Has College Gotten Too Easy?: The Atlantic article

[polly_mer]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/has-college-gotten-easier/594550/

The question is prompted by looking at graduation rates that went up to about 60% of first-time, full-time enrollees who graduate within 6 years along with some GPAs that are higher than previously even while student report studying less.

Does 60% graduation rate indicate that college is too easy?  If yes, then what does that say about the elite institutions that have 85% and higher graduation rates?  The institutions that tend to have low graduation rates generally are the ones catering to the academically underprepared with complicated lives.

Is this a statistical anomaly, because about half of people who graduate with bachelor's degrees don't count as full-time, first-time at their institution (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/26/nearly-half-four-year-college-graduates-attended-two-year-college)?  I know Super Dinky had that problem; most of our graduates started elsewhere and transferred in while many of our first-year students left for something else, sometimes CC for classes at the remedial level.

Of possible related interest is https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/signaling regarding retaking classes and grade forgiveness.

Thoughts?

[marshwiggle]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/has-college-gotten-easier/594550/

The question is prompted by looking at graduation rates that went up to about 60% of first-time, full-time enrollees who graduate within 6 years along with some GPAs that are higher than previously even while student report studying less.


Thoughts?

One thing that could be done is to compare over time  the graduation rates with post-graduation certification rates for programs that have them. Since those professional certification exams are usually designed and administered by independent bodies, then if the problem is grade inflation then the rates of passing those exams should be going down. If those rates are staying constant, or even increasing, then it suggests student performance is improving in real terms.

[downer]

Since most fields don't have national exams, and don't have any particular way to assess the difficulty of courses, it's pretty hard to compare the standards of two schools at one time, let alone the standards over time. It is possible to make some coarse-grained comparisons looking at how much reading and writing students have to do, and how sophisticated the assigned texts are. I expect there is variation, and maybe some schools have cracked down and improved standards. But given the financial strains on schools, we are all too familiar with the pressure to keep students passing classes and the need to keep the customer happy at more expensive schools. So it wouldn't be at all surprising if standards are dropping.

As Marshwiggle says, some areas do have certification by independent bodies. Not many, though.

If this was something people really cared about, there would be more effort to maintain standards from one school to another, and over time. Since there is no such effort, I conclude that the powers that be really don't care about this stuff.

I think it would be a great idea to try maintain some independent standards: there are plenty of schools and programs that seem to have low standards and a degree from them does not mean much. But it is hard to identify which schools and programs those are. It undermines the integrity of higher education.

[marshwiggle]

If this was something people really cared about, there would be more effort to maintain standards from one school to another, and over time. Since there is no such effort, I conclude that the powers that be really don't care about this stuff.

Here's an honest question of mine, and I don't even have an idea about how to answer it: If teaching does, in fact, improve over time, what is the "ideal" result? Should grades go up, or should grades stay constant but depth of content increase?

Also, is it possible to "compare" over long periods of time? For instance, there are discussions of who is the greatest (e.g. hockey player) of all time. The problem is that over decades the game has changed, the equipment has changed, the training has changed, etc. Similarly, technology has changed greatly the way people work from decades ago, so can you compare what someone was expected to do using a slide rule to what someone is expected to do with a spreadsheet?

The one thing that professional exams do is to adapt over time so that "what is expected" outside the university has a useful interpretation. In other fields I'm not even sure where to begin.

[spork]

[. . . ]

Here's an honest question of mine, and I don't even have an idea about how to answer it: If teaching does, in fact, improve over time, what is the "ideal" result? Should grades go up, or should grades stay constant but depth of content increase?

[. . .]

I structure my courses so that the sum total of points available is greater than what it needed to score an A on my grading scale. I.e., while a student must accumulate at least 950 points for an A, there are 1,020 points available. So a student need not get perfect scores on every assignment to earn an A or a B. While this undoubtedly contributes to "grade inflation" in comparison to grading strictly on a bell curve distribution, I find that I often get a bimodal distribution in terms of student performance. A D or an F means a student simply chooses not to do the work, or never improves over the entire semester. I did not see these bimodal distributions ten to fifteen years ago.

Basically I am evaluating writing ability in all these assignments; there is a writing assignment due every single time a class meets. So the (many) students getting A's and B's are expending a lot of effort, and I'm comfortable with the result. What I wonder about is, for example, all the students in the business courses for whom the final course grade derives from four multiple choice exams. Yes, the proportion of A's in one of those courses might be lower than the proportion in one of my courses, but I bet the B or even C students in my courses are retaining more knowledge or skill than many of the A students in those business courses.

[Parasaurolophus]

If I applied real standards to my courses, The Atlantic's staff might just barely eke out a pass. Some of them, anyway.

[mamselle]

And do you hammerhead them into submission, or???

(I just saw a drawing of the putative source of your name...LIKE!!)

M.

[csguy]

...

I structure my courses so that the sum total of points available is greater than what it needed to score an A on my grading scale. I.e., while a student must accumulate at least 950 points for an A, there are 1,020 points available. So a student need not get perfect scores on every assignment to earn an A or a B. While this undoubtedly contributes to "grade inflation" in comparison to grading strictly on a bell curve distribution, I find that I often get a bimodal distribution in terms of student performance. A D or an F means a student simply chooses not to do the work, or never improves over the entire semester. I did not see these bimodal distributions ten to fifteen years ago.
...

I often had bimodal distributions in my introductory programming classes thirty or so years ago. A typical D or F student would only complete a couple of programming assignments before giving up. I argued that it was simply the way such courses worked.

[Parasaurolophus]

And do you hammerhead them into submission, or???

(I just saw a drawing of the putative source of your name...LIKE!!)

M.

Hehe. Nono, that's just for hooting. You're thinking of Pachycephalosaurus.