NYT Article Re: Sense of Entitlement to Good Grades

[Marst]

For example, I noticed that many US schools grade on a curve, while my experience with Canadian schools is that grades are awarded on a "this level of achievement = this grade" scheme. I think if you are grading on a curve, then judging purely on results is not fair. A person's work should not be devalued just because someone else did better. If grading is done on a curve, I believe that effort should play a bigger part in determining grade..

That's why a GPA is always considered in the context of your institution and with your class rank. I understand why you don't think grading on a curve is fair, but how does explicitly rewarding effort change that? I would say it only adds to the unfairness. For instance,how would you avoid punishing people for being competent (and thus getting As without much effort)?
 

I also think it makes more sense to grade graduate students based on results rather than effort. I would relax this criteria for undergraduate students. I would prefer to see undergraduate courses be graded in a "here's a checklist of what you have to do, tick them off and you will get X grade". In undergraduate courses, we are not looking for the best of the best, we are just trying to establish basic competency. I think, in undergraduate courses, someone who meets all expectations should get the same grade as someone who decided to meet all the expectations and then go above and beyond. This is why I do not simply consider end-result when I grade undergraduate students.

Person A going beyond the syllabus may very well have put less effort in than person B just ticking off the requirements. So, what exactly does this have to do with effort? I agree that (undergrad) courses should have ceilings and only grade that what is in the syllabus, but that simply means that for the sake of evaluation person A and B have produced work of the same standard. Still, there is no reason to consider anything else but the result.

Edited May 30, 2015 by Marst

[dr. t]

So, are grades supposed to be an absolute or relative measure of academic achievement? 

[TakeruK]

@Marst: You are right. What I meant was to award points for effort when results aren't there. Let's use an example of grading an undergraduate lab report. If the student didn't perform the experiment exactly correctly so their final measurement is a bit wrong, this would be a B in terms of "results". However, I would likely award them an A if they showed in their lab report that they tried a lot of things to fix it, or took the effort to go beyond normal expectations to explain and understand where they went wrong. But if they just got the poor result and didn't do much else, then they would likely get a B. I

 

I don't "punish" students with good results when less effort is put in though. If a student got the right experimental result and did a satisfactory job of writing up the lab report, they would still get an A (of course, if they don't meet the lab report criteria then that would be a different story).

 

@telkanuru (and @Marst's first comment): Most Canadian schools consider your grade to be a mark of competence and never publish things like class rank. So I would say that to me, grades are a measure of absolute achievement. To me, this is more useful--physics departments across Canada have very similar curricula and similar grading schemes. It's almost always the case that 90% = A+, 85% = A, 80% = A-, 76 = B+ etc. So, if you encounter a student with a A average, you know that this means they scored between 85% and 89% on most of their physics courses and that they have a strong grasp of the coursework. 

 

In my opinion, to properly interpret grades awarded on a relative scale, you need to know both the grading criteria and the distribution in the class (e.g. how many As are awarded etc.). But in the absolute scale, you just need to know the grading criteria. The advantage of the former is that if you see A+ grades, you know that the student both knows the material well and that they are in the top tier of their class. But this might mean you miss seeing other very competent people (i.e. meets A+ criteria) who got A or A- grades because their class had too many similarly good people.