americans colleges: good at grading, bad at teaching
Here’s a puzzle: Why are American college degrees so valuable if the teaching is bad and the grades so inflated? My answer: we, the colleges, are good at evaluating people though we’re horrible at teaching. Little effort to see if we transmit the information, but we can tell if you got it.
You may think that’s a loony answer because of grade inflation, but there are still many non-trivial forms of evaluation in universities:
- Where you went to college. That’s essentially a “grade” reflecting your high school GPA and standardized tests plus personal ambition and family resources.
- College major choice. People sort according to interest, but they also sort according to ability as well.
- Completion - many people drop out of higher education. Completing college is a huge signal for most of the population.
- Admission to graduate education, we don’t take everyone.
In other words, mean grades have increased, but learning is indicated by things other than report card grades. These differences are generated by our own judgments as professors that are conveyed through grades and other mechanisms.
The model I have is that higher education sorts people into bins – colleges, majors, graduate programs. Within each of these bins, grades are compressed. Life is often, but not always, relatively easy within the bin. Do the work and you’ll likely pass. But moving into a better bin is actually hard and usually requires some non-trivial demonstration of ability. This may be simply relative performance (showing you were in the top X% GPA of your class) or absolute (a minimum raw GRE). It may even be interactional, such as the ability to persuade a star professor to write you a letter of recommendation.
Thus, you get a more accurate “grade” by using relative performance, standardized tests, and elite endorsement. Despite our laziness in keeping the overall GPA under control, college professors, as a group, do manage to send out a lot of important information about students. Tell me the student’s major, GPA, and colleges, and I can give you a good sense of how they stack up.
I love reading the posts and guessing, by the time I finish, who of the orgtheorists wrote it. This one was obviously Fabio — I win!
Austen
February 18, 2011 at 6:43 am
[...] American colleges: good at grading, bad at teaching Fabio Rojas, orgtheory.net [...]
Club Troppo » Missing link Friday – diversity, anonymity and libertarian train spotting
February 18, 2011 at 9:09 am
Overall, I think I buy it. One quibble: given the way the gre is scored, can we really think of it as an absolute measure?
Dan Hirschman
February 18, 2011 at 1:01 pm
[...] americans colleges: good at grading, bad at teaching [...]
Daily Links for February 17th through February 18th | Akkam's Razor
February 18, 2011 at 1:02 pm
>College major choice. People sort according to interest, but they
>also sort according to ability as well.
that’s why i always start my first lecture of the term by saying, “look to your left, look to right. in 10 weeks all three of you will still be here unless you totally flake and drop off the grid”
gabrielrossman
February 18, 2011 at 3:04 pm
I give this a C+. Young Rojas has an interesting thesis, but his generalizations fail to subsume too many easy exceptions.
We go to college because “everyone does it” – fully 28% of Americans claim a four-year degree. The attribution fallacy means that a degree makes it easy for organizational people to make choices: they have theirs, therefore they hire other people who do, too.
I first enrolled as a freshman in 1967. While I always considered education important and continued here and there as needed, I only went back in 2005 when I no longer could get interviews for jobs that specified a four-year degree. Back in 1967, I had to take calculus twice after getting a D in algebra. In 2007, I completed algebra with an A grade without a textbook and without a calculator.
In 2008, I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in criminology. I now have a master’s degree in social science (2010). Along the way, I read a lot of papers, both peer and peer-reviewed. I would like to see young Rojas defend his claims here.
Michael E. Marotta
February 18, 2011 at 3:41 pm
“Overall, I think I buy it. One quibble: given the way the gre is scored, can we really think of it as an absolute measure?”
Tangential question, but I would make it myself. I don’t know about previous decades, but universities today ask you to report what percentile are you in in each section of the GRE test.
Guillermo
February 18, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Are American college professors really such bad teachers?
David Hoopes
February 18, 2011 at 5:08 pm
i always wondered just how much letters of rec from reputable faculty helped. i had a horrible gpa bc i was a lazy punk who thought he was too smart (lots of A’s in classes I was interested in, lots of C’s or worse in classes I thought were “boring”). but i got good GRE scores and also a letter of rec from some reputable professors. always wondered about that
Andrew
February 19, 2011 at 8:37 pm
your basic premise is flimsy, so the rest of the article falls apart. i don’t believe you can say we are bad at teaching (or good for that matter) because we don’t now have particularly good tools of evaluation. i wasn’t around back in the day (in the game only 10 yrs), but am guessing tools of evaluation for teaching weren’t better back then.
as for learning being indicated by things other than report cards… wha? evidence?
syed ali
February 20, 2011 at 7:55 pm
[...] week, Syed Ali wrote in response to my post about the poor state of teaching: your basic premise is flimsy, so the rest of the article falls apart. i don’t believe you can [...]
colleges do suck at teaching « orgtheory.net
February 23, 2011 at 3:25 am