blogcutter

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71854&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=grading

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71854

Frazz for 11/06/2025:

And for 11/07/2025:

The "difficulty" of organic chemistry courses is connected to their role as gatekeepers for admission to medical school. Such courses don't just teach relevant background information, they also calibrate students' ability (and willingness) to deal with certain kinds of methods and pressures.

This function applies in an even purer form to calculus courses, which are also required by med schools, though they lack any significant applicability to doctors' future educational or practical experience. As I wrote back in 2009,

The role of college calculus seems to me rather like the role of Latin and Greek in 19th-century education: it's almost entirely useless to most of the students who are forced to learn it, and its main function is as a social and intellectual gatekeeper, passing through just those students who are willing and able to learn to perform a prescribed set of complex and meaningless rituals.

Over the years, I've asked many clinicians and clinical researchers whether they've ever needed (or wanted) to apply in their work what they learned in their college calculus course(s) — and so far, the number of "yes" responses is zero. This is not to say that math is irrelevant in these disciplines, whose practitioners need a better grounding in statistics and linear algebra than they generally get. But expertise in integrating various types of equations is not the help that they need. (See "When 90% is 32%", "(Mis-) Interpreting medical tests", etc.)

Stepping back a bit, grading has at least three goals:

1. Establishing how well someone knows something;
2. Motivating people to learn something;
3. Providing a basis for choosing some people over others.

If the goal is (1), then the best outcome is one where everyone gets the highest possible score.

If the goal is (2), then the best outcome is probably the same, where every participant is fully motivated, although it also works when there are some slackers who get lower grades or fail completely.

It's only for goal (3) that a broad distribution of results is what we want. In my own teaching, it's goals (1) and (2) that I've had in mind, so that I'm fine with results like this:

That distribution is suboptimal for goal (3), a fact that doesn't bother me at all. I'd be happier, in fact, if everyone in the class got an A — like Caulfield in the strips at the top of the post, I'm inclined to see lower grades as my failure to teach, not the students' failure to learn.

And this brings us to the recent fuss about grade inflation, starting with "Harvard College's Grading System Is 'Failing,' Report on Grade Inflation Says", The Harvard Crimson 10/27/2025, with broad media commentary.

If students are getting A or A+ without actually knowing the material, that's worth worrying about. Whether that's what's going on isn't clear to me, however.

It's interesting in this context to read Bertrand Russell's 1924 essay "Freedom or Authority in Education". Russell allows a role for authority, e.g.

It is obvious that most children, if they were left to themselves, would not learn to read or write, and would grow up less adapted than they might be to the circumstances of their lives. There must be educational institutions, and children must be to some extent under authority.

But nowhere in the essay does he mention grading, or the role of grades in choosing among students for subsequent opportunities. It's not clear whether this reflects the culture of the times, or his own attitudes and experiences.

In closing, I should also mention my own experience with organic chemistry in college, many years ago. The pre-meds in the course were so concerned about their rankings that they sabotaged each other's lab experiments, and razored out the crucial pages in the reference works on reserve in the library. This cancelled for me what might have been a career in molecular biology: "Do I want to spend more time in the company of these assholes? Hell, no."

Which was probably an over-reaction. But still…

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71854&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=grading

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71854