Alfie Kohn's (NY Times) Theory That "Everyone Should Get An A" Is Flat Out, Provably Wrong

"If 'everyone gets As', that means the laziest, dumbest, most unmotivated student graduates from high school with the same paper qualifications as the hardest working, brightest, and most motivated student. The result is that a high school diploma would mean virtually nothing and many employers would begin requiring a college degree for jobs that really shouldn't require one or give tests to applicants that would shock the weak "A" students when they fail these tests and reality hits"  - Comment on NY Times article.

"Well written nonsense. Abilities are distributed on a bell curve. Not everyone deserves a blue ribbon. In nearly 40 years as a university professor I have watched institutions of higher education be turned into a business" - University professor comment on NY Times article


A recent NY Times Op-ed ('Why Can't Everyone Get As?- Excellence Is Not A Zero Sum Game)  by Alfie Kohn questions why every manjack (or Jilljack) at a high  school or university can't snag an A- and besides it shouldn't be a zero sum game.  Well, I hate to break it to Mr. Kohn but it is, a zero sum game.  Meaning there must be an essential delimitation of high quality grades in any given course situation else the grades become meaningless. Further, it then become impossible to distinguish actual high quality from mediocre or poor quality work.


Mr, Kohn writes, in defense of his claim::

"Consider widespread complaints about a supposed epidemic of “grade inflation” in higher education, a claim often accompanied by indignant expostulations about young people’s sense of entitlement. The reality is that even if more students today really are getting A’s — arguably a dubious claim if we look at transcript data rather than self-reports, by the way — that doesn’t prove these grades are inflated."

Yes I am afraid it does!  Much of this can  be traced to tests-exams and even homework assignments that are much too elementary for the levels taught.  If an exam is proper for a given level -  including a 3rd year Harvard course in astrophysics or economics- it should possess considerable discriminatory power.  So, even in a class of 30 Harvard  astrophysics over-achievers it ought to be possible to separate out the 10 percent or so who demonstrate peak excellence and really merit A's. This as opposed to having such an absurdly easy test that 40 percent or more get A's off it. 

As I have argued in previous posts, the lack of discriminatory power in grading and the level of difficulty of coursework, assignments automatically lends itself to overly generous marking schemes.  That is also in combination with the use of teacher's evaluations. 

Basically, any student with more than air between the ears can extort a high grade out of a prof by merely the veiled threat of giving him a lousy evaluation. Since these evaluations are (often)  the main instruments used to assess a person for promotion or even to remain on permanent staff (as opposed to adjunct) they are critical. 

As for Kohn's citation of "transcripts" I have no idea which he's talking about but a study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, and published in the prestigious Teachers College Record showed about three-fourths of all grades awarded at university level are “A's or B's."   This makes those A's and B's next to useless precisely because of their very commonality. An 'A' used to stand for academic excellence, but it can't if so many are getting them! It also renders the achievements of truly exceptional students ho-hum. How in the world can they truly stand out if middling or loser students get the same grades they do? It's preposterous!

Kohn blabs on (ibid.):

"But here’s the key point: Many critics don’t even bother to assert that grades have risen over time or are undeserved. They simply point to how many students (in a given class or school) get A’s right now, as if a sufficiently high number was objectionable on its face. ..

Grades in this view should be used to announce who’s beating whom. And if the students in question have already been sorted by the admissions process, well, they ought to be sorted again. A school’s ultimate mission, apparently, is not to help everyone learn but to rig the game so that there will always be losers."

How  in the name of Sophocles does Kohn come up with this codswallop? It isn't a question or issue of "who is beating whom" but rather who is deserving of the highest quality marks and the awards attendant on them. For example, the awards of Summa and magna cum laude are now almost meaningless because of the sheer numbers qualifying for these honors because of inflated grades.  In effect the preponderance of the awards makes them less significant.  Why not also just award Nobel Physics prizes to every top notch physics prof with a great physics theory?  Well, because then the significance of the award is degraded, rendered "common". This isn't rocket science!

Nor is it a case of "rigging the game so there will always be losers", but if we are to ferret out the true highest performers with distinguished academic excellence then achievements have to be scaled by making upper courses much more difficult in content and demands.   Thus, an astrophysics course, say AST 583 on stellar structure,  has to be profoundly more difficult than an Astronomy (AST) 200 introductory course.  That means a student who earned an'A' in the latter may only be able to snag a D or F in the former. The most likely reason? The level of mathematical difficulty of the higher level course is markedly greater and the student's mathematical aptitude is not commensurate.   The student can handle the algebra for AST 200 but not the partial differential equations necessary for AST 583.

Is this forcing students to being "sorted again"?  Well, in a way, kind of, but logically so because the professional or graduate level astrophysicist or astronomer needs to be able to use partial differential equations.  We therefore must ascertain if the student at the higher level can do the math or not. If he can't then yeah, he becomes a "loser"  with a loser's F.   We do him (or her) a major favor - assuming they haven't already figured it out after two quizzes and withdrawn in time to avoid an F.

 In the same way, in a medical school scenario one would like to have the discriminatory power of medical courses to ascertain -  before student X graduates and becomes an intern  -  he or she  has the medical basics down to not muck up a procedure. Say to deliver a spinal anesthetic without delivering 12 sticks in the wrong place first. Is this being cruel? Not at all, merely sifting through a population to identify the most qualified, competent people.

This is also why the author's next claim is absurd, i.e.

"This makes no sense in any context. Perhaps, for example, we can justify rating states or nations based on the quality of their air, health care or schools, but ranking them is foolish. Relative performance tells us nothing of interest because all of them may be shamefully low — or impressively high — on whatever measure we’re using. Comparative success just gives the winner bragging rights (“We’re No. 1!”)."

Again, failing to process that the separation of genuine quality from the mediocre isn't just a matter of subjective interest.  It matters a great deal if an astrophysics student is given a pass in that AST 583 course, then goes on to muck up spectroscopic, astrometric or photometric data at an Observatory.  It matters a great deal if a med school student is passed and allowed to  intern (e.g. in anesthesiology)  if he doesn't even know basics about anesthesia - and delivers an overdose of fentanyl to a patient.  So no, it's not merely a matter of giving winners "bragging rights" but rather ensuring genuine recognition of competence, i.e. which says this person is truly qualified to undertake a photometric analysis of Beta Lyrae in an Observatory on his own. OR, to deliver an epidural anesthetic prior to a prostate cancer's brachytherapy template procedure - without mucking it up!

We see more bollocks emerging near the end of Kohn's piece:

"Framing excellence in these competitive terms doesn’t lead to improvements in performance. Indeed, a consistent body of social science research shows that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best. It creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely"

Most of all, it encourages the false belief that excellence is a zero-sum game. It would be both more sensible and more democratic to rescue the essence of the concept: Everyone may not succeed, but at least in theory all of us could."

Yes, in theory most of us "could succeed" IF we picked the right contexts and settings to do so. If, for example, we grasped our forte was in art and not science - so chose to major in the works of the "masters" rather than stellar astrophysics.  But that usually isn't the case, hence the high rate of true grade inflation - not to mention the colossal rate of medical errors in this country, as well as academicians producing papers with suspect results that don't hold up to scrutiny.  Demand more  rigorous standards and competition and these missteps and calamities likely don't appear.

Another reason for lack of sufficient performance standard  is entering 'winner take all sweepstakes' that do not ensure we will prevail over extreme competition. According to the authors of  'The Winner Take All Society' (Ch. 6, 'Too Many Contestants?', p. 102):

"Market incentives typically lure too many contestants into winner take all markets, and too few into other careers. One reason involves a well documented human frailty: the tendency to overestimate our chances of prevailing over our competitors."

Adding:

"The decision to compete in a winner take all market is akin to buying a lottery ticket. If you win you win many times more than if you were in a less risky career. If you lose, you earn much less."

One major example is the glut of those pursuing Ph.D.'s so that the over supply generates not tenured track profs but tens of thousands of adjuncts.  If there were fewer people chasing Ph.D.s, i.e. who wanted to become academics,  there'd be more chances for others to succeed, say in tenure track positions. But with the mass of newly minted post docs flooding academia, there simply aren't enough permanent academic positions available. The glut means universities can afford to offer only cheap positions with no benefits, e.g. adjuncts. This forlorn lot then have to patch together teaching at multiple sites, while often ending up on food stamps, e.g.

http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/

I suppose here too Kohn would whine about the "terrible" universities and cheapskate administrations creating "too many losers" with their "comparative rankings"  leading to an indentured prof system. But let's pause to consider it's the sheer glut of apparent similar quality (via the Ph.D.) that created this cheap labor pool.  This is given every manjack with that parchment now believes he merits the highest position in the halls of Ivy-  but will now be brutally disabused by the reality of excess competition for those few choice posts.  Cut the pool of hopefuls down by 50-60 percent and university departments would have to respond in more generous ways.


While I am at it, let me skewer another trope that's been making the rounds, i.e. in another NY Times article, that "maybe students are just a lot smarter and there is no real grade inflation".  This hearkens back to the absurd premise of the Flynn effect, where most Americans are allegedly getting smarter and smarter each year as gauged by standard IQ tests. The phenomenon of incrementally increasing IQ first circulated in 1984, following a study in that year by James R. Flynn, purporting to show that citizens in advanced nations like the U.S. have experienced massive IQ gains over  time.

Thus Americans – for example – have gained 3 IQ points per decade from the early 1900s to today, as reflected in both the Stanford –Binet and Wechsler Intelligence scales. By another test’s standards (the Raven’s Progressive Matrices) – for which scores go back to people born in 1872- the gains disclosed amount to 5  IQ points per decade. So a guy with the same genetic background who was born in 1910 and had an IQ of 100 then, would attain an IQ of 160 by 1970 thanks to the Flynn effect, or equal to the (accepted) IQ of Einstein. 

Of course, the Flynn effect is supposed to apply to a statistical ensemble, not individuals - but I use the example of an individual measure over decades to make the point the claim is nonsense.  Even if we just stick to ensembles, it is foolish. Using the Raven’s and scored against today’s norms,  our ancestors in 1910 would have an average IQ of 70, or about moron level. By comparison, our mean IQ today – that is, disclosed within the ‘hump’ portion of a Gaussian distribution – would range from 130 to 150 depending on the test. For reference, 130 basically gets you into Mensa (accepting the top 2% of IQs) and 150 marks you as a “genius”. Are we all geniuses on our way to becoming Über-Geniuses? I don’t think so!  Neither are all the cum laude honors recipients at Harvard really cum laude quality.  They achieved that honor via a skewed grading system.

Most importantly, the ranks of neither Mensa or Intertel have increased markedly - nor have the potential members who would be accepted.  (Taking into account all those who've no interest in joining either one). Select a random sample of the populace, say 10,000 or 50,000 – and dispatch them to sit the Mensa and Intertel IQ tests. Those making the cut will still be only 2% and 1%, respectively, as has been the case for decades.  You will not find 50 percent getting through, or even 20 percent.

And you will certainly not find the mammoth proportions now receiving cum laude honors! An anomaly that suggests that either the courses taken are way too easy, or the professors - TAs are marking assignments, exams too easy.

Make no mistake, because of grade inflation, students use 'Rate My Professor' to  avoid professors who believe the grade of “C” is the average grade and who set up standards that require students to do more than show up, read a couple of hundred pages, and answer a few questions. This then translates into fewer students in the more rigorous courses that also feature more no nonsense profs.

Bottom line:  Kohn's piece is just another paean to entitlement or the next thing: generalizing honors (and A's) so any manjack can lay claim to them. Thereby destroying any special significance in the process.  At the same time, he raises false expectations in too many that hey, they do have the right to get A's - even if they just show up for class.

Doing Away With Tests - And Objective Grades- Would Render U.S. Education Obsolete

I must confess that when I read in a recent WSJ piece ('Here's Why Tests Matter', Mar. 31, p. A13) that Harvey Mansfield - a Professor of Government at Harvard - had finally yielded to grade inflation, my heart sank. When I read that his capitulation manifested as a two-track system of grading, one "officially inflated" (for transcripts), and the other "reflecting what they actually deserved", I was incredulous.

It effectively meant that none of those Government  transcript grades from Harvard were worth the paper they were printed on, which was not likely more than an ounce of doggy lickspittle. So, in other words, these Harvard Government students actually did such inferior work (in context) it would have been an embarrassment to the school and the Prof to deliver the actually earned marks. Or, it could be that since every other prof at Harvard was into it, Mansfield had no choice. In any case, a pathetic indictment of the current university system based on allowing students to dictate procedures based on their evaluations of staff.

In my May 10, 2013 post ,for example, I cited a study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, and published in the prestigious Teachers College Record . Their finding: About three-fourths of all grades awarded at university level are “A”s or “B”s.

Of course, this makes those As and Bs next to useless precisely become of the very commonality. An 'A' used to stand for academic excellence,  meaning only a small percentage of a given class could actually earn them. But it can't be a reliable indicator of excellence if so many are getting them! It also renders the achievements of truly exceptional students ho-hum. How in the world can they truly stand out if middling or loser students get the same grades they do? It's preposterous!

In a newer study, reported at Gradefinflation.com, it was fund that 42 % of the grades at 2- and 4-year colleges were As

By contrast, what did one find in the mid -to late 1960s, say at Loyola University, or the University of South Florida?  Well, the As were at about 10 percent, with Bs at 20 percent, and 'gentleman's Cs' right at around 40 percent where they ought to be (if conforming to the standard Gaussian distribution). Similarly, at the other end of the curve Ds made up 20 percent and Fs 10 percent.  Back in those days there were no student's evaluations of teachers .

But sometime in the 80s, or maybe earlier, some genius administrator thought it would be a cool idea to have students evaluate college profs, like consumers doing a corporate survey rating their oatmeal. Just hand out a little one -page eval form to little Missy or Sonny and let them have at it - pretend "consumers"  aping a consumer survey task. What's not considered is that they lack the maturity to do a proper objective assessment, so it ends up being a  formalized emotional outburst at the prof for not delivering what the entitled little  twerps believe they deserve.

So, for the few curmudgeons who continued to demand standards as opposed to giving out A and B freebies, it was game over. For those profs who insisted that their students EARN their As instead of expecting them for just showing up, well, it was 'hasta la vista'. The college administration had to inform the uncooperative fool that this was the end of the line.

The authors  of the WSJ article indicate things have gotten even more out of hand now, adding:

"At four year schools the number of As has been going up five to six percentage points per decade"

Can't anyone spot what this trend means? That before the turn of the century everyone will then be getting As!

But evidently now the grade inflation cancer, which also underlies a hostility to any objective testing at all, is infecting high schools. As the authors note (ibid.) "classroom grades have become meaningless",  then citing a public school district in northern California that decided to score grades on an equal interval scale, meaning every letter grade was assigned a 20 point range. Thus, whereas an 'A' in high school used to be 93% -100 %, it now meant 80% - 100%. A 'B' used to mean 86% to 93%, and it now meant 60% up to 80%.   When did the student get an F, if ever? That entered in the final interval range: 0 - 20 %.

Insanity and tomfoolery!

In my 1st year Calculus Physics  (Mechanics) class,  I  wanted to know whether the incoming HS students were prepared, and to discourage any  would -be 'evaluators' from exploiting the system to get cheap As.  Thus, they were greeted by two blackboard  diagrams and  two questions, an "intro quiz", e.g.

1. A 1.8 m (5’ 11”) tall man tosses a ball from his height position (e.g. ball leaves his hand at level of the top of his head) to a hard board 2m high and 3.0 m distant. If the ball strikes the board at a height of 1.5 m, find: a) the initial speed of the ball; (b) the time of flight, and c) the speed when it hits the board. (Assume g = 10 m/s²)

2. A rocket is fired at a launch angle of 30 degrees, and at an initial velocity of u = 500 m/s. Find: a) the horizontal range, b) the greatest altitude (h) reached, and c) the time taken to reach h. (Assume g = 10 m/s²)

-------------------------
Quiz content changed from year to year. There were usually two problems,  10 marks per problem, 20 total, and 20 minutes to complete. A passing grade of 15/20  was required to continue in the course, otherwise remedial level math and physics courses lay in the wannabe physics student's future. (I conducted the remedial classes usually on weekends. If you didn't wish to partake you could drop out, no harm, no foul)

The point was to get rid of all those who weren't genuinely serious students but signed up to try to get credits they might need  but by wielding the evaluation form as a kind of blackmail: "Sky high my unearned grade, or else!" It worked like a charm every time I used it. The ones who aced the  quiz simply didn't need to resort to the evaluation form or grade grub in any manner, shape or form. They were sufficiently competent in physics to get the grades they actually deserved, always at least Bs.

Sadly, that was more than twenty -two years ago. Now the impetus among faculty - even Ivy League- is to write off grades entirely, to declare "they no longer matter."  According to the authors of the WSJ piece (ibid.) "the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative wrote an op -ed a few weeks ago entitled 'There's Nothing Wrong With  Grade Inflation'."  Seriously?

Meanwhile, a recent headline in  The Chronicle of Higher Education was "Why Do Colleges Still Use  Grades?"

Well, because they separate the real achievers from the pretenders and also-rans. According to the gurus interviewed at the Chronicle (ibid.): "No one really likes grading, it just annoys students!"

Tough! Then take up basket weaving, snake charming, speed texting or some other useless pastime. But don't attend university and expect to get by on your looks, charm or BS.   Regrettably, from the signs that abound, it appears that may be too late and the education establishment has finally succeeded in marginalizing the last bastion of  serious education in the US of A.

Grade Inflation Continues to Render Most College Scholastic Honors, Achievement Meaningless

The depressing recent study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, and published in the prestigious Teachers College Record is enough to make any educator shake his or her head in despondent resignation. Their finding: About three-fourths of all grades awarded at university level are “A”s or “B”s.

Of course, this makes those As and Bs next to useless precisely become of the very commonality. An 'A' used to stand for academic excellence, but it can't if so many are getting them! It also renders the achievements of truly exceptional students ho-hum. How in the world can they truly stand out if middling or loser students get the same grades they do? It's preposterous!

There is NO way in a real universe, there can be such a preponderance of high grades! Go back now to the 1960s, before the emergence of the surreptitious blackmail device known as "teacher evaluations". What did one find, say at Loyola University, or the University of South Florida?  Well, the As were at about 10 percent, with Bs at 20 percent, and 'gentleman's Cs' right at around 40 percent where they ought to be - if conforming to the standard Gaussian distribution or normal curve. Similarly, at the other end of the curve Ds would make up 20 percent and Fs 10 percent. But what do we find today? Barely 5 percent Ds and Fs and Cs marginally higher because college kids consider those failing grades!  This is nuts!

Essentially, college teachers today - tenured profs as well as adjuncts- have given away the grade store and sold out.  And it's irrespective of whether we're talking about State U. or Harvard. Intimidated by little wet behind -the -ears punks delivering solemn, negative judgments via teacher evaluations, they've decided timidity and wussing out are the better parts of valor.  But in the process they've essentially wrecked all academic credentials, judicious comparisons and objective assessement.

Oh, make no mistake, it was done with the best of intentions. College administrations sought a cheap, expeditious way to evaluate their staffs, and 'Voila!' Some genius thought of a teacher's evaluation. Just hand out a little one page eval form to little Missy or Sonny and let them have at it. What they obviously didn't consider is that neither Missy or Sonny had the maturity to do a proper, objective assessment. No, by the time they received the forms they were already grating at low marks they'd received during the year and now, and NOW....this was the time for payback! And payback is always a bitch!

So, for the few curmudgeons who continued to demand standards as opposed to giving out A and B freebies, it was game over. For those profs who insisted that their students EARN their As instead of expecting them for just showing up, well, it was 'hasta la vista'. The college administration had to inform the uncooperative fool that this was the end of the line.

Meanwhile, for those timid souls that capitulated, the majority, the sky was the limit - not only were they popular, oh so popular, especially for the easiest, 'crib' courses like media, or deconstruction of films by Steven Spielberg. They were the ones that most often notched promotions and even got tenure. But at what cost? Well, at turning our university grading system into a global laughing stock. Because no where else in the world do kids get rewarded merely for turning in labs or papers half done.

Make no mistake, because of grade inflation, students avoid professors who believe the grade of “C” is the average grade and who set up standards that require students to do more than show up, read a couple of hundred pages, and answer a few questions. This then translates into fewer students in physics classes, say, and usually results in questions from administrators who may claim they believe in academic rigor and integrity, but whose slavish devotion to teacher evaluations refutes it.

Now, it's true some departments traditionally grade tougher than others, say like science and engineering departments. In my experience and at least through 1985, all tended to have lower overall grade averages than those in social sciences and humanities. The reason is that they adhered to rigorous Gaussian curve models for each test and homework grades.. If then 50 people took a class, say in complex algebra, and the grades ranged from a maximum of 80-85%  - which 5 got, and a minimum of 40 -45% which another 5 received, then those limits defined the extent of As and Fs, respectively.  The large central tendency bunch (say 28 in number)  that scored between 50% and 70% would ALL receive Cs,  no question. All the rest would get Bs and Ds, depending on whether they fell between 70 and 79 or below 50.

This sort of distribution was consistently applied.

By contrast to the above, we've learned that Education programs tend to have the highest grade averages. It’s not unusual for the average grade in elementary education courses to be an A-minus, and in secondary education to be a B-plus. That means either our future teachers are brighter than a supernova—or that their profs don’t know there are more than just two letters in the alphabet. More likely, it means very sub-average or average students are taking relatively easy courses. The proof of this? Looking at years of GRE  test scores taken by Ed majors vs. those of science majors. In year after year, Ed.  major grads' GRE averages seldom crack the 950 total for both math and verbal, while science grads routinely crack 1200-1250. Case closed!

Lastly, one has to factor in the role of parental expectations and pressure into the ongoing inflation of grades. Because every parent believes his kid will either be another Fortune 500 CEO, or a Billionaire hedge fund owner, he mandates to every university staff member that Jr. is expected to get As. Not to perform to the highest standards, but ...get those As. And woe betide the sorry butt of any prof who doesn't cooperate. He will be beseiged by angry emails or phone calls.

Administrators play into this absurd game, because they are the ones who've made the sine qua non index for their universities attaining a critical mass of students who consistently garner high enough grades to remain - to keep the money pumping in from Mommy, Daddy or more often now, the private lender. Better this critical inflated grade mass of lazy ass students than that they actual develop critical thinking skills, and oh yes...knowledge.

Sadly, there's no sign the trend is going to reverse any time soon. Too many, including colleges, students, profs and the parents, are addicted to the phony exaggerated grade system- just like coke.

So, as we approach the period of standard commencements across the nation....let's give three cheers for more bogus Summa Cum Laude's and oh.......Magnas too!