywhere you would expect the word "the" instead was the word "da." I was amazed.

How are these people passing high school?