But maybe the worst effect of the grading differences we’re talking about is when students have to choose between a course/professor that will be the better experience, or teach them more, and the one that will give a better grade. You often hear that grades aren’t the point, so the choice should be easy. But there are tradeoffs here.

And I don???? think there???? anything stopping a corporation that wants to construct its own exams. Google rather famously has something along these lines for its applicants.

No no no no no, shrieks the HR geek in my head.

You can give job applicants a test, if and only if you meet one of two conditions:
The test has a direct and demonstrable connection to the specific job.
The test does not systematically give higher scores to one group than another in any protected category (sex and ethnicity.)

That’s the general understanding of the “Duke Power Standard”, from the Griggs vs Duke Power case in which it was articulated.

Colleges aren’t bound by that rule in selecting students, and transcripts are not a forbidden thing for employers to check. It’s one of the rules that tremendously enhances the power of colleges.

Susie is a hard-working student with a lot of potential. Susie does very well in her classes in general and her professor, with whom she has taken many classes, notices this. One weekend her professor assigns a take-home essay exam. This same weekend, it turns out Susie has to do a Physics problem set and practice for her play. In addition, she goes to a party Saturday for her roommate’s birthday. Susie doesn’t do as good of a job as she could under other circumstances, but she pulls out a decent effort and gets a B.

Clara is in the same class. Clara is a bit of a slacker. Clara doesn’t do anything particularly different this weekend, and turns in an exam of about the same caliber as Susie. Because the professor has lower expectations for Clara, she gets an B+ on the exam.

I believe that the complaint leveled in McArdle’s blog is that this is unfair – Susie’s being punished for her general level of potential rather than treated on the same level as Clara. Presumably in almost any situation, this wouldn’t have any long-term impact on either student. Susie’s overall record wouldn’t suffer too much and maybe the slight unfairness is worth it to send the message to Susie, “watch out Susie, you can’t let your extracurricular activities and partying get in the way of academic work.” I think it probably it is ok to grade (to some degree) based on a student’s potential in order to better communicate with that student how good/bad their recent efforts are. I just wanted to point out that the original complaint was about fairness and not about the effectiveness of grades as a measurement for hiring.

1) What you assess is a specific body of technical knowledge that builds from class to class.

2) All the students enter the class at approximately the same level. If you’re in whatever 201, you can be expected to know what was in Whatever 102. This would, presumably, map neatly onto years – a junior should be taking courses at X-level to prepare them for taking Y-level courses as a senior.

(At least, that’s what the comments implied to me.) There are, obviously, aspects of US college education that work like this. But there are also areas that cannot be shoehorned into this model.

Music again: a college music department may teach students who start at radically different levels as performers. Some will have been playing their instrument since early childhood and have already played in competitions, etc. These enter as freshman but are in no sense beginners. Others are genuine beginners; others are in between. The genuine beginners are usually non-majors, and the advanced are often (but by no means always) majors. Even music majors can vary considerably.

Under these circumstances, every student has to be assessed as a performer on how much progress that particular student makes, not against some absolute yardstick.

This is an extreme case, but lesser versions of the same phenomenon crop up elsewhere. E.g. the survey course that counts for both Gen Ed (or whatever) and for a major. The compromise there can be (usually is?) that, for a major, it’s an easy course.

I wonder if those commenters were tacitly assuming the sort of thing one can get in the hard sciences, with separate courses for majors and non-majors, so that they’re never in the same room for a science class. I also wonder if they’d prefer the older British model of a highly structured and specialized curriculum that culminates in high-stakes exams at the very end that test everything you’re supposed to have learned over your years.

And I don’t think there’s anything stopping a corporation that wants to construct its own exams. Google rather famously has something along these lines for its applicants.

Maybe the fact that most corporations choose neither option suggests that transcripts and rough metrics of school quality are perfectly adequate informational signals for the purposes of most employers, and that when they want more information about applicants, they precisely do NOT want a test, but instead something more about the applicant’s less measurable qualities–their ambition, their drive, their ability to work with others, their ability to improvise. Which is where letters of reference, interviews, internships, trial positions, in-house training programs and so on come into play.

The idea that universities need to have another tier of mandatory national testing for graduates is much beloved among one constituency of assessment advocates, but I think this has little to do with assessment: for many of the people most obsessed with the idea, this is really a back-door strategy for enforcing disciplinary canons again. More on the role of canons in the humanities in a main post today.

Wouldn’t be easier to allow corporations (or whomever) to give exams in which candidates show what they can do rather than have to figure out whether an A from one big state school is the same as an A at another big state school.