andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-825 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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1 GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0. [sent-7, score-0.866]
2 People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. [sent-17, score-0.621]
3 Back when I used to organize a class with several different section leaders, each instructor wanted to give his or her students higher grades. [sent-20, score-0.465]
4 We had common assignments and a common final exam; even so, each instructor had a reason why his or her students deserved some exemption from the grading cutoffs. [sent-21, score-0.916]
5 So the real question is, why have grades been going up so slowly ? [sent-22, score-0.621]
6 My explanation for this behavior is as follows: college professors typically got high grades themselves in college. [sent-26, score-0.67]
7 Getting high grades is part of how we defined ourselves when we were students. [sent-27, score-0.621]
8 Rather, I think it’s just that profs see grades as important in themselves. [sent-30, score-0.766]
9 I remember looking at grading records for undergraduate classes back when I taught at Berkeley in the early 1990s. [sent-32, score-0.568]
10 There was lots of variation in average grades by instructor, even for different sections of the same class. [sent-33, score-0.741]
11 I didn’t do a formal study, but I remember when flipping through the sheets that average grade seemed to be correlated with niceness. [sent-34, score-0.306]
12 The profs who were generally pleasant people tended to give lots of A’s, while the jerks were giving lower grades. [sent-35, score-0.397]
13 Again, no standardized tests so no way to judge whether the average grades were informative, but I doubt it. [sent-36, score-0.946]
14 At the institutional level, these problems with grades would be fixed using standardized tests or with some sort of statistical correction such as proposed by statistician Val Johnson, who writes : There are two approaches that might be taken in reforming our grading system. [sent-37, score-1.257]
15 The first is to encourage faculty to modify their grading practices and adhere to a “common” grading standard. [sent-38, score-0.943]
16 The second is to make post-hoc adjustments to assigned grades to account for differences in faculty grading policies. [sent-39, score-1.063]
17 By statically correcting for grading practices, Val’s method produces adjusted grades that are more informative measures of student ability. [sent-41, score-1.228]
18 Since students know their grades will be adjusted, they can choose and evaluate their classes based on what they expect to learn and how they expect to perform; they don’t have to worry about the extraneous factor of how easy the grading is. [sent-43, score-1.454]
19 Since instructors know the grades will be adjusted, they can assign grades for accuracy and not have to worry about the average grade. [sent-45, score-1.419]
20 (They can still give all A’s but this will no longer be a benefit to the individual students after the course is over. [sent-46, score-0.336]
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same-blog 1 1.0 825 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-27-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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Introduction: My upstairs colleague Blattman writes : The trend is unsurprising. Schools have every incentive to move to the highest four or five piles [grades] possible. . . . Then grade inflation will stop because . . there will be nowhere to go. . . . So why resist the new equilibrium? I don’t have any argument for resisting, but I don’t think everything’s quite so simple as Chris is saying. First, you can easily get compression so that almost everyone gets the same grade (“A”). So, no four or five piles. Second, the incentives for grading high have been there for awhile. To me, the more interesting question is: how is it that grade inflation hasn’t gone faster? Why would it take so many decades to reach a natural and obvious equilibrium? Here’s what I wrote last year : As a teacher who, like many others, assigns grades in an unregulated environment (that is, we have no standardized tests and no rules on how we should grade), all the incentives to toward giving only A’s: Wh
3 0.25606236 1803 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-14-Why girls do better in school
Introduction: Wayne Folta writes, “In light of your recent blog post on women in higher education, here’s one I just read about on a techie website regarding elementary education”: Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research . . . suggests that it’s because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts. . . . The study, co-authored by [Christopher] Cornwell and David Mustard at UGA and Jessica Van Parys at Columbia, analyzed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade. It examined students’ performance on standardized tests in three categories—reading, math and science-linking test scores to teachers’ assessments of their students’ progress, both academically and more broadly. The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, bo
4 0.16844292 1688 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-22-That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
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Introduction: Judah Guber writes about his new company : What we have done with Ultrinsic is created a system of incentives for students to allow them to invest in their ability to achieve a certain grade and when they achieve that grade we reward them with a cash incentive on top of receiving their original investment. This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . This is the dream of many economists: to c
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same-blog 1 0.97131127 825 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-27-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
Introduction: My upstairs colleague Blattman writes : The trend is unsurprising. Schools have every incentive to move to the highest four or five piles [grades] possible. . . . Then grade inflation will stop because . . there will be nowhere to go. . . . So why resist the new equilibrium? I don’t have any argument for resisting, but I don’t think everything’s quite so simple as Chris is saying. First, you can easily get compression so that almost everyone gets the same grade (“A”). So, no four or five piles. Second, the incentives for grading high have been there for awhile. To me, the more interesting question is: how is it that grade inflation hasn’t gone faster? Why would it take so many decades to reach a natural and obvious equilibrium? Here’s what I wrote last year : As a teacher who, like many others, assigns grades in an unregulated environment (that is, we have no standardized tests and no rules on how we should grade), all the incentives to toward giving only A’s: Wh
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Introduction: Mark Palko points to a news article by Michael Winerip on teacher assessment: No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30. . . . Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. . . . The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3′s or 4′s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to . . . the city’s most competitive high schools. . . . You would think the Department of Education would want to r
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Introduction: After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: 1. All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4.3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. 2. Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time
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Introduction: Judah Guber writes about his new company : What we have done with Ultrinsic is created a system of incentives for students to allow them to invest in their ability to achieve a certain grade and when they achieve that grade we reward them with a cash incentive on top of receiving their original investment. This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . This is the dream of many economists: to c
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Introduction: My upstairs colleague Blattman writes : The trend is unsurprising. Schools have every incentive to move to the highest four or five piles [grades] possible. . . . Then grade inflation will stop because . . there will be nowhere to go. . . . So why resist the new equilibrium? I don’t have any argument for resisting, but I don’t think everything’s quite so simple as Chris is saying. First, you can easily get compression so that almost everyone gets the same grade (“A”). So, no four or five piles. Second, the incentives for grading high have been there for awhile. To me, the more interesting question is: how is it that grade inflation hasn’t gone faster? Why would it take so many decades to reach a natural and obvious equilibrium? Here’s what I wrote last year : As a teacher who, like many others, assigns grades in an unregulated environment (that is, we have no standardized tests and no rules on how we should grade), all the incentives to toward giving only A’s: Wh
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Introduction: Kaiser asks the interesting question: How do you measure what restaurants are “overrated”? You can’t just ask people, right? There’s some sort of social element here, that “overrated” implies that someone’s out there doing the rating.
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Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
4 0.95182157 1098 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-04-Bayesian Page Rank?
Introduction: Loren Maxwell writes: I am trying to do some studies on the PageRank algorithm with applying a Bayesian technique. If you are not familiar with PageRank, it is the basis for how Google ranks their pages. It basically treats the internet as a large social network with each link conferring some value onto the page it links to. For example, if I had a webpage that had only one link to it, say from my friend’s webpage, then its PageRank would be dependent on my friend’s PageRank, presumably quite low. However, if the one link to my page was off the Google search page, then my PageRank would be quite high since there are undoubtedly millions of pages linking to Google and few pages that Google links to. The end result of the algorithm, however, is that all the PageRank values of the nodes in the network sum to one and the PageRank of a specific node is the probability that a “random surfer” will end up on that node. For example, in the attached spreadsheet, Column D shows e
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