Good article on college grade inflation

[Stretch 74]

I know we have had some discussion a while back on grade inflation relative to high school, this one focuses on college. I think it really is a strong indictment on the US education system.

I am curious to hear what some of you folks that are still working have to say about this. Have you noticed a deterioration in the skills of the younger kids coming into the work force? Especially in areas like engineering. My brother in law was an engineer and I know that he had talked about this even 10-15 years back. I had noticed it also when I was working, in particular in the ability to write and communicate effectively. What has been the observations and experiences from some of the rest of you?

College Grade Inflation Undermines Workforce Competitiveness

townhall.com

 

[BleedCrimsonandGray]

I know we have had some discussion a while back on grade inflation relative to high school, this one focuses on college. I think it really is a strong indictment on the US education system.

I am curious to hear what some of you folks that are still working have to say about this. Have you noticed a deterioration in the skills of the younger kids coming into the work force? Especially in areas like engineering. My brother in law was an engineer and I know that he had talked about this even 10-15 years back. I had noticed it also when I was working, in particular in the ability to write and communicate effectively. What has been the observations and experiences from some of the rest of you?

College Grade Inflation Undermines Workforce Competitiveness

townhall.com

Is grade inflation the same as expectation degradation? Have just put a kid through k-12 I can attest that being stupid is the norm and will "earn" a passing, if not better, grade.

 

[95coug]

I know we have had some discussion a while back on grade inflation relative to high school, this one focuses on college. I think it really is a strong indictment on the US education system.

I am curious to hear what some of you folks that are still working have to say about this. Have you noticed a deterioration in the skills of the younger kids coming into the work force? Especially in areas like engineering. My brother in law was an engineer and I know that he had talked about this even 10-15 years back. I had noticed it also when I was working, in particular in the ability to write and communicate effectively. What has been the observations and experiences from some of the rest of you?

College Grade Inflation Undermines Workforce Competitiveness

townhall.com

I can tell you that at all education levels, there’s no longer incentive or encouragement to have high achieving student. The goal is toward uniformity.

And, in the interest of teaching the “correct” process, there’s no teaching problem solving. But that’s been happening long enough that most teachers don’t know how to do it either, and don’t understand when you ask them about it.

 

[Cougsocal]

Interesting article, but it ignores the reality that class rank is the be all and end all on your resume. That because grade inflation has been around for decades and what employers really want to know is how you compare to your contemporaries. It is all about being in the top 10%, whether your GPA is 3.00 or 3.95.

What has changed is how competitive it is to get into a university these day. When I was attending WSU all you basically needed to do was to fog a mirror to get in. That isn't the case any more. The average admit at WSU has a 3.46 GPA, and a 1130 SAT. It has gotten insane in California. UCLA and Berkeley have an 8% acceptance rate.

A 4.00 these days won't get you into any of the UCs except, potentially, UC Merced and Riverside, the systems' bottom tier. This year, my son had a 1360 SAT and a lowly 4.13 GPA and was rejected by UCSD, SDSU (not kidding) and Cal Poly SLO on an engineering intended major application. None of these schools required the SAT, so he was basically applying on 4.13 GPA, being a two sport varsity athlete (swimming and water polo) and having 1s on the AP Calc, Physics and Comp Sci. Are kids brighter these days, of course not. So there is certainly a level of both grade and qualification inflation at the high school level.

That said, on the other side of the coin, our visit to WSU was disappointing regarding the engineering program. Gone are the days that you needed at least a B in Math 171 and 172, as well as Physics 201 to be admitted in to the program. Now, you are admitted to the program if you list engineering as your intended major, and you will receive an engineering degree if you pass the required classes (even with some Ds) at some point if you have a 2.00 GPA. Our meet and greet with the student engineers confirmed it. Everyone I spoke to admitted struggling to pass these former "weeder" classes. I was left disappointed and praying that my son would not chose WSU, fearing that employers now would tend to look down their noses at an WSU engineering degree.

So my take on it is this. If you are recruiting engineers from top tier schools, they are as strong academically as they have ever been. But schools like WSU now do the bare minimum to filter out kids who really aren't suit to the discipline.

 

[COUGinNCW]

Where’s your son going Cougsocal?

 

[95coug]

Interesting article, but it ignores the reality that class rank is the be all and end all on your resume. That because grade inflation has been around for decades and what employers really want to know is how you compare to your contemporaries. It is all about being in the top 10%, whether your GPA is 3.00 or 3.95.

What has changed is how competitive it is to get into a university these day. When I was attending WSU all you basically needed to do was to fog a mirror to get in. That isn't the case any more. The average admit at WSU has a 3.46 GPA, and a 1130 SAT. It has gotten insane in California. UCLA and Berkeley have an 8% acceptance rate.

A 4.00 these days won't get you into any of the UCs except, potentially, UC Merced and Riverside, the systems' bottom tier. This year, my son had a 1360 SAT and a lowly 4.13 GPA and was rejected by UCSD, SDSU (not kidding) and Cal Poly SLO on an engineering intended major application. None of these schools required the SAT, so he was basically applying on 4.13 GPA, being a two sport varsity athlete (swimming and water polo) and having 1s on the AP Calc, Physics and Comp Sci. Are kids brighter these days, of course not. So there is certainly a level of both grade and qualification inflation at the high school level.

That said, on the other side of the coin, our visit to WSU was disappointing regarding the engineering program. Gone are the days that you needed at least a B in Math 171 and 172, as well as Physics 201 to be admitted in to the program. Now, you are admitted to the program if you list engineering as your intended major, and you will receive an engineering degree if you pass the required classes (even with some Ds) at some point if you have a 2.00 GPA. Our meet and greet with the student engineers confirmed it. Everyone I spoke to admitted struggling to pass these former "weeder" classes. I was left disappointed and praying that my son would not chose WSU, fearing that employers now would tend to look down their noses at an WSU engineering degree.

So my take on it is this. If you are recruiting engineers from top tier schools, they are as strong academically as they have ever been. But schools like WSU now do the bare minimum to filter out kids who really aren't suit to the discipline.

A lot of schools now are sort of forced to relax criteria because they need tuition-paying bodies. Letting kids fail out means losing money…so it’s better to keep them in class and graduate them than it is to weed them out

 

[Cougsocal]

Where’s your son going Cougsocal?

Cal Poly Pomona, As a "poly" it has very big engineering school @6500 undergrads, the largest school on campus, a quarter of all undergrads. Like WSU they accept you into the engineering program right out of the box, unlike WSU the engineering school and the specific departments involved decide who they admit. Because of the population of the state, the school of engineering receives far more applicants than they have spots, and thus they rejects more applicates than they accept. I don't know if the facility is any better than WSU, I doubt it, but the typical enrollee has a 1 or 2 on the AP Calc and physics exams, as the engineering curriculums assume they have already successfully taken a year of calculus, starting with calculus 3, and requiring only the physics for science majors lab.

 

[Cougsocal]

A lot of schools now are sort of forced to relax criteria because they need tuition-paying bodies. Letting kids fail out means losing money…so it’s better to keep them in class and graduate them than it is to weed them out

I definitely got that vibe. WSU has been aggressively trying to counter declining enrollment. For example, you now get $1000 dollars off tuition if you simply attend an orientation, which we did, and my son, wife and I received a steady stream of emails and texts from his SoCal admissions handler throughout the process. Conversely, Cal Poly Pomona did jack all, offered no incentives, and did not even send an acceptance letter/packet.

 

[random soul]

I've become pretty skeptical about the entire proposition of grades, but the alternative is far more expensive to administer. I'm a big believer in performance assessment, as in, you get assigned a project/presentation/paper, some kind of performance, that will require the practice of the desired skills in order to get through it successfully. The simple standard example I got in a writing assessment class at WSU was the list of ten steps to make a cup of coffee from one of those old filter machines, but you could use anything. If you did 9 things correct, that's 90% under the traditional system, but you don't have a cup of coffee. To the extent that you could try to implement that philosophy, it would require the assessments to be performed by people expert enough in the subject matter to judge the quality of the performance, and it would obviously take a lot more time than filling in bubbles in multiple choice exams. Does this mean bringing in business and education people to help participate at the k12 level? I would suspect so. And it would probably mean making 'internships' a bigger part of professional education, as in actual course credit for them, for people studying to enter a profession. Teachers and doctors already do this kind of thing, but in a lot of other areas they're kind of optional. For a lot of fields, school systems are good at making professors out of the best students, but not necessarily other things, and the world has too many professors (and lawyers). Exclusivity is less important to me than core competence, and when Ivy League kids are struggling to read full books, maybe we're teaching the wrong things and using the wrong mechanisms to sort.