Did you make the grade?
"Harvard, other schools still fighting grade inflation" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff, December 05, 2013
Harvard College is facing a new round of disapproval, and even ridicule, from some educators following news that the most common grade awarded is an A, more than a decade after professors pledged to combat grade inflation.
I saw it first hand when I went to school.
Critics say that making top grades the norm cheapens the hard work of the best students and reinforces the deluded self-regard of many members of the millennial generation.
They sound like reporters or staffers of AmeriKan news media outlets!
Yet Harvard has illustrious company among universities struggling with how to turn the tide on several decades of rising marks.
Princeton University is reconsidering the grading crackdown it instituted nine years ago, amid concerns that tougher grades are hurting Princeton graduates’ prospects for jobs and graduate school. At Yale College, where 62 percent of grades are in the A range, proposals to curb grade inflation are in doubt following student protests and faculty concern.
Grade inflation is a problem far beyond the Ivy League, although perhaps not quite as much of a problem, according to Arthur Levine, an education scholar. For his book “Generation on a Tightrope,” Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, found in a national survey that 41 percent of students had grade point averages of A-minus or higher in 2009, compared to just 7 percent in 1969.
“Harvard is leading the nation once again,” Levine said Wednesday, with considerable irony. “This is a generation which has grown up without skinning their knees. They’ve all won awards: best trombone player born on April 25. They’re used to having approbation.
“Given inflated self-esteem, it’s not a good thing to give them high grades, because it only encourages a false sense of what they can and cannot do,” he said.
How do you like the insulting shots, kids?
Of course, I somewhat agree with him. This hypersensitive, politically-correct, Jewish value system we have all been indoctrinated and inculcated with all these years has finally come home to roost. No one is different, no one loses, everybody wins, everyone is special.
Combine that with the endless drive to isolate us all into little consumer units as the kids disassociate themselves from the society around them with their electronically-tracking social media gadgets they can not do with out and with which they are obsessed, all the while telling the kids they can have anything they want anytime they want via advertisement reinforcement in the same said media.
Then they wonder why the kids think the world revolves around them?
After a Boston Globe analysis in 2001 found that an astonishing 91 percent of Harvard College students were graduating with honors, officials released data showing that 48.5 percent of grades were A’s and A-minuses, compared to 33.2 percent who received those marks in 1985.
In response to the uproar that followed, the faculty capped honors — summa, magna, and cum laude — at 60 percent. They also pledged to award more B’s, a largely self-policing policy, but deans said they would notify department chairman when professors were unusually lenient or stringent. For several years, Harvard officials published annual grade statistics showing that grades were creeping upward.
In response to a professor’s question at Tuesday’s meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Jay M. Harris, dean of undergraduate education, said that the median grade awarded to undergraduates is an A-
minus, while the most frequently awarded grade is an A. The news was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
Harvey C. Mansfield, a government professor who raised the issue, described an “embarrassed silence” at the meeting, where neither President Drew Faust nor the deans present commented on the issue. “Essentially, they’ve given up on it,” said Mansfield, who has long railed against grade inflation.
That's the way I feel about the Globe.
Still, Mansfield said, he was cheered that he received e-mails from members of the faculty council who suggested they may review the issue, asking him to write a memo to put it on their agenda.
Harris did not respond to messages Wednesday, and Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal would not comment beyond a statement saying that faculty members have elevated the importance of teaching.
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The Crimson editorialized Wednesday against any rigid grading policy, suggesting that rising grades are “due in part to the rising quality of the undergraduates themselves.”
Many professors are relatively sanguine about grade inflation. Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, wrote in his 2006 book, “Excellence without a Soul,” that grades are meant to be a motivational device to help students learn and should not be seen mainly as credentials for external consumption.
Then why do they make point averages out of them?
“The pressure for ‘meaningful’ and stiff grading is anti-educational,” he wrote, noting that handwringing at Harvard about too many A’s dates to at least 1894.
A few universities emphasize strict grading, or what students unhappily call “grade deflation.” Boston University has been known for difficult grading for many years....
Why even bother looking at the report card anymore?
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Oh, you got all As! I'm so proud of you!
At least the easy grades made the debt enslavement worth it:
"College debt varies by school, region, study finds" by Richard Pérez-Peña | New York Times, December 05, 2013
Rising student debt has become a national concern....
It's the next big bailout for banks.
The Institute for College Access and Success, a research group, report underscores the murkiness of college costs, with consumers often focusing on sticker prices that have little to do with how much aid they will receive, how much they will pay out of pocket, and how much they may have to borrow....
Related:
Yeah, it's all murky!
Whenever the propaganda pre$$ uses that word it means they are covering up something.
The report came a day after the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it would regulate large loan servicers like Sallie Mae in the $1.2 trillion student debt market.
See: Agency expanding supervision of student loans
Related: Federal government books $41.3 billion in profits on student loans
That's why your "friend" Obama took over the collection duties.
The bureau, created after the 2008 financial crisis, oversees lenders, but it recently reported that people who have student debt are often tripped up by the loan servicers, particularly when they want to change repayment terms....
The institute’s report lists some of the colleges where students borrow most and least, based on the college survey, while cautioning that some colleges that did not take part in the survey might have made those rosters.
The high-debt private colleges listed are concentrated in the Northeast, while half of the high-debt public colleges are state schools of Pennsylvania or New Jersey....
Graduates of colleges in Arizona, California, Louisiana, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming were among the least likely to have student debt, and those who did, borrowed relatively little....
At the other end of the spectrum, graduates in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maine, Minnesota, and Ohio were among the most likely to borrow, and had some of the highest debt loads....
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Related: Sunday Globe Specials: Ma$ter's Degree
I'm $ure it is worth it, even if you have to back to babysitting.
