Re: Grade inflation? Test/examinations

In a message dated 04/16/2002 5:10:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes:

<< One explicit premise underlying my previous posts on grade inflation is
 that the students be fully informed, when a course begins, on what they are
 expected to learn as they take the course. >>

That is true, as far as I have observed it to be so.

But there are other considerations pertaining to grade inflation
and how to end it than the question of fully informing students
what they are expected to learn.

It may prove useful to take a systems view of the instructional
arrangements, at whatever level.  These arrangements, defined
by cultural practices subject to the operation of metacontingencies,
may well form a complete system.  We could label any such
system an "instructional system." An instructional system may
be part of larger systems, such as a university system, and this
in turn may be considered part of the educational system.

An instructional system has various inputs, outputs, and interconnected
operations and processes.  These operate together, and they
exhibit various functional relationships.  (These functional relationships
need to be studied scientifically, experimentally analyzed to the
degree that is feasible or even allowable.)

At the university level one output of the system is the grades that
are given out.  These, at best, only roughly correlate to behavior
change or to performance.  I don't know any behavioral scientist
who would suggest that grades form a measure of behavior.

One input into the system, especially one that has arisen over
the past 30 or so years, is student RATINGS of the course,
which includes ratings of the professor. These ratings are
also known as student evaluations.  Basically, they reduce
to how well the students liked either the course, the way it
was taught, the content of the course, and whether or not
they liked the professor who taught it.  The ratings, in turn,
are used within the context of the larger politico-economic
system of the university to the extent that they are used to
determine matters such as tenure, promotion, and other
questions salient to the continuity of the professor's job and
financial well-being.

The suggestion has been made -- and I am certainly far from the
first to make it -- that this arrangement sets up a metacontingency
situation where teaching practices and professor behavior that
function to return high, positive ratings also, in turn, functions
to increase the probability that the professor will be rehired,
given tenure, promoted, or given other "perks" and benefits that
the university, as a politico-economic system, can bestow.

In short, a professor who does not grade harshly may receive
higher student ratings.  A professor who lighten's the work load
for the students may receive better ratings.  A professor who
learns to crack jokes, tell funny or interesting stories, show
"care" for students, and be their friend, may receive higher
ratings. In contrast, one who "upholds standards," may find
the ratings slipping. One who makes students work harder
for a grade, may encounter lower ratings.  One who appears
aloof or who seems to not care about students, or worse, who
may even seem to not like them, could be marked down by them.
Ultimately, then, in a course with a lighter workload, lower,
less stringent standards it would seem inevitable that more
students would receive higher grades.  Further, in turn, students
who receive higher grades are also more likely to rate a course
and professor more highly.  Certainly this is a testable assertion
(though it may be difficult to find very many professors willing to
test it under actual conditions).

There is that celebrated case of the Harvard professor who
"shocked" the academic world last year by pointing out how he
keeps two sets of books.  One book has the sets of grades
that he actually gives to students.  These are mostly all A's.
They are given out largely without regard to the amount of
real learning that took place, and even without regard to
performance.  Whatever underlying real distribution of performance
exists is masked over by nearly everyone being given the highest
grade possible.  The other book has what he "would have" given
as grades had conditions been different.  In this book few
students were given A's, if any at all.  Most would earn C's,
and no doubt even then many of these would be the old
"gentleman's C."  There would even be D's and F's, and quite
possibly many.

But in this day and age to be accountable is to risk much. It
is better to go with the flow, do the same as your colleagues,
not rock the boat, not upstage them, and not fight the system.
Accordingly, there is no accountability.  Moreover, all up and
down the larger educational system, both in America and in
many other countries now too, there is no accountability anywhere.
Efforts to demand accountability are resisted.  Political and
legislative actions to demand accountability are watered down,
ignored, or even cleverly by-passed.*  The term accountability
loosely refers to metacontingencies, and a behavior analysis
at the metacontingency level would need to analyze the
cultural practices denoted by accountability or lack thereof,
and determine what functional relations control these practices.

Meanwhile, I realize that some people may not want to think about
it, but in reviewing that stage of "parenthesis," signs of it, which
are indicative of the types of metacontingencies operating,
include such bureaucratic practices such as ratings, and
effects of bureaucracy, such as no accountability.

---------------------------------
* The by-passing shows up most markedly in public education
with respect to the mass, standardized testing issue.  When
schools, administrators, and teachers are "held accountable,"
and when their actions cannot produce performance, guess
what? They cheat!  The frequency of cheating -- and we are
talking here about cheating not by the students, but by their
teachers and principals -- has gone up.  The full scope of
it has yet to be uncovered.