Faculty Grading Research Articles

COLLEGE GRADES: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF POLICIES AND PRACTICES

ABSTRACTThis study examined policies and practices related to grading at 14 colleges and universities and how they had changed between 1980 and 1990. It also examined the grading orientation and practices of over 500 faculty members in the business, chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and psychology departments of these institutions.The study sought information to answer four questions: What are the current institutional and/or departmental grading policies and practices? Were there changes in these policies and practices between 1980 and 1990 and, if so, what was the nature of the changes? What are the current grading orientation and practices of faculty who teach undergraduate courses? Have these changed over time? Do faculty grading orientation and practices differ across departments and, if so, how? Information was collected from 14 colleges and universities, 8 public and 6 privately controlled. Within each institution, information was collected from department chairs and faculty in each of the designated departments that was established at that institution. Usable questionnaire responses were received from 58 department chairs (68 percent response rate) and from 542 faculty members (25 percent response rate).Institutional changes between 1980 and 1990 that may have affected grades included greater prescription of the curriculum, greater differentiation in grading systems, and increased use of student evaluations of faculty members.While none of the department chairpersons said there were specific departmental grading policies, faculty had a very different perspective. Approximately a quarter of the faculty said their department had a policy of grading against specific standards, 14 percent of these said there was a policy that all students be given an A or B in honors courses, and 11 percent said there was a policy that attendance should be a factor in course grades. Additionally, about two‐thirds of the faculty said that, although not specific policy, their department expected them to grade students against specific standards. About half of these faculty said their department expected them to grade students relative to the overall performance of the class.Only about a third of the department chairpersons reported having formal meetings to discuss grading, but informal meetings about grading were reported by 75 percent. Fifty‐six percent of the responding faculty said their department had tried to raise standards during the decade between 1980 and 1990.Faculty orientations toward grading could be categorized into two approaches, one viewing grades as formal and objective, the other insisting that grades cannot be reduced to a set of objective measures. There were significant differences across departments, with chemistry, mathematics, and psychology faculty more likely to subscribe to the “objective” view while English, education, and history faculty tended to favor the “nonobjective” view. Faculty in business appeared to have diverse attitudes toward grading and could not be easily categorized into either group.Forty‐three percent of the responding faculty said their grading philosophy had changed since they began to teach. Faculty believed that the meaning of a grade varies more across disciplines than across institutions and that the major reason why grades today are higher than they were 20 years ago is because faculty now expect less of students.When asked about the purpose of grades, responding faculty saw the primary purposes as providing feedback to students, providing information about students to graduate or professional schools, motivating students to do good work, and helping the college or university make decisions about students.Faculty were asked if they ever used each of three grading approaches. Eighty‐one percent said they sometimes used a criterion‐referenced approach, 57 percent a norm‐referenced approach, and 44 percent a self‐referenced approach. When asked which one they used most often, 64 percent named the criterion‐referenced approach, 29 percent the norm‐referenced approach, and 8 percent the self‐referenced approach.When asked about the importance they gave to various components of grades when assigning grades in introductory and advanced courses, tests and quizzes were rated as most important for introductory courses, papers and written assignments for advanced courses. Other factors that took on increased importance in grading advanced courses included oral reports, creativity, class participation, group projects, and subject‐specific skills and techniques. There were many significant differences across departments in the importance assigned to different components of grades.Responding faculty were more likely to use essay than multiple‐choice tests in their introductory courses, but again, there were significant differences by department.

Itʼs report card time again

The author, the outgoing president of the AAMC, presents report cards on how the academic medicine enterprise is faring today and how it may fare in the year 2000 by assigning grades to four spheres of activity: Manpower gets a D today, for the following reasons: (1) There are still far too many specialists and too few primary care physicians, and the problem may be worsening; (2) the proportion of underrepresented minorities is still too low in medical schools and the physician workforce, but there are encouraging signs that this problem may be lessening, thanks to schools' efforts to fulfill the mandate of the AAMC's Project 3000 by 2000; (3) student indebtedness is increasing, a situation that affects some students' choices of specialties. By the year 2000, the grade for manpower will rise to a C, since most Americans will have access to care, and there will be some--but not dramatic--improvement in the generalist-specialist balance. Effectiveness of medical school faculties gets a C today, mainly because although faculties have grown with no corresponding increase in students, there has been no significant increase in time or effort devoted to teaching. By the year 2000, the faculty grade will rise to a B, since the faculty will be leaner and may teach better, tenure will have become rare, especially in clinical departments, and faculty practice activities will not usurp academic activities to the extent they do today. Research gets a B+ today for solid accomplishments in the face of major constraints.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Making Better Use of Student Evaluations of Teachers

shall we conclude from these charges? I conclude is this: we feel more keenly the problems of evaluation when we are on the receiving end than when we're on the giving end. That is, the charges I've just summarized simply throw a clearer light on the problems in #//evaluation, particularly conventional faculty grading of students. Let me set the problems of student evaluations into a larger context by briefly standing back and talking about evaluation in general. Trustworthy, fair evaluation means giving God's ver dict?finding the single verdict that all right-minded, good readers would agree on. The problem is that God isn't telling her verdict, and we cannot get readers to agree?not even good readers. It may sound extreme to invoke God here, but we can't be cavalier about evalu ation in education. A single student's evaluation of a teacher doesn't carry much weight, but a single teach er's grade for a student often carries a lot?for example, in an application for a scholarship or a job or profes sional school. We can't just take a fashionably theoreti cal view of the grades we give: Oh well, of course my grades are 'situated' and 'interested'?so what else is new? Because grades carry heavy consequences, we cannot take anything less than genuine fairness as our goal?God's view, correctness?yet we know that trust worthy, fair evaluation is not possible. I'm not saying anything new. We've long seen this predicament on many fronts. Research in eval uation has repeatedly shown that if we give a paper to a set of read ers, they tend to give it the full range of grades (see Diederich for a classic exploration; for an indication of how long people have noticed this problem, see Starch and Elliott [three cita tions] and the summary of their work in Kirschenbaum, Sidney, and Napier 258-59). We know the same thing from literary criticism and theory. The best critics disagree about the quality of texts?even about what texts mean?and nothing in literary or philosophical theory gives us any agreed-on rules for settling such disputes. Barbara Herrnstein Smith may not be too cynical in concluding that when ever we have interreader reliability, we have something fishy. And students know the same thing from their controlled experiments of handing the same paper to different teachers and getting different grades. (Perhaps this explains why we tend to hate it when students ask their favorite question, What do you want for an A?: it rubs our noses in the unreliability of our grades.) Champions of holistic scoring will reply that they do get readers to agree, but they get that agreement by training the readers before and during the scoring sessions?that is, by getting them to stop using the conflicting criteria and standards they normally use outside the scoring sessions. Thus the reliability in holistic scoring measures not how texts are valued in natural settings by actual readers but only how they are valued in artificial settings with imposed agreements. Nevertheless, these practical and theoretical problems don't permit us to decide we can get along without eval uation. Everyone seems to agree that we need some kind of evaluation of students by teachers. And even cynical teachers realize that we can't just refuse to have our students evaluate us. Those who ignore the other reasons still must acknowledge that colleges operate in a

An evaluation system for teaching clinical removable prosthodontics

The continuous assessment and updating of clinical evaluations are integral aspects of dental education. The purpose of this article was to describe the development, implementation, and assessment of an evaluation system for clinical removable prosthodontics. A system based on a three-point scale (RST) was adopted and implemented with the intent of maximizing evaluation effectiveness while minimizing stress on students and faculty members. To date, the RST system has improved both the quality of clinical evaluation and the level of clinical learning. The RST clinical evaluation system appears to be defusing students' ardent quests for grades while promoting the teaching potential within the evaluation process. The system also stimulates student self-evaluation, improves the consistency of faculty grading, facilitates student counseling, and permits an in-depth analysis of the evaluation system at regular intervals.

An Economic Model of Faculty Grading Practices

The statistical evidence examined by the author indicates that faculty members with relatively few students tend to assign higher grades than would be expected otherwise. In evaluating student achievement and faculty performance, therefore, one must not only be aware of this association, but also be able to assess its significance.

An Economic Model of Faculty Grading Practices

An Economic Model of Faculty Grading Practices

PREDICTING THE LONG‐TERM PERFORMANCE IN COLLEGE OF MINORITY AND NONMINORITY STUDENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS IN TWO COLLEGIATE SETTINGS1

ABSTRACTIn two undergraduate settings, data reflecting the cumulative records of cohorts of minority and nonminority students over from four to seven years following matriculation were analyzed to determine the correlational validity of admissions tests and school rank for predicting long‐term cumulative GPA and nonGPA criteria (e.g., degree attainment), as well as short‐term, first‐year GPA, the criterion most often used in comparative validity studies. An analysis of trends in mean GPA from the first through the eighth semester and cumulatively was undertaken to explore the possibility of “late blooming” tendencies among minority students—i.e., the possibility that minority students may show relatively greater improvement in academic performance following the first year than their nonminority classmates.The late bloomer hypothesis derives from the plausible argument that minority students face special problems of school‐to‐college transition that adversely affect their first year performance. After a period of adjustment, the argument continues, tendencies to perform at a first‐year level no higher and frequently lower than expected from test scores may be halted or even reversed.Data employed in the study were from two quite different settings, namely, Main Campus (of a complex State University System) and College (a selective, liberal arts college for men). Results of correlational analyses in both settings indicated that the admissions variables used were at least as valid for predicting longer term criteria of success (e.g., overall or four‐year cumulative GPA, highest educational level attained) as they were for predicting short‐term first‐year GPA, and that this finding was consistent for minority as well as for nonminority students.With respect to the novel question of late blooming, GPA trends at Main Campus were not consistent with the late‐bloomer hypothesis—i.e., minority and nonminority students were somewhat more sharply differentiated by later semester and overall cumulative GPA than they were by the first‐year or first‐semester GPA. At College, which provided data for four successive entering classes (cohorts), results of GPA analysis were ambiguous, suggesting the possibility of late‐blooming tendencies in data for later but not for earlier cohorts. Interpretation was complicated by substantial across‐cohort (across Class) increases in average grades, greater for minority than for nonminority students, that could not be explained by increases in ability levels (test‐score averages did not increase across classes). “Inflationary” and “emergent late blooming” rationales were offered for these findings, but they could not be rigorously evaluated due to lack of needed data.According to the inflationary rationale, the extra across‐cohort GPA increases for minority students could be accounted for by changes in the comparability of faculty grading standards and performance expectations for minority and nonminority students and shifts among minority students toward “less demanding” courses or curricula, etc. According to an emergent late blooming rationale, the extra minority GPA gains could be due to possible increases across successive entering cohorts, plausibly greater for minority students, in average levels of academic and social sophistication, general coping ability, self‐confidence, etc. Such increases would not necessarily be reflected in test‐score averages, but if present could be conducive to improved levels of academic productivity; improved institutional support systems for minority students could also be involved.The concept of “emergent late blooming” focuses attention on the possibility of generational, developmental increases among minority students in average levels of academic intellectual and social sophistication, self‐confidence, achievement motivation, and other noncognitive performance‐related characteristics—increases that might reasonably be expected to occur over time as the more obvious barriers to full equality of opportunity for minorities are removed. The unexplained across‐cohort increases in average grades and especially the interpretive problems introduced by differential rates of increase for minority and nonminority students point up limitations of the grade‐point average as an index of academic performance in comparative validity studies generally, that should be given special consideration in future research concerned with across‐cohort developmental trends in the comparative performance of minority and nonminority students.

Faculty Evaluation as Interpersonal Reinforcement

The reinforcement principle, “We will like those who reward us; we will dislike those who punish us,” was tested by comparing faculty evaluations and grades received by students. Data from a random sample of 37 courses suggest that the principle is valid, especially if it is reformulated as “We will like those whom we expect to reward us.” Implications are discussed regarding design and use of faculty evaluations in colleges and universities.

Evaluation of a psychiatric clerkship by videotape.

The authors used a videotape-based objective examination ingeneral psychiatry to assess the clinical competence of medical students who had completed their third-year clerkship. The test has been shown to be a reliable, valid measure of clinical competence. Subjective faculty grading related positively to test scores. Students on one ward had significantly lower overall test scores, with particularly low scores on clinical judgement questions. However, faculty grades for these students were not significantly different. This suggests that the faculty was unable to assess the relative efficacy of its own teaching. The test can provide objective assessment of student clinical competence and is a means of program evaluation.

A study of the relationships between faculty characteristics, subject field, and course grading patterns

This paper describes an analysis of faculty grading patterns at a large public university. It introduces a methodology to both normalize and stabilize grade data by courses. Using this method, we report on grading patterns for over 1,000 teachers, giving more than 40,000 grades in approximately 2,000 courses. The findings indicate that the academic field of the course is strongly related to the types of grades assigned. Courses emphasizing quantitative and factual learning tend to have assigned lower grades. The higher grades are found in career-oriented courses, such as teacher training. This was shown in separate analyses for undergraduate and graduate courses. For undergraduate courses, lower grades were found in freshman and sophomore courses as compared with junior and senior courses. The academic credentials and personal characteristics of the teachers were only moderately related to grades. Temporary teachers had higher grades in their courses, but such personal characteristics as sex, marital, and minority status were not systematically related to grades given. There was a tendency in undergraduate courses that as class size increased, the proportion of higher grades decreased.