Race to the Top Education

[Lamplighter]

The mission is education, but job-training is just one of the hidden expectations.
So, at times, grades become the ultimate goal for some students and/or parents.

NY Times - 12/25/10
A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean

It could be a Zen koan: if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean ?

A corollary is: if everybody in the class gets an C, what does an C mean ?

With college grades creeping ever higher,
a few universities have taken direct action against grade inflation.
Most notably, Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that
no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s,
a policy that remains controversial on campus.

Others have taken a less direct approach,
leaving instructors free to award whatever grades they like
but expanding their transcripts to include information
giving graduate schools and employers a fuller picture
of what the grades mean.
<snip>
Studies of grade inflation have found that private universities generally give higher grades than public ones,
and that humanities courses award higher grades than science and math classes.

The article describes several schools that include a calculated "median grade" in the transcript.

“It’s complicated, it’s controversial, and it runs into campus political opposition
from all sorts of directions you might not anticipate,” Mr. Nassirian said,
adding that transcripts with too much extra information can become unwieldy.

But the "median" seems cumbersome and hides information,
when it's the "cumulative percentile" or "rank" that is more informative.
Median: half of the grades are higher, half are lower
Rank: relative position within all grades of the class/school.
The advantage of a "cumulative percentile" is that it shows the distribution of grades in the group,
so it's immediately evident when there are clusters of grades: high, low, or in the middle