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Down-grading
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 6, 2007
In the next few days, Columbia College will admit a select group of the senior class into Phi Beta Kappa on the basis of the strength of their academic records prior to senior year. These students deserve to be commended for their academic achievements. The award itself, however, will be skewed toward math, economics, and physics majors, whose professors give out more grades of A-plus than do those in other departments. The University takes pride in its ability to distinguish its top students, but it does a disservice to those who just miss the cut. This disparity in grading is part of a larger problem in the ranking and honors of Columbia students, both within the University and with respect to other top-tier schools.
Although both science and humanities classes award grades of A-plus to a small fraction of students, quantitative courses lend themselves more readily to this top distinction. Where performance is measured by correct solutions to problem sets and exams, students can effectively earn grades of A-plus simply by scoring very well. Where students are graded on class participation and papers, however, there is no concrete way for a student to earn an A-plus. When graduation honors are conferred, humanities students who are no less deserving than the top physics or math students will be less likely reach the highest ranks. Columbia College should eliminate the A-plus from all courses in order to remove this inequity.
The problem is worsened by the relative scarcity of graduation honors at Columbia in comparison with other universities. Whereas Columbia caps all Latin honors at 25 percent, Harvard conferred honors to over 50 percent of its graduating class this year. Judging from historical GPA cutoffs for Columbia honors, a student at the University of Pennsylvania who receives magna cum laude may have a lower GPA than a student who graduates Columbia College without any honors. Employers may not realize that Columbia students are less likely to receive honors than are their peers at other universities.
To solve this problem, the University should make departments primarily responsible for conferring Latin honors, so that students can be evaluated relative to those in the same major. An equally reasonable alternative would be to institute standard GPA cutoffs throughout the college. This would engender consistency, as students in an academically strong class year would not be subjected to an unfairly high standard in the determination of honors. Regardless of which approach is taken, Columbia should award more honors than it currently does. At a time when universities are criticized for grade inflation, it may seem strange to call on a school to become less selective in distinguishing its students. Nonetheless, as long as other Ivy League schools honor a large proportion of their graduates, Columbia should look after its own.
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The science students have lashed out. All the science students have have met here seem to this that they are the "better" of the two groups (science and humanities). These two fields consist generally of two very different types of thinkers. While it is possible to get A+ in a science class for getting all the answers right, it is impossible to get an A+ on a class based on papers. But papers are what I prefer because I have a humanities-brain, not a science one. My fellow humanities students are not any less smart than the science students, they should have an equal chance in being selected to the PBK.
seem to think*
Academic-wise, say a Latin honor should be awarded based on a student's academic ability and academic motivation.
The question then is, regardless of whether someone got A's or A+'s, do the top 25% of the students from a humanities department possess and exhibit the same levels of ability and motivation as the top 25% in a physics/math/econ depatment?
If the answer is yes, then this editorial may have a point. If no, then there may not be over-representation of physics/math/econ majors in Latin honors.
I think the previous post using GRE/LSAT/GMAT scores as evidence was quite persuasive.
I can think of a few possible reasons for the disproportionate number of math/science majors among the elite students (these are hypotheses--testable hypotheses if we could get our hands on the relevant data):
1. Your grade in one math class is a good predictor of your grade in another math class. I think this relationship holds true for math/science classes more than for humanities classes because (i) it's basically the same skill set being tested in different math classes, and (ii) math/science classes are often sequential and build on one another. Yes, humanities classes hand out A-plus grades and so do math classes, but in the math/science crowd, it's the same few people racking up the A-pluses time and time again. Perhaps in the humanities, you're less likely to have a few elite students who are the top dogs in every single one of their classes.
2. Math/science major GPA's simply have a higher variance than the GPA's of humanities students. While humanities classes tend to hand out a hell of a lot of A-minus/B-plus grades, math classes hand out grades along a flatter, wider distribution, from A-plus to D and F. For any major's GPA distributions, some people are going to be in the tails, and those that are fortunate enough to be in the right tail of the math/science distribution are going to be Phi Beta Kappa.
3. Perhaps math/science majors try harder to reach the upper echelons because admissions to graduate programs in these areas are more of a numbers game than in the humanities. [Honestly, though, I have no idea how true this one is.] Think med school, Ph.D. programs in physics, economics, etc.
4. Maybe math/science students just tend to be better students. I'd bet that most Phi Beta Kappa math/science majors are better at the humanities than the humanities-oriented Phi Beta Kappa students are at math and science. It's quite possible that the humanities draw a disproportionate number of students who were bound to be slackers and mediocre students in the first place.
Anyway, those are some conjectures. It's bedtime for this numbers guy.
This article doesn't make too much sense. If professors in the humanities are unwilling to give the highest grade possible when it is an A+, why would they be willing to give it when it is an A?
Also as several comments point out, honors are most likely harder to get in quantitative ("hard") fields. A quick glance at my transcripts and the percentage of A grades seems to verify this:
Mind Brain and Behavior: 45%
Masterpieces of Western Art: 80%
--
Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology: 27%
Intermediate Microeconomics: 25%
Analysis and Optimization: 29%
As an instructor, I do give people A+ for a truly excellent paper and/or participation. The article is misleading.
Sometimes the humanities grading is truly subjective, whereas in math you just have to just get the answer right after learning the concept.
They should get rid of a-pluses just so people here will be ever-so-slightly less GPA-obsessed. Also, just FYI to someone above, people in CC can major in applied math.
Oh please, do you really think employers care whether or not you graduated from Columbia with honors? Getting a job is a lot different from getting into college. If mommy or daddy knows someone or if you were smart enough to get a good internship during your undergrad years, you'll have no problem getting a job. Otherwise you'll be fighting with all of the other Ivy grads for a shitty 30K/year job in Manhattan.
Very silly editorial.
Let's have a sense of scale. There are about 10 graduating physics majors this year, and about 20-30 math majors. (I can't speak to economics, because I'm a physics and math major and have no experience there.) Therefore, most of this editorial is focusing on whether about 40 students, out of a CC graduating class of, what, 1600 (?) receive latin honors. Let's assume that 1/3 (an extremely generous and unrealistic number, for the sake of argument) receive them: that means that this editorial is questioning whether about 10-15 students deserve latin honors more than other students.
For a math major, you sure are bad at numbers. The article states that Latin honors are capped at 25%. Moreover, there are about 1000 CC graduates each year.
Also, physics and math are not the only quantitative fields. There are statistics, chemistry, biology, applied math, and operations research majors, to name just a few. And even though you're not an economics major, surely you've noticed that about 20-30% of your classmates either major or concentrate in the subject? The article focuses on the fact that the 300+ students focusing on these fields have the opportunity to earn an A+ that is not found in other subjects.
Entire humanities departments do not grant A+ grades; I think that is the real issue. The Chinese language program, for example, does not give any grade higher than an A.
The real issue here, however, is that GPA simply isn't a good indicator of much of anything, except by a general order of magnitude.
Hi Jiabao,
You may be right about the CC graduates, I don't know, and it hardly makes a difference. In any case, if you include Barnard, the number of physics and math majors hardly changes, and the number of total students will increase by 500, closer to my original estimate.
Your point about quantitative fields is not valid. First of all, the article specifically mentions physics, math, and economics, not chemistry, biology, etc. Secondly, applied math, and operations research, etc are part of SEAS, which gives latin honors separately, and has a separate valedictorian/salutatorian. I concede the point about economics, as I have no understanding of the grade inflation that goes on there. I will point out, however, that people gripe about us physics and math majors having it "easy" grades-wise far more than they do about economics students.
Latin honors are capped at 25%, but there is a difference between capping it at 25% college-wide and capping it at 25% in each department, as I'm sure you can appreciate. I assumed it was on the college-wide level, or else there would be no real point in discussing which departments are over-represented in the latins, as the top 1/4 chinese language students would get latin honors, as well as the top 1/4 physics students.
Finally, you state that GPA isn't an indicator of anything. What, pray tell, is better? Standardized exams? In 5 minutes of searching, I found this...If you rank the average GRE scores by department, physics/astronomy rank 1st in quantitative, verbal, and writing. LSAT scores ? Physics/math takes it again. GMAT? Physics is first again. If you look at the combined scores for the three tests, and add in the average salary for graduating seniors, the top three are physics, math and economics. Surprise?
Source:
http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/p...
Although it is true that it is possible to receive an A+ in an economics or math class it is by no means EASY. Every economics class I've ever taken has had approximately 25% of the class getting grades in the A grade, while every humanities class I've ever taken as had approximately 35% or more in the A range. So lets not make this about it being harder to get A's, A+'s maybe, but if you are getting A's in every class then you will be a good candidate for pbk or latin honors. Plus also Phi beta kappa isn't exclusively decided by grade point average.
Clearly, this editorial is written by pissy humanities students who assume that they're just as smart as the top Physics majors and Math majors at Columbia. Listen, it's EASY to do well in humanities classes. Profs for Quant classes give out A+'s as a way of distinguishing between the best in a large class. Outstanding humanities students are identified in other ways, such as by being asked to write an essay for the Lit-Hum competition, or do some extra work w/ a professor, which should make them candidates for PBK anyway.
I was a history major and received several A+s, but I think earning consistent As had more to do with my ability to graduate PBK and magna cum laude, and this is certainly achievable in humanities courses, especially considering they aren't brutally curved as math and science grades tend to be.
Where problems exist, they tend to be at the highest end of the scale. When was the last time the valedictorian wasn't a physics major?
Must be a big change from when I was in Columbia in early 1990s. Math, Science, Engineering classes had means set at B-. Yes, if you answered all questions correctly, you'd get an A+, but the tests tended to be very difficult. Contrast that with writing a paper for a humanities class. In my experience, "decent/average" papers got B+. B- was considered bad.
Unless things completely changed, these editorialists have no idea what they're talking about.
Mark G.
SEAS '94 & MBA'00
While it may be true that the average for a paper is higher than that for an exam, it is almost impossible to get an "A+" on a paper because professors feel very uncomfortable telling someone their writing is perfect (and this is exactly the territory where Latin honors are made). Moreover, when exams are difficult in math/science classes, they are adjusted with a curve to just about match the averages in humanities classes. I think the author makes a fair point that it is more difficult to get a perfect score in humanities than in economics.
You don't need a "perfect" A+ score to get Phi Bet Kappa. I doubt that A is the cutoff. If it is, and 25% of students still get the honors, then there are bigger problems.
Mark G.
An "Honor" that is given to 50% of any group is not an honor.
@ 10:37
Exactly. One can make a good argument that Latin honors are a silly idea, but if we're going to have them, let's at least try to make them mean something.
:) Try to explain that to your interviewer when he's considering a UPenn grad (and probably is, himself, from a devalued honors school).
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