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March 8, 2010

Grades continue to climb, but does it matter?

Todd Findelmeyer:

Grades awarded to undergraduates attending college in the United States have gone up significantly in the past couple decades according to a report titled "Grading in American Colleges and Universities," which was published in the Teachers College Record.

The article was written by UW-Madison graduate Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University. Rojstaczer is a retired professor of geophysics at Duke University and the creator of GradeInflation.com, a website that tracks grading trends.

Rojstaczer has posted a free copy of the article on his Forty Questions blog.

The report analyzes decades of grading patters at American four-year institutions and notes that "grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 8, 2010 1:06 AM
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