A New Kind of Grade Inflation
I spent my summer vacation like many assessment professionals – steeped in data! Summer is when we have the time in our office to review assessment data from both the general education curriculum and the career and technical programs on campus. I will admit to being a little bit disappointed as I reviewed some of the data sets. What emerged from the results was a form of grade inflation in student learning outcomes. The College has been very deliberate in its message about the use of assessment data for improving student learning in the classroom – NOT faculty evaluation. However, I believe faculty still harbor concerns that the data on assessment will be used as an evaluation tool, and this is causing a new type of inflation not of grades, but of data. I’m not sure what to call this trend. Data-gate, data-inflation, or learning-inflation? All in all it does not benefit the students or the faculty. I am still grappling with Continue reading A New Kind of Grade Inflation