I was really struck by this post on the LiveJournal applying to grad school forum. In a nutshell, an English/history major questions whether having taken 6-7 courses outside her majors Pass/Fail in the last 2 years will look bad on her transcript. (Oh, sorry, it's now called Pass/"No Pass" - insert curmudgeonly rant on the ridiculousness of the self-esteem movement in perverting language here if desired, or ignore.) The original poster (OP) admits to having taken this P/NP so that she could preserve a 3.92 cumulative GPA and focus extra effort on classes in her major.
I didn't comment on the post because I have nothing much to say to this particular person, and even though I have critical remarks about it, they aren't directed at this individual. This is what one's own blog is for.
First, taking 6-7 classes as P/NP in 2 years seems like a lot of P/NP. While I do not agree with the commenter who interpreted this as "slacking," it does seem to be a sort of questionable way to artificially limit one's workload. If I personally had a 3.92 GPA with 6-7 no-grade courses, I would feel very much like I have this on my transcript:
Cumulative GPA = 3.92*
*Note: 6-7 courses taken Pass/No Pass not accounted for in GPA. Recalculate cum GPA substituting C- (the lowest Pass grade) for these credits to yield real GPA of 3.53 - 3.58. Take off additional points because of how lame it is to pretend** to have a 3.92 when one doesn't really have one.
** Student may bring this transcript to Big Joe's Tattoo Shop to receive a 50% discount on "I Am An Actual Imposter" tattoo. (Students who took all math and/or econ courses P/NP may ask one of their quantitatively better prepared friends to explain the concepts of percentages and discounts.)
Second, the OP doesn't say what the courses were that she took P/NP, and I think that makes a difference in my personal interpretation of her GPA. If she took some demanding classes that people in English/History don't usually take, then the P/NP doesn't bother me much. If she took classes that other applicants to her grad programs also took, but took for a grade, then I look more disfavorably on the P/NP since it looks like she didn't think she could take those classes and do well or couldn't handle a normal workload.
Third, WTF is with a situation that could lead one commentor to note that she took a language class P/NP because her earlier "B in German...KILLED [her] GPA"? How can a single B do that even if you have been a 4.0 up to that point? If we assume she was halfway through her college career (60 hours) and had all A's plus one B, that results in a cum GPA of 3.95, hardly "KILLED." (One assumes one of the courses she got an A in was not statistics or that she has a very different idea about what it means to hurt one's GPA from mine.)
Fourth, what is with the high GPA's all these humanities majors report on this web site? I recognize that this is by no means a representative sample, but the social science and physical science majors seem to me to self-report lower GPA's than the English etc. majors. And in talking to classmates at school over the last couple years (mostly science, engineering, math, and CS majors), these people are not regularly getting a mix of A's and some B's in their classes either.
Posing this question to Robert, he found a report that Texas A&M puts out every semester with the grade distribution for every single class at the university. (He was familiar with it from when he was teaching.) And we looked up some numbers from the Spring 2008 semester. While this won't tell us precisely what GPA's look like for e.g. English majors versus Math majors, at least it will show what kinds of grades people get in the classes in these departments.
Department Total GPA
Perform. Art 3.490
Liberal Arts 3.272 (includes e.g. women's studies)
Computer Science 3.249
English 3.075
Hispanic Studies 3.072
Languages 3.070
Sociology 2.914
Philosophy 2.892
Psychology 2.885
Anthropology 2.884
Communications 2.879
Statistics 2.833
History 2.795
Poli Sci 2.783
Chemistry 2.714
Physics 2.684
Economics 2.669
Biology 2.551
Mathematics 2.320
School Total GPA
Education 3.509
Agriculture 3.167
Engineering 3.141
Business 3.118 (remember, usually must have/maintain a 3.0 to stay in the bus. school)
Liberal Arts 2.936 (includes humanities & social sciences)
Geosciences 2.903
Sciences 2.575
So these data are consistent with the claim that people tend to get higher grades in humanities courses than math/science courses. The social sciences are inbetween, which is about what I would have expected. (And yes, it also lends support to the notion that education courses are a joke. A 3.5 average?)
I also liked seeing the differences in average grades for the more advanced courses (taken primarily by majors) in math and English.
Serious-ish Math Courses (not everyone takes)
Calculus 1 2.071 n=2694
Calculus 2 2.036 n=1427
Calculus 3 2.295 n=696
Discrete 2.103 n=109
Linear Algebra 3.153 n=163
Diff Equations 2.666 n=891
Adv. Calculus 2.297 n=54
Fourier Series 2.920 n=56
Applied 2.743 n=179
Serious-ish English Courses (not everyone takes)
Am. Lit 3.025 n=459
Eng. Lit 1 2.753 n=335
Eng. Lit 2 3.033 n=190
Creative Writing 3.326 n=234
Adv. Comp. 3.176 n=135
Tech. Writing 2.861 n=556
Shakespeare 2.864 n=136
Am. Ethnic Lit 3.529 n=71
Child Lit 2.898 n=257
Adolescent Lit 3.045 n=96
Chaucer 2.564 n=57 (A tough one)
Women's Lit 3.226 n=34
Senior Seminar 3.367 n=101
So it doesn't appear to me that the relatively higher grades in English classes is due only to freshmen doing better in, say, their required Rhetoric & Composition class than their required College Algebra class. There is a tendency for higher-level classes to have higher grades in English than in Math also.
I can think of a couple of things that could contribute to The Great Humanities/Science GPA Divide:
1. It would be easier to make the course content of e.g. an English class simple (and hence easy to get a good grade in) than it would to make the course content of a math class simple. It's more obvious how to dumb down the content of an English class. After all, we all take English classes that require reading and writing essays starting in 7th grade and we don't all get F's, and I have seen literary criticism by actual professors on the same works that I read and wrote about in junior high (e.g. Great Expectations), albeit obviously at a very different level. However, there's only so easy you can make a math class and have it actually cover the relevant material. Differential equations is differential equations and 7th grade algebra is 7th grade algebra - they are not revved up or dumbed down versions of each other.
2. It is easier to resist grade inflation teaching courses like math and chemistry than it is English and history because the quantitative nature of the work makes grading more objective. (I am not saying hugely objective, simply more objective than with grading essays.) Social sciences would fall inbetween the humanities and sciences in grade inflation.
Hey, it occurred to me that the Texas A&M data might be able to provide evidence for this hypothesis. Here's what I found comparing GPA from spring 1986 (1st year in data set) versus spring 2008:
Math: 1986 = 2.286; 2008 = 2.320; change = +.034
Psych: 1986 = 2.685; 2008 = 2.885; change = +.200
English: 1986 = 2.673; 2008 = 3.075; change = +.402
Sciences: 1986 = 2.536; 2008 = 2.575; change = +.039
Lib Arts: 1986 = 2.644; 2008 = 2.936; change = +.292
This is the pattern I would have expected. Low grade inflation for math (and the sciences), high grade inflation for English, and moderate grade inflation for psychology. While the data could be interpreted as beng somewhat incomparable due to different types of students in 1986 versus 2008, I would have expected a secular downward trend in grades with time (given no grade inflation) because more marginal students are entering college in 2008 than in 1986.
Here are the average grades for the university as a whole over time (spring semester reported). Cue the Grade Inflation Alarm! Toooot toot tooooooot!
University overall
2008 = 3.051
2001 = 3.053
1996 = 2.989
1993 = 2.951
1991 = 2.874
1986 = 2.819
It seems likely to me that if, with a very little time spent looking at data on the Internet, I can find support for a grade inflation problem in the humanities (yes, from one college, but it seems like a relatively "normal" and representative one for this purpose, being a large state university), grad school adcoms in the humanities must be very well aware of what's going on with grades. No wonder I see prospective English or Women's Studies PhD applicants fretting publically about their "miserable" 3.7 GPA's and such. No wonder the original poster from the LJ forum was worried about protecting her 3.92 GPA from grades in other classes (particularly if they were from the physical sciences, where getting high C's is typical).
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7 comments:
Wow, six classes is like an eighth of your college career! That's a lot for pass/fail.
I think the grades are pretty inflated at my school. I don't know that any classes I've taken have had a final class average in the C range.
What stood out to me was how important "Rate my Professor" type information must be to maintaining a strong GPA. It was not unusual to see different professors teaching sections of the exact same class, where Smith had a 3.2-3.5 average, and Jones had a 2.0-2.3 average.
I did grades this morning for the class I am TA for, and the class average (calculated as a GPA like the TAMU data) was a 2.889. The vast majority of people ended up with a B.
I'm not sure about linear algebra, but for the other math classes I've taken, the final grade average has been a mid-range C, so assuming linear was a bit higher, I would predict a GPA of 2.6 or so for these courses.
I apparently was a fairly average grader. I was pretty close to the median each time I taught at A&M.
Fall '00 - 2.429 for my class, 2.621 overall in that class. Mine was 5th of 8 in difficulty.
Spring '01 - 2.941, 2.906, 3 of 5.
Summer '01 - 2.833, 2.910, 2 of 2.
Spring '02 - 2.955, 2.763, 5 of 10.
Summer '02 - 2.955, 3.000, 2 of 2.
Yes, the last two are identical.
I sort of admire people who can take classes pass/fail. I found my classes so hard that the difference between how much work I had to do for a D and for the highest grade I could get wasn't very large at all. I felt that if I slacked at all, I would be much more likely to just fail the class.
It's like the difference between me in the 9th grade and people who were strong enough to serve a volleyball out of bounds beyond the back line. Those people had to be careful, but I just had to try as hard as I could every time.
**
The relative GPA data (assuming it was true for my school back in the 80's, and why wouldn't it be?) mean I was even worse compared to my pre-med friends than I looked! Oh, well.
**
My experience of psychology courses back then was that there was so little known that it wasn't easy to make questions you wouldn't already know the answers to from just having lived your entire life as a human being, raised among other humans. They took one of two tactics: 1) making you memorize who tested what hypotheses on what dates and who made up what terms for what phenomena (favorite example - the TOT phenomenon: what happens when something is right on the Tip Of your Tongue) (the GRE subject test does this) or 2) trick questions. Fortunately for me, they mostly went for the trick questions because I was better at guessing those right than at memorizing crap. For example, I took intro with a friend, and we both knew the material, but she got a D and I got an A, all because she narrowed it down to the same two answers, but then guessed wrong.
**
I never could understand how people could get straight A's until graduate school when I met some people who did. They did everything I did (do all the work and study the interesting and important things) but then also figured out what the professor thought was important and studied that plus took risky courses pass/fail. (Or as they say at UT, credit/no credit. Which sounds not quite as ridiculous as pass/no pass for some reason.) I really didn't have what it took to study some of those things that professors thought were important but I didn't. I would just fall asleep instantly every time.
Sally, I liked your point about math being more different at the different levels than English is (where, as you pointed out, 7th graders and PhD candidates can write papers on the same topics).
One other thing about math is that the "certification" aspect of grades is more important because math is cumulative (as are many of the other sciences). Giving someone a passing grade in Calc 1 doesn't just say, "This person did adequately well in this class;" it also says, "This person is ready for Calc 2." Passing people who will then flunk subsequent courses isn't doing anyone a favor.
Rvman - From what you said before about grade distribution, it sounds like your classes had more variability in grades than the marketing class I was TA in, but that may be due to the group project in the marketing class bring down some low A's and bringing up some high C's into the B category.
Debbie - I'm moving my response to a separate post because you brought up so many issues to comment on.
Tam - Good point re: the cumulative nature of math coursework. Somebody's ability to perform well in the upper-division course on Victorian literature is probably not much affected by what they got out of a previous class on contemporary African literature (except for the extent to which all of these courses are attempting to develop and refine one's analytical and writing abilities).
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