The recent revelation of the inflated grades in the music department at MSU is simply a result of the national trend in grading. Nationally, education majors also have very high grades, according to CBS’s moneywatch.com, even though education majors have the lowest scores on national exams of all majors.
Why do local high schools have multiple valedictorians, all with perfect grade point averages? Kids aren’t smarter these days than in days gone by, when only occasionally would a student make it through high school with perfect grades. Many of our teachers make it through college with hardly any competition, getting grades that mean next to nothing, and now many are handing out meaningless grades to their students.
When a music dean states 80 percent of their students receive As in their classes because they are “A” students, that’s simply untrue. To suggest there is little if any differentiation between students implies that the professors don’t know how to teach or they are simply looking for good student evaluation forms. What student doesn’t want an “A?”
The inflation in grades began when we were required to have our students grade the effectiveness of our instruction. Up went the grades and up went the students’ opinion of our effectiveness. If I give all my students an “A,” suddenly I’m a very good professor. Those music students have some great professors.
Our educational system is messed up from top to bottom. Too many of our K-12 teachers were below-average students. Our College of Education should identify some courses that prevent those below-average students from becoming the teachers of our children. The top administrators at MSU and the college deans could cut the budget of units with inflated grades and not allow any pay raises for instructors who hand out all those As.
Merle C. Potter, retired MSU professor
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