Quantitative Psychology Brownbag
Monday 7 February, 2022: 12:30-1:30pm Eastern time.
Dr. Alexander Petrov
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
Title: Personal reflections on grade inflation, academic freedom, and educational standards
Abstract: The Mission statement of our Department proclaims that we train our students "to become 21st-century psychological scientists able to evaluate, apply, and create knowledge." However, I routinely come across *some* students in my undergraduate classes who fall far short of this standard. Indeed, not only are they not able to evaluate or apply knowledge, they simply *lack* basic knowledge of psychology. And yet, these students get passing grades quite easily and eventually obtain a university degree in psychology. In my talk, I will share some personal experiences from the classroom, summarize data about some worrying national trends, analyze the causes and consequences of grade inflation, and attempt to clarify the tangle of conceptual confusions that surrounds these controversial topics. I will conclude with an appeal to faculty to take steps to formulate explicit educational standards and put in place mechanisms for enforcing them.
Bibliography
Four papers and a writing at a link are provided as background for Dr. Petrov’s presentation. He recommends reading the Rjstaczer article first.
Rojstaczer, S. (2002). Grade inflation at American colleges and universities.
Stroebe, W. (2000). Student evaluation of teaching encourages poor teaching and contributes to grade inflation: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42 (1), 276-294.
Johnson, V. E. (2003). Grade inflation: A crisis in college education (Chapters 1 and 8). New York: Springer
Biggs, M. (2008). Grade "inflation" and the professionalism of the professorate. In L. H. Hunt (Ed.) (2008). Grade inflation: Academic standards in higher education (Chap. 6, pp. 109-120). SUNY Press.
Slavin, R. E. (2018). Assessing student learning. In R. E. Slavin, Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice (12/e, Ch. 13). See in particular the sections on Bloom's taxonomy (pp. 346-347), Evaluation (pp. 348-355) and Grading (pp. 373-379).
Dr. Alex Petrov is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on relational reasoning, analogy-making, and high-level cognition. He also conducts research on visual cognition, visual perceptual learning, spatial vision, and neural-network models.