TA confession: I'm sorry, but most of your children (my students) are average

Parents Forum
361

I see that you didn’t respond to any of the issues and are instead trying to make it personal. I’ll play along.

Earlier in this thread you wrote, “My preference for Manzi’s meritocracy to Rivera’s plutocracy reveals my own bias…”, admitting a bias. Praising IQ/SAT/standardized testing in nearly all of the threads you have participated on in this forum, in some cases when standardized testing was irrelevant to the discussion, also doesn’t exactly scream impartial and unbiased.

Ignoring this, growing up in a country with a less holistic college system that has a greater emphasis on scores does not mean you are impartial. For example, I wouldn’t assume that if I want impartial views about atheism, I should go to persons who spent their lives in strong Christian families since they don’t have personal involvement in atheism. Instead the opposite is likely to be true. Similarly parents who grew up in a system where college admission is almost solely determined by gaokao score are not exactly known for their impartiality about the holistic college system with a lesser emphasis on scores.

Really, the holistic college system passes privilege to the next generation, but standardized testing does not? You are obviously aware of the correlation between standardized testing and SES, and how the holistic college system has made a point of creating a diverse class that favors admission of persons from less privileged backgrounds, in part by de-emphasizing test scores.

I am probably one of the biggest proponent of studies and backing up opinions with numbers and facts on this forum, and often particularly admire posters who do the same and generally trust such referenced posts more than opinions. The problem is not with studies in general, it is with your “studies”. You might ask yourself why are the studies so open to criticism which you can not adequately explain? Yes, part of it is being the only poster I’ve seen who references 50+ year old studies, but I get the impression that you did not even read the vast majorities of studies you have referenced in this thread and instead read an article or pro-IQ website that mentions bits of the study, then use it as a reference. Or claim a conclusion that differs from the author’s actual conclusions. In this thread, you went so far as to list a quote from the study, when it actually came from the article you read and did not appear in the study. If you don’t know the details of your study, don’t be surprised if they do not support your opinions, or if the study’s details differ from your assumptions based on the bits that were captured in the article you read.

362

It depends on what you think the primary purpose of grading is. Some see it as a way to show who has mastered the material, and some see it as a way of distinguishing students from one another. The former would likely prefer the vast majority of the class getting an A, if the vast majority mastered the class material; while the latter would likely prefer only a fixed percentage of the class always getting an A to distinguish the ones who have best mastered the material.

In either system one can use a curve and challenging tests. For example, the grade distribution for the Stanford electrical engineering class ee101a is pictured at http://www.stanfordrank.com/ee101a . This is a class that is almost entirely taken by EE majors at Stanford, who tend to be excellent students of which the vast majority are expected to readily learn the material. So the class is curved such that more than 2/3 of the class receives A’s, and there are no grades below B-. Had the class did unexpectedly poorly on the exams, the professor has the option to use a different curve with a larger portion getting B’s/C’s or lower. In short, the curve was not fixed (or at least was not when I took the class) and instead can be set up to reflect the percentage who master the material. Also note that there were very few A+ grades. It was my experience that A+ grades were often reserved for something really exceptional beyond just mastering the material. For example, I received an A+ in this class primarily because I found some additional solutions on a key exam question beyond just the ones the professor had considered. This can be a way of distinguishing students in such a system.

There are other complications as well. Princeton tried to have a system where a fixed percentage get A’s in each class, then abandoned the policy recently. The internal report that likely led abandoning the policy talks about the majority of students saying the policy negatively impacted their experiences at Princeton; In the first class some professors saying something to the effect of “There are x students in this class, so only y of you will be getting A’s”; Some students refusing to collaborate with or assist classmates to increase the chances of being one of the y students at the top of the class who gets an A; Some departments completely ignoring the guidelines and still giving the vast majority A’s; Students believing they are less likely to be admitted to professional/grad school or get jobs/internships than screen GPA; Students listing it as reason to not apply or favor HYS… over P… For such reasons, it’s common to err on the side of high grading. A’s have often come to mean more than just mastering the material. A’s can indicate just have satisfactory understanding… essentially A = Average. This degree of grade inflation is also a reason some cite locking grade inflation with a fixed percentage get A’s system.

363

And that’s the thing that a number of people on all sides of this issue seem to be having trouble with—particularly since the primary purpose in grading may differ from course to course at the same institution, or from assessment to assessment within the same course.

Why some are insisting that there is One True Way for grades to be distributed from an assessment, I really don’t get.

[Edited to add a missing word.]

364

That makes perfect sense.

Right - in the first case hopefully the majority “got it” and are ready to move on to the next level. I can see uses for the latter, like when there are a fixed number of spaces in the next level course and only the top x number can get in. I can’t really think of a use beyond that (for a course grade, not an individual test), but maybe there are some.

Yes, I’d be unhappy with that policy, personally, it doesn’t seem like it would foster collaboration (and I think collaboration, problem solving in a group, etc is part of what is expected once these students graduate and go to work).

If the goal of a college course is to learn and master material (whatever “master” may mean), that ought to be how the assessment works as well.

Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation, @Data10 .

365

I hesitate to believe that students anywhere who have mastery of hard problems are getting Cs. Some highly selective schools may be giving these kids Bs. Gtech has a reputation for tough grading, but as a very large tech state school it also accepts probably 25% people who would not get into engineering at other schools. My experience at a flagship is that you do not want to get into engineering unless you can do the work, it is very painful and leads to being tossed out with a low GPA (unless you are smart enough to see writing on the wall and leave after one semester of Cs and Ds). Getting As at MIT might be a challenge and may be unlikely if you aren’t in the top 50% of the class in high school prep and well, intelligence, and of course work ethic and study skills.

The accelerated math classes and exposure to Calc1 and possibly 2 and AP physics, chem should help insure there are more qualified engineering students. One way this may not appear to be true is that many opt out of repeating these classes, so don’t get the easy A they could, leaving lesser prepared students to get lower grades.

Similarly, if I needed help writing a good essay, going to Williams might just make me a C student in English.

I doubt anyone really cares about grade distributions, they just want As. And having taught classes, that is really just too bad, since I make the curves and give the grades and I am not giving someone who does not have high mastery an A or good mastery a B. I may have extra credit so people who want to lift themselves a few percent can, but then again that just makes more work for all the solid A/B students. Seriously, I could have assigned final grades week 3 when I taught, it was plain to see … then it’s just a matter of taking the class through the required material with the mastery expected for each student. A few people go up or down … work harder, lose interest, get confused … but not many.

Does anyone who actually has taught a class have a really different experience? Students don’t seem to be very self-aware in their abilities or how well they are keeping up with the material, it’s more about what they need from the class for med school or graduation or for reimbursement.

I think the one true way for professors is that you want those who deserve it to get the As and you want the class to master the material, often by using the carrot/stick that is their grade.

Between colleges, I guess you want your college to be easy grading but known for rigor so you can get honors from SchoolX, put it on your resume and get that consulting jobs with 6 figures + bonus.

366

I know this is an old thread, but I just saw it for the first time yesterday. I have been a practicing physician for 24 years, and I have a son who is a senior in HS, to put my response into context. Before attending medical school, I received an MS degree in physical chemistry. I really enjoyed teaching, but, wasn’t cut out for the research part of a basic science. I have seen this issue from every side of the problem. When I was an undergrad in chemistry, for example, my professor effectively failed an entire class of graduate students because I made the highest grade in the class, and he didn’t think I “deserved” an A in his course. At the time, I was a junior in a flagship state university that is consistently ranked in the top 30 or so in the US for chemistry. His basic problem, and he told me to my face, was that he didn’t want me to graduate with a perfect 4.0 in undergrad, which I had going into his course. My overall grade was 92%. Obviously, I survived.

The course I taught as a teaching assistant was junior year physical chemistry lab. I was the head teaching assistant, so I supervised the other teaching assistants and frequently acted as a mediator between the students and the professor and other TAs. Like the OP, I acknowledged that most of the students were “average”. Of course, average in a third-year college chem course means something different than average in college algebra. I tried to be fair. When I presented the grades on all the experiments to the professor, I would always point out the average grade for teaching assistant A was 78% while that of teaching assistant B was 37%. The professor ultimately assigned the grade, of course. In this setting, there was usually consistency in performance of students in comparison to their peers, despite being graded by different TAs, and there were usually consistent cut points at the end of the term. I have observed the same over the years when I judge grade school science fairs. We might all give different grades, but, whoever comes out on top is consistent.

I can only conjecture on why one TA gives a mean grade of 37 while another gives a 78. However, I think it has more to do with the personality of the TA than the specific student.

367

@Zeldie

I’m confused. You talk about the educational system in the U.S. But your most recent post says you lived in Europe when young.

There are many things right about our educational system in this country, most notably that we don’t turn students away from our doors in the public schools,regardless of their abilities, motivation, background, interests, or some test given to them. Our education doors are open to all.

I’m not saying it’s perfect…but we leave the door open for educational opportunity…and that isn’t a bad thing.

368

The American k -12 does NOT open doors to anybody, forget being perfect. The system is a shame and the most expensive in a world. K - 12 is filled with busy work that aim at one thing - to kill the analytical skills. The notion that the real “stuff” can start only in HS is equivalent of being “too little too late”. And it does not have to be 13 years long either, 10 years of efficient system is plenty.
I will be hated for what I am saying, so be it. I am not smart enough to come up with it, somebody else said it: “The further society drifts from the truth, the more it hates those who say it”. If keeping head in sand and paying huge money for it is OK (well, “not perfect”, but OK), then have it. Just keep in mind that those kids who do get ahead, many of them receive help outside of k - 12. More so if the parents were educated abroad (immigrants), they can bring the education of their kids to higher level and not much is needed for it, few minutes here and there, sometime in a car or during other activity. Kids are like sponges, they will absorb and more so if they easily see that it gives them advantage in classroom. Why certain groups are way overrepresented in the very selective places, from HSs to Med. School? They are not the richest! Maybe answering this question will lead to some realizations.
I agree wholeheartedly with one thing - our kids are just average. And what is wrong with it? College degree does not require anybody to be a genius, MD diploma neither. Hard work overcoming the shortcomings of the American k -12 with the great family support that is all that is needed. High IQ is not one of the requirements.

369

@drdelilah101 - we have seen that exact effect in my DS’s Chem 1 class. My son’s particular lab TA happens to be one of the tougher graders. He’s doing OK, and realizes that it’s just luck-of-the-draw sometimes, but it is aggravating. DS actually like chemistry so that helps.

370

As a former TA (1980s) and professor (1990s) at two different elite universities, I was very aware that grading serves two functions. As a faculty member, I gave what I considered intellectually honest grades on each assignment because I though students deserved and could learn from a realistic assessment of how close or far they were from doing excellent work. Then at the end of the term, I curved so that final grades (i.e. What went to the outside world (including university administrators) and would be used to rank and sort) were consistent AFAICT with campus norms. Not hard to do – same data, just a different scale and no one complains when their final grade is higher than they expected. Basically, I thought I owed my students a first class education but didn’t think that the price of getting one should be a GPA that punished you for your ambition.

As a TA, I did whatever the prof told us to --though the person I taught for the most had a very collaborative approach to grading and worked hard to ensure fairness across sections. The course as a whole had the rep of being a hard one to get an A in.

Abstractly, I would have been delighted to have a class in which everyone earned an A on the intellectually honest scale. And, in that case, I wouldn’t have adopted the conventional curve for final grades. But, in reality, there was never a risk of that. Most of the work I saw was B level work. Acceptable but not stellar in any respect. Had some kids who produced great work, some who produced very promising work, and some who basically shat on paper. I gave detailed and helpful comments on essays and held lots of office hours after returning them. The kids who cared about why they got a low grade generally improved. But most didn’t take advantage of feedback.

One interesting data point for me came from anonymous surveys I conducted of time spent reading/studying outside of class. Very few students reported more than 2 hours a week (in a course where readings probably averaged 250 pages a week). It was a real shocker to me because, as an undergrad at a peer institution I probably spent over 10 hours a week per class on coursework. That wasn’t abnormal among my college friends, but, in retrospect, we may have been atypical.

371

That’s a widely-noted problem—those who become college faculty are (mostly) the ones who worked really, really hard and did really, really well in college, and so that’s our norm. The norm for most college students, however, doesn’t match that, and the culture clash creates friction.

(But: As a college professor, I’m sticking with rigor no matter the friction it may cause. I understand why those without tenure may feel the need to allow more slippage, though, and am completely sympathetic with such strategies.)

372

Hours per week of work are different from class to class and do not reflect complexity and the level of challenge in class, with some exceptions. D’s very easy Honors English where she learned nothing and got an easy A was extremely time consuming because of the requirement to read “boring and stupid” novels, her words. She much rather would do something else and learn more, but it was a requirement for her major. While interesting for her class of Papermaking maybe considered easy by most, and it was not at all. She managed an A, but spent enormous amount of time on assignments, just like in any art related class though. On the other hand, not much time on work was spent in Gen. Chem. class, easy A, all tests are 100%+ and a job offer from prof. to be his SI. College Stats was another easy A.

On the other hand, only one exam in Orgo class required at least 30 hrs of prep., so in the week of test, 10 hrs on Orgo would not be even close.

373

And yet there were probably other students in the same class who found those same novels to be fascinating and thought-provoking. Such is the nature of (particularly) well-designed class assignments, after all.

374

I don’t think anyone in my class could actually complete the assigned reading in 2 hours. So it wasn’t a matter of different kids needing different amounts of time to do the same assignment. It was virtually nobody planning to do more than skim the reading on a regular basis. In seminar courses. So no textbook and no lectures to fall back on. Basically, most college students are “too busy” to study or, in the absence of weekly assessments, they don’t see the point.

Re the culture clash between academics and college students. In anticipation of my kid heading off to college next year, I recently re-read My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Highly recommended!

375

However, workloads in college have been decreasing over the decades.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/why-students-leave-the-engineering-track/
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15954.pdf

Consider that a faculty member attended undergraduate school a few decades before his/her current students in this context.

But it is not necessarily true that all of the decreased workload is due to decreased rigor. Some types of modern technology have made it possible to work more efficiently. One does not have to go to the library and look through the card catalog or microfilm to write down a list of books to check for the needed information, then go through all of those books (possibly waiting for them through interlibrary loan, or waiting for checked-out books to be returned) like one may have had to do decades ago. Instead, a quick web search may reveal a list of relevant references, then another quick web search will show which libraries have each book, or where the book may be purchased from.

In other subjects, one can also see how workloads are reduced. For example, in a computer science course, it used to be that the whole class would share one computer, with a limited number of 80*24 terminals to connect to it. Now, every student can purchase an inexpensive computer with orders of magnitude more computing power than the one shared by a whole class of computer science students a few decades ago.

For reference, the credit hour system used at many schools is nominally supposed to mean 3 hours of work per week per credit hour, so a full time student with 15 credit hours is nominally supposed to spend 45 hours per week on school work (including both class time and out-of-class time).

376

The time one needs to spend on a given assignment could also vary by individual abilities and their nature/density/rigor.

For some of the readings I’ve had in intro/intermediate undergrad classes in my core academic fields of interest, I had no issues reading them without skimming in around 2-3 hours straight through while being able to retain most of the information. In contrast, I had one classmate who could do the same degree of justice to the same readings in 45 minutes-1.5 hours and several other classmates…including older classmates 2-3 classes ahead who’d struggle to do the same degree of justice to those readings while taking twice as long/more or never finish what I’d consider a light-moderate reading college-level assignment.

And this wide spectrum of time required to complete the same given assignment was further underscored when I tutored several students who happened to be taking the same class and doing the exact same assignment with the same Prof.

377

Yeah, I get that people read/work at very different speeds, but I’m deeply skeptical that any (much less virtually all) of the undergrads I taught could read scholarly monographs at a speed of 125+ pages per hour. And then didn’t need any time beyond that to think about what they’d read, whether they agreed, how it related to other texts in the course, etc.

For what it’s worth, I’m not really blaming the students – just explaining why, even in highly selective schools, lots of the work getting turned in is unimpressive. Most students most of the time just don’t put in the effort it takes to do academic work really well, even when they have the ability. Seems true in the workforce as well, so I don’t think it’s unique to college.

378

Given the amount of reading a research-active faculty member needs to do to keep up in their field, I don’t think the students are alone in this approach to their texts…

379

There are people who could easily read 125+ pages per hour…even scholarly monographs.

One college classmate in a few seminar classes we’ve had together demonstrated that throughout the semester to the amazement of yours truly and other classmates. Granted, he is an extreme exception…and is exceptional in other ways such as graduating a few years ahead of me with high honors at 17 years of age and is currently an assistant Prof on the tenure track at a respectable U somewhere in the NW.

Agreed. Incidentally, one older friend who has acted as a mentor with grad school applications with an older college classmate expressed concern with me over his extremely slow reading speed. He expressed concerns about how would he cope with the heavy reading loads and sometimes tight deadlines common in elite/respectable PhD programs in our fields of academic interest if he struggled with the reading loads we had as undergrad seminar students*.

  • I.e. 800-1000 pages/week/class. And some of it was some of the most dry, dense, and atrociously written prose in various academic monographs/journal articles I've encountered. A reason why I sympathize with those who joke that Profs/grad students in that particular field tend to be among the worst writers in academia.
380

^You monitored how long it took your classmates to complete their readings in college?