1. pharyngula
  2. The wellspring of grade inflation

The wellspring of grade inflation

By pharyngula on August 25, 2011.

I hate to discourage teachers (we need them!), but there's a problem in teacher education.

Well, guess which students earn the highest grades? It's future teachers. According to a new study by Cory Koedel published by the American Enterprise Institute:

Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline. The higher grades cannot be explained by observable differences in student quality between education majors and other students, nor can they be explained by the fact that education classes are typically smaller than classes in other academic departments.

This is despite the fact that education majors have the lowest high school grades and standardized test scores of all college students.

(Also on FtB)

Tags
Academics

More like this

Problems With Teacher Evaluation: The Value Added Testing Edition
One of the supposed key innovations in educational 'reform' is the adoption of value added testing. Basically, students are tested at the start of the school year (or at the end of the previous year) and then at the end of the year. The improvement in scores is supposed to reflect the effect of…
Is the NCAA encouraging academic fraud?
I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn't the best strategy to…
The Education Gap
The Times last weekend had a big article on the "achievement gap" in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the…
This Is One Charter School Experiment That I Hope Suceeds
I'm not a fan of charter schools: they typically 'cherry pick' the best students, and then claim spectacular results (if they can do so at all), while paying teachers less and expected them to work even harder. However, here's one charter school trying something that I hope works--paying teachers…