Posted by Jay Livingston
Would conservative students prefer greater inequality in grades? That was the question I asked in a recent post. I was responding to a stunt by the Merced Republicans that asked A-students if they would be willing to give some of their GPA points to lower-GPA students in order to reduce inequality. The Republicans opposed such redistribution, so I wondered just how deep and solid was their preference for inequality. Would they favor a return to the less equal grade distributions of the 1940s, with far fewer As and more Cs and Ds?
My proposal was far more realistic. Students cannot transfer their GPA points, but professors can change their grading scales. And, at least in one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues. Here’s a graph from a forthcoming article by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman.
(Click on the graph for a larger view.)Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors tend to assign more very low and very high grades: the share of the lowest grades (F, D-, D, D+, and C-) out of the total is 6.2 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 4.0 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors; the share of the highest grade (A+) out the total is 8.0 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 3.5 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors.
The students were undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences at “an elite university.” The paper has been mentioned at The Monkey Cage and at a WSJ blog.
9 comments:
Fascinating.
Two thoughts come to mind.
First, the number of republican-identified professors is so small - maxing out near 15% that I wonder how representative it is. In particular, I would have preferred to see comparisons of grades course-to-course, rather than just within the same department. Any department's courses have varying levels of subjective subject matter. I suspect the subjects these few Republican professors are drawn to teach may be significant as well.
Finally, on a different note, it's interesting how the performance of the students with the very best SAT scores goes DOWN compared to their slightly lower-ranking peers when graded by a democratic professor. There are a lot of possible explanations that I'm not going to speculate on there, but I think it's certainly the most interesting bit of the data.
It's so interesting the way "social science" is so riddled with social and political bias (of course...). I was amused by your phrasing:
"At least in one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues."
Republican professors create grade distribution with greater inequality? -- man, what a spin!
How about this wording: "In one study, Democratic professors were less able to make sharp distinctions between high achievers and mediocre performance."
or... In one study, Republican colleagues tried to remain faithful to a traditional grading curve while Democrats gave in to modern practice of neither rewarding excellence nor marking down poor performance."
or... etc. etc. so many other ways of saying this than that Republicans are somehow favor "inequality." How about this: Republicans are more likely to impose higher standards.
But I don't believe any of this, by the way. "Anonymous" pointed out flaws in the study -- I am just pointing out the biased framing typical of "data" "reported" "here."
bs: Apparently you did not read what I wrote. I did not say that Republican or Democratic professors “favored” anything. The statement that Republican professors “create grade distributions with greater inequality” is merely factual. It did not attribute motives or abilities (“tried to remain faithful” “gave in to”) that are impossible to verify. The statement is biased only if you think that inequality in grading is a bad thing. Do you?
Your “More likely to impose higher standards” avoids those attributions, but is not accurate. Democrats had higher standards for giving the highest grades and so gave fewer of them. Apparently you didn’t look at the graph either.
It's true I don't always understand what you're getting at.
But you've missed my point. I'll try again: You wrote, "At least in one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues. Here’s a graph from a forthcoming article by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman."
Where is the word "inequality" in the report or graph cited? Nowhere. That was your framing. Because of your ongoing agenda here, you wanted to make the association "Republican" with "inequality." You did that. Not the repot.
Now do you get it?
'Where is the word "inequality" in the report or graph cited? Nowhere. . . .you wanted to make the association "Republican" with "inequality." You did that. Not the repot.'
True, the report uses the word inequality only once. But egalitarian or egalitarianism appear 25 times in the 11 pages of text and in the titles of three of the ten tables and charts.
Apparently you are drawing an exceedingly fine difference (the word parsing comes to mind for some reason) between equality and egalitarian. Most readers would conclude that a paper that speaks so much about "grading egalitarianism" is also talking about professors' attitudes towards inequality. Perhaps you could explain why that conclusion is incorrect.
You have forced me to go back into the long, tendentious original article. I said you framed the article in a prejudicial way... and you reply that I am pedantically parsing words. I leave it to your readers to decide whether your personal bias shaped your characterization of the study.
Conclusion in original: “We found that relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades…”
Your characterization: “In one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues.”
Do you not see an important difference in meaning here? I do.
The difference is that the authors are being cautious. They say “associated with” because they can’t be absolutely sure that the effect is created by what professors do rather than by student performance. It’s possible that in Republican professors’ classes good students perform even better, and bad students even worse, maybe because Republican profs devote more attention to high-SAT students while Democratic profs put more effort into helping students at the other end of the distribution. That doesn’t seem likely, but the authors don’t have the data to rule it out. So they say “associated with” in the same way that the cigarette warnings used to say that smoking was “associated with” a greater risk of heart disease rather than that smoking creates that risk.
But there’s no doubt that professors create grade distributions. As the authors put it in the last paragraph, “Professors control the allocation of grades.” It’s also obvious that those distributions are not all the same and that Republican professors’ grade distributions are, on average, more unequal than those of Democratic professors. The statistical variance is greater. There's a wider gap between the top grades and the lowest grades.
As I said before, that is “prejudicial” only if you think that grade equality is a good thing and that greater grade inequality is a bad thing. That’s a different issue and to a great extent a matter of value. But the Republican-Democratic differences in this study are matters of fact, regardless of whether we use words like equality and egalitarianism or whether we can find a word that’s more to your liking.
Oh well. You've talked all around my point... whatever.
If you thought my wording that "Republicans create grade distributions with greater inequality" was all spin; if you still think that there are "so many other ways of saying this than that Republicans are somehow favor 'inequality.'" you'll really gag on this summary of the report.
"When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average." [emphasis added]
It comes from a biased, tendentious, agenda-promoting publication -- The Wall Street Journal.
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