Guilty, Your Honor. I Inflate Grades

The New York Times article last Sunday (12/26/10)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/education/26grades.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=grades&st=cse

got me to thinking about my own grades. Here are the conclusions:
1. I inflate grades.
2. My students make me do it.

Theoretically, student attributes, including ability, should be normally distributed within a class. For that population, there should be some As, more Bs, mostly Cs, and some Ds and Fs. Look at my grades and you see mostly As, some Bs, a few Cs, and no Ds or Fs. Are my classes composed of better than average MSU MBA students? Unless there is a way of stacking the deck, I don't think so. Maybe I'm a brilliant instructor who has this unusual ability of getting the average and below students to excel. I don't think so; besides, that would make me a poor instructor for the above average students who would not advance as far as the other students. Nope, pure and simple, I inflate.

Why? My students make me do it. Not all students, some students. I'm talking about the students who decided not to check out some of the tech tools or reflect on the impact of the tools. I'm not talking about getting a 1/2 on the reflection, I'm talking about not doing it. It was so easy: play with the tool, show me you did, and then write a reflection. Mostly, if you wrote anything, you got 2/2. Couldn't be easier.

I'm talking about students who didn't contribute much (or any) to wiki and/or decided to skip some/all of the SI initiative reflections. Contribute to wiki, get credit, regardless of the value added. Write an SI reflection, get full credit, regardless of the value add. Couldn't be easier.

Sure, I did my part. For the presentations--both consultants and C-level--I started at 5 and deducted. Normal distribution would say start at 2.5 and go up or down from there. Class participation? Same thing--start at 20 and deduct for absences and missed opportunities to contribute to class. My guess is that the mean is above 18. Imagine if we subtracted 8 from your participation score.

An MSU MBA graduate once told me that 50% of her job as a supervisor was "getting employees to show up." I was shocked. People don't show up! How/why miss the easy part. Now I get it. Getting some people to do the work--show up, if you will--is the hard part. The good news for the rest of you is that to inflate grades of these students I must inflate your grade. So, students really do make me do it.

The other side of this, of course, is that by not doing the work the student gets a lower grade and inflation is offset. Eurika! I still have too many As, but you give me Bs and Cs. Thank you, sort of.

Sorry if I sound grumpy. I'm not, just a little surprised and maybe a touch disheartened.

Dr. P.