Objective vs. Relative Grading, which is better?

College Search & Lists
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<p>Hi everyone!</p>

<p>“When HYP attracts the cream of the crop of the world’s college applicant pool and then accepts < 10% of them, why would anyone expect their students to get Bs and Cs? They never did prior to going to college.” A poster from Princeton responded "Your argument assumes that grades should be an objective, rather than relative, metric of a student’s academic performance. Of course HYP students will produce high quality work. But it doesn’t immediately follow that they should all get good grades. Princeton believes that grades should differentiate students from their classmates–i.e. my grade conveys some information about how I did relative to my fellow Princetonians. Harvard and Yale, while certainly recognizing that grades must convey information about relative performance, have chosen to put a greater emphasis on the objective quality of students’ work, thus keeping grades at those schools higher. "</p>

<p>-I found this on a CC post.</p>

<p>Schools often use either Objective or Relative Grading, which do you think is better?</p>

<p>I’ll give you all an example of both…</p>

<p>Harvard and Yale often utilize “objective grading,” which means that as long as you understand the material at a “regular A level,” you’ll get an A. This often leads to insanely high average GPAs at these schools, as they often receive the “cream of the crop” type students, who regularly get As. Upon graduating these Ivy League schools, students will have high GPAs, making it hard for employers to truly distinguish between the students, as there GPA basically implies that “everyone is smart”.</p>

<p>Princeton and MIT use “relative grading,” as in only the top _<em>% of students will get an A, _</em>% will get a B, __% will get a C, etc… Obviously, all Princeton/MIT students are smart, talented, and just overall amazing students, but an A won’t come as easily to them at Princeton/MIT as it would at another university. For example, a Princeton/MIT kid may only get a 3.0 at Princeton/MIT while they may have gotten ~4.0 at a lower tier school. Upon graduating, a Princeton/MIT student’s GPA will help tell employers their approximate placement in their class, instead of “yeah, this kid knows a lot”. </p>

<p>Which do you think is better, and at what types of schools do you think they should be used?</p>

<p>For example, at rigorous/boarding school high schools?
at community colleges?
lower tier universities?
upper tier universities?
overall?</p>

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<p>Better for what?</p>

<p>Is it better to measure your distance to work in miles or your weight in ounces?</p>

<p>One measures your work against a scale the professor determines (e.g. "A level work).
The other measures your work against against how you stack up vs. other people.</p>

<p>The last one can create really odd outcomes.
Would you be happy knowing your doctor who went to pre-med at Princeton, got into med school because he got 40s on exams when the average was a 25? How much did he really understand the material? </p>

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<p>Again, which one do you think is better for:</p>

<p>“rigorous/boarding school high schools?
at community colleges?
lower tier universities?
upper tier universities?
overall?”</p>

<p>But that’s the thing, @fluffy201, at Princeton, if the average grade was a 25, it means that the material is much harder or was designed to get A students to receive 25s. At Harvard, let’s say that any grade above a 90 is an A, and at Princeton, if the average is an 85, then any grade above a 95 would be an A.</p>

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<p>I think that the difference betwen them is smaller than people think. I’ve served as a TA at a school where the grades are relative (or on a “curve,” as students call it). I calculate the percentages and then the professor’s algorithm determines what the letter grade is for the student. In theory.</p>

<p>In practice, the professors have a large amount of leeway when they want to assign letter grades. I once co-taught with a professor who didn’t want to give anyone any lower than a B, even when I thought the student deserved it (and I graded all of their materials - she had never seen any of their written work). So even though in a curved class this student would’ve gotten below a B, her final grade was a B. I’ve also been in classes when professors add “mercy” points to students’ final grades if they felt they had put in extraordinary effort or were really borderline and had diligently come to office hours or something.</p>

<p>Personally, I think relative grading is better. To me the purpose of a grade is to compare you to your peers in the class - what was your performance like relative to everyone else in the class? I mean, let’s say that I am admitting graduate students and I have limited slots - I can only admit 10% of the students who apply because I am giving them a large fellowship. I don’t want to know which students are capable of turning out good work; I want to know who are the best students - the ones who are, essentially the “cream of the crop.” Similarly, if I am hiring someone, I am not just concerned with who is minimally qualified; I am concerned with who is the best and most diligent at the job I need to hire for. Even with so-called objective standards, there’s a relative element to it, especially in non-quantitative classes (like when grading papers - someone has to set the standard for an A, B, C paper. Even with a fairly strict rubric, which I use, there’s still an unconscious curve to it.)</p>

<p>It makes no sense when 91% of the class is graduating with honors; it ceases to be an honor (and I read an article stating that was the case at Harvard last year).</p>

<p>That’s why in my mind I do not assign a “grade bump” to students who go to top schools that practice this grade inflation and, if I am ever in the position to hire or accept students from those schools into a program (which is likely given my field), I don’t plan to. It’s not that I don’t believe those students are brilliant and driven, but their grades are often insanely inflated. Why should I give them more credit for earning a 3.8 at Harvard when getting a 3.8 at Harvard might be easier than getting one at Ohio State?</p>

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</p>

<p>Depends on how the exam was structured and the difficulty level. The exam could’ve been scored out of 60. Or the professor could’ve made the exam so deliberately difficult that the highest grade was a 45, but earning that 40 was indicative of an extraordinary amount of work and an above-average retention of the material. I’ve taken classes where everyone “failed” the exam because the professor deliberately made the exam difficult, but at the end of the class it’s “curved” (statistically scaled) and the D becomes an A-.</p>

<p>But none of that is really relevant, anyway; I personally don’t care whether my doctor struggled in organic chemistry in college 10 years ago. I honestly don’t even care whether he graduated at the top of his med school class. I care whether he passed his licensing exams, is a licensed medical provider and does good patient care in his area.</p>

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<p>Absolute grading: does not depend on the strength of other students in the class, a particular concern with smaller classes. But it requires a relatively precise calibration of difficulty of exams and assignments.</p>

<p>Relative grading: does not require precise calibration of difficulty of exams and assignments. But it may be unworkable with smaller classes where the strength of the students varies from one semester to another.</p>

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<p>Absolute grading: to each according to their merits. Relative grading is a disservice.</p>

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<p>@julliet, </p>

<p>Harvard isn’t necessarily inflated, you just have the best of the best students attending (and ~7% of them at that). It’d be hard to imagine such great students getting anything lower than an A. If they started at a CC, they’d get all get a 4.0, same with a mid-tier school like Ohio State University. Honestly, I’d think that a 3.8 at Harvard may even be more difficult to achieve than the same GPA at a different university. The average GPA would probably be even higher than what it is if it weren’t for sports recruitment. </p>

<p>You wouldn’t expect a high school Valedictorian/Sports Star/Business Prodigy to get below a 3.8 at Ohio State, so what’s the difference with Harvard? There’s only a finite amount that a school can add to a course.</p>

<p>Would you rather hire someone with a 3.8 from Ohio State who’s at the top of his class, or someone with an average GPA for Harvard, who has always been at the top of his class, but now, when compared to other brilliant people, is “average”?</p>

<p>With relative grading, you’re comparing others based on someone else’s merits. Who needs that? Let’s say that I’m a Literature major taking a Chem class just to learn something outside of my usual path, would it be fair to be compared to a Chem major? To which Chemistry comes naturally to? Or instead, just based off actual material learned?</p>

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<p>Absolute grading is OK, provided that the tests are designed hard enough to differentiate at the high end. </p>

<p>When everyone’s grade is an A, then u may as well just hand out certificates for attendance. </p>