Wed 19 Nov 2008
A new category in which I provide quick links to stories of interest, often pulled up from our comment threads.
McClatchy Newspapers coverage of the Congressional Black Caucus event on Monday.
Percentage of grades in the A range at Brown now at over 50% (pdf). My request for similar data for Williams was denied today. Previous discussion here.
Morty mentioned as a possible candidate for the presidency at Dartmouth; also, confirmation (?) that he was a finalist during the last search in 1999. Or did they just get that by reading EphBlog?
November 19th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
My guess is that the Dartmouth Review got it from EphBlog. The thumbnail biographies in the Dartmouth Review’s list of possible candidates are uneven in quality and depth from candidate to candidate, suggesting that the information was gathered on a quick and dirty basis.
November 19th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Those Brown grade distributions are ridiculous.
November 19th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Wow, I agree, the grade distributions are astonishing. Why not just move to pass/fail for every class?
November 19th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
No, not pass/fail. Then little Biffy and Buffy wouldn’t get their As at an “Ivy League” college.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Oh, wait, I see Biffy and Buffy are covered even under the S/No Credit option. If they do really well, they get an “S with distinction” which is used along with “As” to award Honors and Phi Beta Kappa.
Plus, Biffy and Buffy can request a written course performance report for their S/NC courses. After reviewing these, they can select as many positive evaluations as they like with their transcripts.
Boy, when you buy good grades at an Ivy from Brown, they sure do give you your money’s worth.
What a joke. Seriously.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
DK - This a good feature.
What do you envision as the best way to use it/set it up?
Among the many things I could envision would be for each author who had a few short squibs just to post them under a new post called “Links” or something similar - but this might get confusing if several such threads were active at once.
Another approach would be similar to the first except that each author would entitle the piece whatever he/she wanted but you’d ask everyone to tag this sort of thing as “Links” so that a reader could easily search for them (I’m thinking they may not receive much comment traffic and are likely to get buried).
Yet another option might be to run the feature through a link on the right side of the wall, especially if we could have the tidbits in reverse order (most recent first).
Another way would be to run a “Links” thread for several days, collecting up tidbits, and then start another. If the original poster added the last of her/his
tidbits as the first comment, other posters could nest additional tidbits in that first comment, keeping all the links at the top and allowing comments on the tidbits to be made in Comment 2 et al. of the thread.
Or we could just let the chips fall where they will, and overthink this.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
But wait, there’s more:
Unlimited pass/fail with an upside of “Pass with distinction” in case Biffy or Buffy actually decides to do some of the work in the course.
66% of the letter grades given each year are As and A-’s are recorded as A’s, presumably to bolster Biffy and Buffy’s self-estime.
No D’s or F’s or other bad grades are recorded on the transcript. Sweeeeeet.
No GPA is calculated.
And, special hand-picked glowing course evaluations can be attached to the transcript.
Good lord. I guess we wouldn’t want Biffy or Buffy to break a sweat in the hallowed halls of Ivy, now would we?
Major joke. Seriously.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Oh, and of course, Brown doesn’t ask Biff or Buff to take any courses they aren’t “comfortable” with — like a math or science course — because that might scar their fragile psyches.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
LG,
For starters, I recommend your option 2). Each author creates her own post with whatever links she has. As long as she gives them the “Eph Links” category name (which, perhaps should be shortened to just links), we can group that together, should it seem sensible.
I am glad that you (and, I hope, others!) like this feature.
UPDATE: I changed the category name to “Links.” I will try to do more of these in the future.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I seem to recall hearing about this several years ago, but I thought it was an urban legend. Personally, I would have loved to have my grade in Linear Algebra simply disappear from my transcript, but that sadly wasn’t an option at Williams.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Of course, Brown does have some decent graduate programs and students, including one whippet-smart EphBlogger who seems to be really raising the standard of the place.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Congratulations to Diana.
Do grad students get grades? I guess they don’t need them with accomplishments like this.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Well, at least Brown has a simple solution for the economic crunch. Just raise the price they charge for an “A”.
Right now, little Biffy gets 8 As for $48,000 or $6,000 per A. They could just go to $10,000 per A (run a special on “S with distinction for $8,000) and throw in a free wash and wax of the little Bimmer Daddy gave her for Christmas.
Everybody wins!
November 20th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Brown and Dartmouth are both great schools. I would imagine that the vast majority of the students that get into places like HYP, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Brown, Dartmouth etc… Have abilities, histories and records that would suggest they are going to be great students. You could always do a bell curve… if you want to make it about the competition within the institution.
I have suggested a bell curve on previous posts. I did a 2 year program called the College of General studies at Boston University that graded all major tests on a bell curve, and those grades made up for 80% of your final grade. It was designed to wash students out. The bell was 10% F, 20% D, 40% C, 20% B, and 10% A. You had to have a C or better average to continue, so over 30% of the students failed the first year. The Second year, you took an elective in another college at the University, so there was a lower failure rate. I would guess that it is one of the “hardest” programs in the nation if you want to use GPA average as a metric for “toughness”.
It is odd that Williams refuses do not disclose general GPA information. I know my father gave average grades in the B to B- range when he taught at Williams, but he is an anomaly and an extremely hard grader.
If I had to guess on reputation alone, Swarthmore would have the lowest GPA per student in the WSAT category. Swarthmore has a reputation for hard grading. Not sure that that proves anything? Thoughts?
November 20th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Forty-five years ago at the high quality law school with which I am familiar the average grade was between C and C plus - and closer to C.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:23 am
good god, are you all grade gruppers so much? Brown basically said it doesn’t care about grades and it wants intrinsic interest in the class materials to drive student course selection and student work. Does that mean some asses can sneak by while doing no work? probably. does it mean a brown education is a joke? no.
get out of the assumption that grades determine student effort or accurately reflect student learning and brown’s system suddenly becomes perfectly reasonable. in fact, you could argue standard grading practices are simply anachronistic.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Rory-
What is the purpose of grades? Are grades a way in which you are evaluated against your peers, or a way in which you are evaluated by a Prof? Both? If everyone gets an A in everything, how do you break Students out for Graduate school? Is a B from Swarthmore “worth more” than a B from Williams? How about an A in one class V a B in another, same subject, different Prof? How does anyone evaluate a person’s performance in college if everyone gets an A? If grades truly are not a measure of anything substantive, then why should grades matter at all? Why even have grades? Are grades stupid? I don’t think so.
There has to be some measure to evaluate a person’s performance in areas of study. Grades are that measure. If everyone gets an A, that measure is gone. If everyone is “outstanding” in everything, then there is no one who is excellent, good, average, poor or unsatisfactory. According to the scale, C should be the average.
Professors are not doing their jobs teaching and evaluating students if they give straight A’s. Why not force all professors to have a grade average no greater than B? Make professors evaluate their students. That is part of their job. If they are teaching math, and everyone is getting everything right, are they challenging their students? No. If they are testing students in History, and they are not putting enough pressure on students during exams to make some questions difficult enough push students, are they doing their jobs? No.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Yes, Rory, I agree on one level. Yet I’ve had to shift through hundreds of resumes at a time on occasion, and no grades or meaningless grades, coupled with the meaningless recommendations fear of litigation now produces, create quite a problem. In the ideal world, I’d be able to see and evaluate each applicant and read her or his writing, but it doesn’t work out that way. What’s a person to do in hiring people just out of school? Some people rely heavily on the name of the school. Some people give preference to anyone recommended by someone from within the company. Internships can be invaluable, but there aren’t all that many slots (and the same questions/problems arise in choosing who gets to be an intern). Every approach has its drawbacks and none is fair; initial hiring so often involves a large component of luck. Somewhat meaningful grades were a helpful, albeit flawed, tool.
And what do these meaningless grades mean for applicants from other schools such as Williams, where there has been significant grade inflation since the day of the “Gentleman’s ‘C’” but where at least at least 32 courses have real grades and the norm is below a Brown “A”?
November 20th, 2008 at 11:26 am
While grades can be a useful tool for the post-college evaluation of a student’s academic abilities, that’s not the college’s fundamental educational concern. Practically, of course, it is a concern of the college and it ties directly into the rationale behind grade inflation and grade grubbing.
So our hiring practices would need to change also. But if NO applicant had grades, then lacking grades would not be a problems for any individual applicant.
i’m not arguing that moving to a brown model is feasible (though below I do…lol), but rather that the responses that it is a mockery and a joke are rather short-sighted and too pragmatic instead of focusing on the academic experience of the student.
Are grades stupid? Not exactly. but they are the dumbing down of academic endeavor and accomplishment into a single letter. I guess I just called them stupid in a nicer way. So yes, grades are a stupid–but also entrenched and pragmatic and easy–means of evaluating a student and expressing that evaluation to the student.
And if the Ivies all decided together to say no to grades, would it really hamper their students’ future success? And if the top liberal arts schools followed a few years later, what then, etc.? Nothing much would change, except the abolition of grade inflation and a slower but more richly informed job application process.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am
My neighbor mentioned to me the other day that her son did not advance in a scholarship competition, for which I’d offered my name as a recommender, because his (top in his class) 3.7 unweighted GPA (in a high school with tough grading that doesn’t weight advanced courses) did not stack up on paper against the 4.5+ GPAs students from other schools in the region could claim (and probably often from less rigorous courses of study). I rail against this but there are a lot of times when a simplistic gatekeeper mechanism unfairly slams doors shut. I wonder what I would do if I were the principal of my neighbor’s high school and kept hearing stories like this about how the grading system was depriving my students of opportunities. This example is of an obvious (but, given volume, understandable) stupidity, of course, but there are difficult issues here.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Thanks. It has been an ongoing mystery this semester to winnow out the answer to this question. At this point, I basically have no idea. My current understanding is that I will get grades, but they may not have a high r-squared value with the quality of my coursework. Officially, the grading scheme for graduate-level courses is “A/B/C no credit” or something like that. (I am not allowed to change the grading scheme to pass/fail.)
It is all very confusing, but happily no one in the grad school seems to care much about grades; they seem to care mostly that I am working hard and learning math (as Rory points out below).
November 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
even in schools like mine where grades are very important for undergrads, graduate grades–except for students in masters programs who may wish to get a ph.d afterwards–are seen as a bureaucratic requirement otherwise not worth a second of anyone’s consideration.
as you say–other accomplishments (publications, awards, fellowships, etc.) are much more important to the evaluation of the grad student than grades.
oh, and congrats diana!
November 20th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Rory - If the lower-tier schools kept grades but the top LACs had none, the LAC students would be disadvantaged in many fields at the start up level, as the latter schools (and their excellence) are unknown in many places. At many of the same companies or other hiring institutions, new graduates of the Ivies would probably do fine, as those schools, especially the “top 3,” have a radically wider brand recognition than a place like Williams does.
As an upside to no grades/meaningless grades, I wonder whether they mean less cheating, more collegiality, and more collaborative efforts <– the very sorts of things that, as you point out, we should value greatly.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
That, of course, is not what Brown has decided to do. They have, instead, decided to hand out As (with not even the blemish of an A-) like cheap Halloween candy to little “No I’m Not Taking a Math Course and I’ll Hold My Breath and Turn Blue If You Make Me” Biffy and Buffy.
They are welcome to do as they please. We are welcome to review their distribution requirements and grading policies and come to the conclusion that their academic program is a joke when it comes to rigor.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
don’t feed troll…(but anyone with half a mind on statistics and also how brown’s grading works would understand why the rate of As is so high).
I work and study with Brown graduates. They and their preparation are as good, if not better, than those from other elite schools.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
lgeorge,
good point on the name recognition. This is why the effort would have to start with those schools that have the name recognition.
However, if they did it and part of the job application process became the submission of a transcript of one paragraph summaries of the student’s work in the classes(or a writing sample, or whatever works best other than grades), then others could follow. In other words, if the ivies could change our employers’ cultural expectations of what a job application should include, then other schools could then follow.
I do believe–and having worked at Hampshire college (which lacks grades, but is not an ideal test candidate), i have some anecdotal evidence–that a lack of grades does have some real positive benefits on a school’s environment, but not as many as we might hope.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I work and study with Brown graduates.
Of course they are. They are all “A” students. Baaaa waaa haaa haaaa…..
November 20th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Oh give it a rest, hwc. My gosh you are tedious.
We get it already, okay?. Brown, and Biffy, and Buffy, are on that long list of ‘things and people that hwc aims to slander’, which, considering what I know of that list already, makes me think Brown must have a lot going for it.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
http://students.brown.edu/band/media/audio/75th_EverTrueToBrownOfficial.mp3
And fond memories of kicking through autumn leaves marching behind the Brown band with #1 son.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Rory - I wish job applications could work that way (and they still do in some fields), but we are getting further and further away from any meaningful personal look, especially in big organizations. More and more, especially for entry level positions, computer programs scan applications for key words and numbers, rejecting many bright possibilities (as happened on my young neighbor’s scholarship quest) without their applications ever having been seen by a live person. In others, initial screening is done in the Human Resources Department - don’t get me started on that.
But your comment about cheating, etc. and the relationship to grades interested me more (”some real positive benefits on a school’s environment, but not as many as we might hope”). Too bad about that. I wonder if other readers have had similar experiences.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Dick:
Would he be “Biffy” or “Buffy”?
Love marching bands. My mom was a baton twirler in her day, and once she was marching along, threw her baton up, up, up…and when it came down, it broke her nose. No real harm done in the long run…at least to her nose…
November 20th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Marching bands… I was in the Williams band (tuba). There were about 40 of us (enough to make a block W). Under the direction of Williams legend Irv Shainman who solved the problem at the end of marches - “Always use a stinger”, he said.
The eternal question as you are playing along and marching is “does this one end with a stinger?” Example (at the end) Da Da-da Da Da DAH or simply Da Da-da Da Da (no stinger).
Gray flannels, blue blazer with Williams Crest, white shirt, Williams tie. Very nicely collegiate in the era of 280 piece marching bands in two-piece multi-buttoned jump suits and shakos, with a bevy of twirlers and an immensely hatted, huge marching baton-equipped drum major entering the field
bent backward and nearly parallel to the field at 220 steps per minute!
Play the Rouser! On Wisconsin! The Fight Song!
Those were the big guys!
Added later by popular request (my own) !
Minnesota Rouser
http://www.music.umn.edu/marchingband/songs/Rouser.mp3
On Wisconsin
http://www.badgerband.com/music/audio/on_wis_traditional.mp3
Michigan Fight Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF–ldYIBnM
Ya gotta love the Big Ten!
November 20th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Ya, I know this isn’t the place, but as Dave says, very few read the comments.
Fight songs are always in a strong 2/4. Well, except for my daughter’s old school, the musically-inclined St Olaf. ‘Um yah yah’ in 3/4 time. It’s those Norwegians!
http://www.stolaf.edu/multimedia/streams/ringtones/umyaya.mp3
Uffda!
(And it has a stinger! the influence of Irv Shainman, no doubt)
November 20th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Have you seen the Williams marching band? It’s wonderful. (I’m biased, though, I was in it.)
November 20th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
eph ‘07
I haven’t! Anything on youtube?
November 20th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Dick- That was a wonderful bridge to marching bands. Lucky for me that you put in the Michigan fight song.
I never knew the lyrics. And, my high school, which had & continues to have an amazing music dept., borrowed the song. “Champions of the West” actually fits a school in California better than a university in Michigan!
November 20th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Dick:
A tuba! That must have worked up a sweat.
The band clips are wonderful. My fav was the Minnesota Rouser, especially the very end…the way they say Minnesota…
07:
I’d love to hear or see the college band. Maybe Dick can find something.
Does Williamstown have parades? If so they must be like the ones we have in our little town…blink and you miss em.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Here’s a link for the MuchoMachoMoocow…
I haven’t tried it so can’t comment.
http://wso.williams.edu/orgs/band/index.php/multimedia.html
November 20th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Famed for their hats:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ledges/2501456350
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ledges/2500591835
For their Homecoming parade down Spring Street: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ledges/2500645749
And for their Homecoming Halftime Scramble Performance, for which I did not find a photo after a quick hunt.
Also for declaring that the words to “Yard by Yard” are (almost endlessly repeated) “Yard by yard by yard by yard….” (a wonderful, minimalist approach for our modern age).
There are some videos and transcripts of old halftime shows up on the Williams website somewhere, but I don’t have time to search right now..
November 20th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
My two cents on grade inflation at elite colleges, a complaint I’ve never really gottten –
In this day and age, Williams students are not just competing against those from Amherst or Harvard or Virginia ina little elite club with impermeable boundaries. For some graduate programs — I’m thinking primarily of law school — the two biggest factors in admissions are gpa and lsat scores. I am not being a snob when I say that a C at Williams ought to be worth more than an A at the University of Texas of the Permian basin, but that is simply not the case in too many instances. Yes, some of our A students might be decent students elsewhere, but that likely means that that small sample might be decent to middling students at Williams. Yet a 4.0 at UTPB will count more in admissions at many a decent state law school than a 3.2 at Williams. Thus the fact that 60% of Brown students are getting A’s does not bother me one bit.
Williams is no longer part of a small little chummy club where a gentleman’s C will still pass muster in a whole lot of circles. Times have changed. I have no problem with Williams or Brown changing apace.
dcat
November 20th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Define “decent.” If we are talking about a school that lets in more than 50% of its applicants, then a typical Williams student will get in almost regardless of her gpa, mainly via her LSAT scores. If we are talking about a relatively elite state law school (Texas, Michigan, and so on), then you can be sure that the admission committee knows all about schools like Williams (elite liberal arts) and can accurately compare a 3.2 from Williams with a 4.0 from UTPB in terms of what those stats predict for law school performance.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Please, for many of us a gentleman’s ‘c’ in a course worth taking was worth it to be able to take the course.
Circular, but there you are. Not everyone in the class of ‘56 was Brownlee “5-oh” Gould!
November 21st, 2008 at 12:41 am
Derek,
I think you make a valuable point, and not one I have seen voiced so openly on EB.
As the mom of a student who is working his you-know-what-off, for grades that are lower than his (by comparison) less stressed friends are getting at other schools, I hope… I pray, that the Williams ‘bar’ counts.
But, I can tell you, it has not been easy. There has been substantial discussion about this in our family. Thank goodness our son seems to recognize, and appreciate, the value of being challenged, and of, ultimately, achieving graduation from Williams. But he has had to come to terms with the fact that it won’t be with the higher GPA that many of his less academic pals will pull from their (well-respected) colleges and universities.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
David –
By decent, how about the University of Texas? Almost wholly numbers driven.
dcat
November 21st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Sorry, Dave — misread you. But actually, Texas is a great example of Williams meaning very, very little because of the relative inflexibility of the numbers game in the law school admissions office. A 3.0 at Williams will almost certainly not get someone in the door, even though a 3.0 at Williams is almost certainly damned good compared to a 3.7 at San Angelo State. The 3.7 is in significantly better position to get into Texas Law.
dcat
November 21st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
MO has been called. When do I get the cool beer mug?