Based on my experience taking 10+ APs 10+ years ago, the scores were already inflated. A 4 seemed like it indicated the student might understand the material well enough to build on it with subsequent study in that area, and a 5 raised the odds to probably. Never understood how schools could give credit for 3s, besides language where higher/lower scores could inform placement level in college.
On one hand, you could argue that grade inflation is actually a good thing: if pedagogical methods are getting better over time, then you should naturally expect grades to rise if standards stay the same. After all, we no longer expect literacy to be limited to the rich and/or highly educated.
On the other hand, grade inflation makes it harder to filter above-average students from below-average students. You could combat this by grading on a curve or by making exams harder, but this risks driving students into deleterious zero-sum behaviors - see Asian "cram schools" or American "tiger parenting".
On the gripping hand, maybe grades are the wrong thing to focus on. There does exist the argument that all social classes need smart people, not just the upper-middle/upper classes. Perhaps we should be focusing on improving living standards across society rather than attempting to brain-drain the working class. But this sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would be used to justify aristocracy.
> You could combat this by grading on a curve or by making exams harder, but this risks driving students into deleterious zero-sum behaviors - see Asian "cram schools" or American "tiger parenting".
So people studying more is deleterious behavior? There's definitely a point at which is not a healthy childhood, but by many objective metrics (educational attainment, salary, etc) "Tiger Parenting" is a beneficial strategy.
Yes but not when judging by life fulfillment or happiness. All tiger parenting does is instill a sense that the child is never good enough, or that they must work like crazy to be valuable at all to society, both of which are extremely harmful on the longterm.
I think this is overly dismissive and pedantic. The person you're replying to is speaking more broadly, and presenting a hypothetical model where we would expect to see something that looks ostensibly like grade inflation, but isn't.
It's obvious that they understand this distinction, so I don't really believe your comment is all that constructive.
In the context of the subject article, it certainly appears that there was a sudden change based on a test-grading change and thus score inflation is indeed what happened. However, it's still possible that the former panel-of-experts system was inadvertently a more relative grading system which was slowly adapting to better pedagogical methods and better performing students. For what it's worth, I consider this unlikely, but it's an idea worth considering rather than dismissing entirely.
> if pedagogical methods are getting better over time, th
This is a faulty premise from the get-go. Human learning, and teaching, go back hundreds of thousands of years. It goes back farther than any technological invention, before the knot, before fire (hell, we wouldn't have those but for teaching/learning). We've been doing this a long fucking time. If we weren't good at it, we wouldn't be the technological (or artistic, or philosophic, etc) species that we are.
We've gotten pretty close to optimal, and we did that centuries or even millennia ago. We're definitely in an era of diminishing returns in pedagogical research. And if we could be honest, this certainly isn't a hard science. Hell, it's usually in the college of education, and not included in the college of social sciences. If we could believe that it was less of a pseudoscience than, I dunno, astrology, then I might even think that there'd be this principle of "we teach to maximize everyone's potential" and not "if done correctly, identical outcomes are possible for every individual". So, no, I have no evidence to support the idea that people who would've flunked 50 years before could magically be made to pass today with the same material.
> On the other hand, grade inflation makes it harder to filter above-average students from below-average students.
This is in part because the grade no longer signifies a measure of knowledge of the materials, and is rather a rubberstamp. But it is also the case that in coddling those who did not deserve to pass, there was no longer enough resources to properly teach those who might've genuinely earned a passing grade in the previous era. This is hidden anyway due to the grade inflation.
>You could combat this by grading on a curve or by making exams harder, but this risks driving students into deleterious zero-sum behaviors - see Asian "cram schools" or American "tiger parenting".
This is plainly false. If people come to understand that you can't cheat or force the grade through Asian tiger parenting, then everyone understands it's just pointless to try. And we return to uninflated grades. But that's a little too unprogressive, I think, for us to ever return to that outlook.
Grade inflation is the proof everyone uses to justify to themselves efforts towards cheating grades. "See, dumb people can get good ones too if they just figure out the correct hustle!" Some of these are more admirable than others ("I'll just study 39 hours per day!"), but it amounts to the same. People who will never understand the material believing that this is not a fundamental barrier to success in that field cause all sorts of problems.
> On the gripping hand, maybe grades are the wrong thing to focus on.
If we do away with grading, how is that any different than giving everyone an A/4.0/whatever? Except, maybe it's a little less work for the instructor who no longer has to scribble down a letter next to each name?
The IQ of the average college student has dropped from ~120 to 102 over time.
College no longer the domain of a people pursuing intellectually-demanding careers. It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public, costing them a fortune not only in tuition, textbooks, boarding, etc., but also in the opportunity cost of delaying their earnings and career advancement by 4+ years. We’re now stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.
By ignoring the problems, and actually making them worse by lowering academic standards and pushing the student loan burden to taxpayers, it reeks of either gross incompetence or corruption in our government.
If so, Google Scholar finds only two citations to it, neither interesting, which tells me the conclusions haven't been really examined by others in the field.
I bring this up because my first thought was to wonder how they handled any implicit cultural bias which might have been in the 1950s-era tests. If the IQ tests favored well-off white students, which were over-represented in college students back then, then IQ result would be excessively high for the 1950s students.
The alternative explanation for the secular decrease in student IQ is that IQ tests became less culturally biased over the same period of time.
I saw no discussion of this possibility in the paper.
Sometimes you can just blame people. All you need to do is hear the stories of parents forcing meetings with teachers to complain about how their child is failing because they didn't submit any assignments. And the school administration pressures the teachers into acquiescing to the parent's demands.
If 100 is average IQ, isn’t it more likely that a higher percentage of population enrolling in college has caused the average college IQ to revert to the average population IQ?
You might say it’s a distinction without a difference, but surely it’s a healthy trend for more than 10% of the population to have access to a college education. (120 IQ is 90th percentile.)
The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?
I dunno, I think it’s a question of framing. If you think that the lowered standards of admission (which are not evenly distributed amongst all colleges, btw - I doubt the average IQ at Harvard is 100) will degrade the experience for the more intelligent students, then sure, I was restating GP’s point.
But I’m not sure that’s the case. You get out of college what you put into it. The presence of some students with average intelligence should have a limited affect on the experience of someone with higher intelligence (YMMV - this depends on the quality of the institution and the effort of the student).
There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?
> The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?
The point that college stopped being a signal of raw intelligence and potential and became a way to gatekeep people who couldn't afford it from the same level of white-collar jobs of people that could.
> There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?
Probably to some degree, but it wasn't that pronounced. People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.
> People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.
You've conveniently not stated what you to believe that threshold to be, and likely no evidence exists to support your hypothesis so I'm not even going to ask for it.
About 44% of the population goes through college.[1] If this population was the top 44% by IQ, then the minimum IQ would be 102.[2]
Instead the average IQ is 102, meaning many college students are below average in intelligence. We’re populating our universities with students of less academic potential than you would expect given the number enrolled.
The question is not whether any particular person can benefit from university education - the answer is that there is a possibility of benefit for any person. That does not mean that every person should attend university.
The question we should be considering is, given that university education comes at substantial expense, and that the number of students our university system can accommodate is necessarily limited: what students are justified in going to university, by their ultimate social and personal benefit?
I would argue that sending unintelligent people through university is counter-productive: it undermines the quality of conversation and culture of the university by allowing mid-wits to shift the conversation. It undermines the standards that professors apply to their students by making it intractable to fail much of their class. It lowers the bar, even for the capable students. Thus it diminishes the education, most tragically, for the capable students who might otherwise take us to greater heights of understanding.
>It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public,
This isn't a "problem" per se because that is literally what we drilled into multiple generations of people.
"Go to college if you don't want to flip burgers forever.", as was oft said. We will become a country of white collar service industries, it was oft said.
We demanded everyone go to college, everyone thus went to college regardless if it made any logical or financial sense to do so.
Meanwhile, the trades are seeing fewer and fewer students and apprentices, blue collar jobs are seeing fewer and fewer applicants, and people who actually gave some thought to going to college or not generally have had happier lives.
The problem isn't everyone going to college, it's the notion everyone should go to college.
We required them to go to college (employers require the checkbox with no exposure to the cost), didn't pay for it (funds to schools reduced to lower taxes), made them take out loans that aren't dischargeable (what other obligations are not dischargeable in bankruptcy besides tax claims, spousal and child support, etc?), did not provide any guarantee for a job mandating the obligation, and did all of this when folks were too young to understand the trap they were sent into. We should be ashamed of this, but in America, this is a Tuesday.
You must internalize the externality of requiring a college degree to obtain a job, and shift the cost to the demanding parties. Universal access to community college and robust apprenticeship pipelines are also potential solutions. Otherwise, people will just give up [1] [2] [3], as it is the rational course of action. Think in systems. With all due respect, this system is garbage and we can do better if improved outcomes are desired.
The trades are not "struggling". They have the same administrative incompetence issue as uni's. Unions in the long term destroyed your ability to work in a trade by requiring indentured servitude to get your certificate. The one you need to pull any kind of permit or do basic work.
Government and unions have intentionally choked the life out of trades by ensuring very few can get into it. It's a club, and you ain't in it.
The solution is effective - nullify duration requirements, replace with in person testing.
And related to this, there's the failure of secondary schools to actually sufficiently educate children. Is it budget cuts, flawed curriculum, or (this is approaching conspiracy theory territory) a particular political party wanting to keep the population stupid, because a better educated population would vote against them?
Definitely not budget cuts. School budgets have surprisingly little to do with educational outcomes. See Abbott districts in New Jersey for one of the starkest examples of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
Despite having better per-pupil funding than the wealthiest districts in the state (thanks to a court order mandating increased funding) student performance has stayed the same and even worsened in these districts.
The single biggest determiners of school performance seems to be the level of parental involvement and the average IQ of the students. Well those, plus selection effects to bump up numbers: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-t...
The problem is they have several conflicting goals and education is only one of them. Secondary schools teach whatever their local government or state wants.
Now there are things like UT Austin's online high school where they teach everything like Khan Academy. Again they are teaching to meet whatever standard the state told them to meet. https://highschool.utexas.edu/hs_courses
Here's my experience. I went to a majority black school my freshman year and was initially placed into core classes. These classes were filled with clowns and I immediately demanded assessment testing to assess out. Once I was in AP classes, shit got real and I definitely felt like I got what I put in: I could have learned a lot but chose to do the minimum. I also felt like my fundamentals were so flawed that they had to grade me on a curve in order to not fail me. Of course this did me a disservice but I did put in a little effort.
Anyway, the next year I transferred to a white school and they placed me in core classes again. Difference was that in the white school, these kids were chill so I was fine doing the bare minimum. In this environment, the bar was set so low now, it was easy to ace anything. I did take some AP classes that were challenging.
So my hot take is that school is hard for those looking for a challenge and willing to advocate for themselves. I chose to take assessment tests. I went into the offices to talk to department heads. I never once told my parents this or anyone really. I just knew I wasn't personable enough to survive a year of "looking ass" jokes.
Well said. I have a plethora of personal experience dealing with incompetent chair warmers at big uni's everyone has heard of.
The solution is actually simple. remove all federal student loan aid and grants. Only project grants should be used to onboard students into a higher uni education. If there's no work to be done then no students. There should never be an education program where the professors are not including their students in tangible work.
Guess we have to close all those pesky departments that don’t use many funds for research because the professors only work on fundenmental problems that don’t have linear solution. Goodbye theoretical physics!
> Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization’s business by making AP courses seem more attractive.
Yes. Of course. Some people in the comments will lament letting the dum dums into college but that’s not the problem. The problem is we consistently see this pattern across our society. Profit above all else. Our entire society in the western world now is a big game to extract as many dollars (sorry, value) from each other as possible through any means necessary. And we are not learning our lesson.
Kinda short on analysis. This could be grade inflation, it could be better prep or even cheating. Or just a short-term statistical aberration that regresses to the mean in a year or two.
Ugh. Which will reduce their value to middle and working class families who could otherwise use strong educational values to help their kids rise, since getting a pile of 5s despite going to a mediocre public school will be less impressive. Just like deemphasizing SATs.
Why can't the US treat education seriously the way East Asian countries do? Or hell, even the way Germany does with its emphasis on vocational schooling as an alternative to university?
Feels like the US picked the worst of both these systems.
> Or hell, even the way Germany does with its emphasis on vocational schooling as an alternative to university?
Increasing emphasis on vocational schooling would probably be a good idea from an economic (when viewed outside the narrow free market lens) and national competitiveness standpoint.
I kind of feel like there may be some ideological factors going on, but I don't know enough about Germany or East Asia to comment. Are those countries more comfortable with certain kinds of inequality or are vocational professions more respected (or a little bit of both)?
In Germany I think it's a bit of both. Beginning in 5th grade, pupils attend different schools. It differs a bit between the states, but generally those in the university track schools (gymnasium) will attend secondary school until 12th or 13th grade then go on to university while the other schools finish at 9th or 10th grade. Those students can then begin working, take an apprenticeship or attend vocational school.
While it may be beneficial to have support for apprenticeships and vocational training, it's controversial that the decision point is made so early. At that age, it may be less about the child's ambitions and abilities and more about the family's resources and social class.
> While it may be beneficial to have support for apprenticeships and vocational training, it's controversial that the decision point is made so early. At that age, it may be less about the child's ambitions and abilities and more about the family's resources and social class.
Part of me thinks that may not be such a bad thing. It's very meritocratic thinking to assume that the smartest ("best") kids should always bubble to the top, but that also probably has some perverse consequences. All parts of society need and benefit from talent (e.g. becoming a union leader or a really skilled mechanic), and concentrating talent at the top helps tell a (false) moral story that only those at the top are really deserving of the rewards.
A lot of Americans don't actually value education, as in learning, they value the degrees. Once you understand this, you understand why parents push for backwards things such as grade inflation.
Education in the abstract is good, but East Asia is probably not the model to emulate. IMO East Asia has Goodharted "education" to the point of being acutely destructive to society. South Korea treats education so seriously that the endless death march of cram school is widely cited as a primary cause of their cratering birth rate. China recently realized the zero-sum rat race of private school tutoring was causing a similar effect and is trying to ban it. There are fixes to be applied to US education but East Asia isn't where to look to.
AP is a scam, ought to be banned entirely by the dept of education. Yes SATs are good for class mobility, but they shouldn’t exist for the same reason: because they are a profit motive for a large org that has captured most of the market. High school should not be about preparing for college.
I taught AP along with non-AP chemistry for a number of years and I think the AP program is a good fit for those students who plan on going to university, especially those interested in the sciences. In two semesters we covered almost the full range of chemistry topics (only organic was slighted) and the students came out well prepared for college chemistry.
The value in an AP course, to my mind, is not the AP exam. It's that the class has the depth and the pace of a college class. Even those who barely passed my course knew a lot more chem than those in the non-AP class.
