More on Grade Inflation

Reader Lucas Wyman notes a specific example of how grade inflation has helped to drain resources from science and math:

Last fall, I found a course description book being thrown away in a stack of books by a retiring faculty member. The catalogue was from 1983 (the year I was born), and it contained a great many interesting surprises. The mathematics department offered a second course in logic which covered model-theoretic results and set theory, a course in point set topology, a course in algebraic topology, one in complex analysis, measure theory at the undergraduate level (now considered graduate), several courses in theoretical computer science, and what is now two classes in abstract algebra was only one class. I asked my faculty advisor why there had been such a change (he started in 1986), and this was his explanation (paraphrased from memory and condensed substantially from several conversations):

"At the time we had almost 400 majors in the department with nearly 150 of them in pure math, but now we have about 300 majors with 50 in pure math. Changes in the [state] teacher requirements (for high school) forced us to restructure the algebra class since a decent course would be too hard for most HS teachers. The reason that we lost students is both that a lot of bright people went into computer science, and our program was considered too hard, so that people started going to easier majors. As we were forced to stop running courses, people began to come back because the program requirements became easier, and it's been sort of a spiral down since."

Seems to jibe pretty well with your experience and intuition...

Yep. The really difficult part, from the perspective of a professor who'd like to reverse the trend, is that you cannot make the change unilaterally. If you started grading your classes harder than others, you would just be punishing those students who took your course instead of someone else's -- and probably reducing your future class sizes. In addition, you'd probably be lowering your evaluations relative to other instructors. I think this situation has many features of the classic prisoners' dilemma.

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The Invisible Foot Strikes Again

Mark Kleiman provides a comprehensive breakdown of the issues raised by the OMB's threat to give the DEA only a small budget increase because of its gross inefficacy. But I prefer Amy’s quick-and-dirty bottom line:

So remember folks, if you're a totally ineffective government agency doing a job that shouldn't be done in the first place, you might only get a small amount of extra money, like say a few million dollars.

And that, of course, is what happens when government works *well*. The usual rule for bureaucracies is the worse you do, the more funding you get.

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Not Making the Grade

This article about grade inflation struck a chord with me, since I have to deal with grade inflation on a daily basis. The following observation rang especially true:

Unfortunately, grade inflation is not costless. One consequence is that students are discouraged from taking science courses, where the nature of the subject matter has held down grade inflation, in favor of those in the humanities, where it is rampant. Over time, this has caused universities to drain resources from science programs.

Now, I don't know if it's actually true that resources have been drained from science programs (has there been a study?), but it definitely fits with my intuition and personal observation. Some disciplines, including my own, have a greater inherent resistance to grade inflation than others. It's easier to mark someone down for a clear error in math or graphing than to mark someone down for awkwardness (though not actual grammar errors) in writing. When there are some answers that are clearly right or wrong, not just a matter of opinion, grading standards are not as difficult to maintain.

Not surprisingly, the average grades are lower in economics and physics than any other department at my university (or so I've been told). And the students undoubtedly react by avoiding courses in subjects where the grading is known to be harder. If universities respond at all to the ebb and flow of student demand - and I think they do, though not with the speed and efficiency of for-profit organizations - then it's inevitable that resources will flow from the harder to the easier departments, other things equal. Of course, the other-things-equal assumption is important; if firms recognize the value of a good education in science and math, they will offer higher wages for students so educated, and that should increase the demand for the appropriate majors. Unfortunately, not all students are so far-sighted, and in any case, the grade differential still biases the selection of majors. Some students on the margin, who would have picked a math or science major if the grading were comparable, will choose the touchy-feely majors instead. So much the worse for them - and the rest of us.

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Return of the Muse

One of my favorite websites, Free-Market.Net, has risen from the ashes. After the demise of its parent company, the Henry Hazlitt Foundation, I wasn't sure Free-Market.Net would find a home - but fortunately, the International Society for Individual Society has rescued it. And as though to mark the occasion, they've resumed the Free-Market.Net Personal Update service, which until December 2002 had emailed me a daily list of web links on issues I specified. That service was my source for many blog topics, and I've been hurting for inspiration since then. I'm so pleased it's back!

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People Who Live in Glass Vaticans…

Good news -- the Vatican has given the thumbs-up to Harry Potter. The best part is the following quotation from Vatican spokesman Peter Fleetwood:

I don't think that any of us grew up without the *imaginary* world of fairies, magicians, *angels* and witches.

The emphasis is mine, of course.

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On a Lighter Note

Gene Healy provides a knee-slappingly funny deconstruction of smoking bans, as well as a pants-wettingly clever rejoinder to his critics. The short version: Smoking is cool. Dweebs and sissies who can’t handle the smoky atmosphere and stinky clothes lobby for laws that make it easier for them to hang out with cool people.

I, like Gene, am one of those non-smokers who has tried and failed to pick up the habit -- but who still recognizes the coolness of smoking. Its self-destructiveness, its “air of futility and tragedy” as Gene puts it, does not make smoking uncool -- on the contrary, the danger is precisely the allure. The people who would redefine smoking as “uncool” remind me of the elementary school teachers who tried to convince us that “Reading Is Cool!” and “Math Is Cool!” What a crock. Reading and math are useful, indispensable in fact, and (for some) interesting. But reading is not cool unless it’s Ken Kesey or J. D. Salinger; math is not cool unless you’re taking book. Point being, “cool” is not a universal word for anything good or desirable. It’s a specific attribute of things that, fairly often, are fun laced with some degree of danger. Trying to convince people otherwise is a good way to identify yourself as, not merely a dweeb or sissy, but someone who doesn’t even quite understand modern American slang.

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Federal Department of Lying to Your Kids

According to the Drug Czar… okay, hold on for a minute, I can't finish that sentence without inserting a quick rant. Doesn't the Constitution of the United States forbid the granting of titles of nobility? And is not "Czar" a title of nobility? Yeah, I know, "Czar" isn't the man's real title. It's really "Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy." But nobody calls him that. And the fact that a government official in the American democracy is regularly referred to as a Russian monarch should give us pause, don't you think?

Back to the top. According to the Drug Czar, it's a good idea to lie to your kids about drugs -- specifically, about your own past use of drugs. I think Amy's take on this is exactly right, so I won't belabor it. I will, however, point out a couple of misleading claims in Czar John Walters's comments.

First, he says that parents who smoked marijuana "should warn their children that the dope being peddled today is much more potent than what the older generation smoked." While that's true, it erroneously implies that people who smoke now are getting more high than before, whereas in fact the evidence indicates that marijuana smokers seem to aim for a "target" level of intoxication, and now it just takes less weed to get there than it did before. (I found that out from Mark Kleiman's blog a few weeks or months ago, though his archives don't seem to be operative at the moment.)

Second, Walters says that "of the 6 million Americans undergoing drug treatment today, about 60 percent are marijuana-dependent." Notice the clever wording. He does *not* say that 60 percent of people undergoing drug treatment are undergoing treatment for marijuana. What the statistic really shows is that, for every ten people undergoing treatment for *some* drug, six of them also use marijuana. This is not surprising -- someone who uses crack might very well like weed, too. But the crack, not the weed, is most likely the reason they're in treatment.

I disagree with the Czar's notion that lying to and misleading your children is a good policy. But I'll give him this much credit: at least he's leading by example.

UPDATE: Mark kindly sent me the link to his comments on marijuana potency. Aside from the point above (that pot smokers seem to aim for a target high), it also turns out that Walters's factual claim about the potency per ounce is also bogus, for reasons Mark explains.

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