But, eventually, the piper gets paid. Unearned grades means unlearned material.
I just read the following article, Correspondence Bias in Performance Evaluation: Why Grade Inflation Works by Don A. Moore, Samuel A. Swift, Zachariah S. Sharek and Francesca Gino of Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.cbdr.cmu.edu/papers/pdfs/cdr_608.pdf.
After hypothesizing (and later demonstrating) that graduate schools don’t pay attention to any particular university’s average GPA, just the grad’s absolute grades, they give a wonderful analogy.
“…assume your goal is to pick the tallest players for your basketbal team. In a desperate attempt to improve their chances of making the team, some of those trying out have worn elevator shoes. If you know only the player’s total height (with shoes) and the height of the shoes, then those two measurements should be weighed equally and oppositely in determining the player’s shoeless height: Each inch contributed by the shoe will reduce by one inch the player’s size when the shoes are removed. Instead, we hypothesize that the positive effect of individual performance (e.g., height) on evaluations will not be matched by the discounting effect of situational factors (e.g., elevator shoes). In the context of grades and admission, our hypothesis predicts that people will favor those from institutions with lenient grading because absolute GPA will be weighed heavily in evaluations of applicants, but average grades at the institution will not be used sufficiently to discount it. In other words, those who show up in elevator shoes will be more likely to make the team. [emphasis added]”
This is from their conclusion.
“While universities do prefer to maintain a reputation for high academic standards, the results presented here show that they derive a benefit from having graduates with higher grades:better placements for their alumni. While our studies focused on university admissions decisions, the same effect may also hold for private employers that use grades as a selection criterion. Given the tremendous value of being able to place alumni in better graduate schools and in better jobs, universities cannot be expected to go too far in seeking to curtail grade inflation. …we should expect academic institutions to pay lip service to the importance of high academic standards while at the same time avoiding publicizing average grade distributions and avoiding reporting class rank data on their students.”
I can’t agree more.
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