Conservative Grades, Liberal Grades

May 23, 2011
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.)

Students with high SATs get higher grades than do low-SAT students (despite all the criticisms of the SAT, it is still a good predictor of college performance). But those high-SAT students are more likely to get the highest marks in courses taught by Republicans. Students with low SAT scores get better grades from Democrats than they do from Republicans.

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.

Congratulations CHSS grads

May 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences had its convocation Thursday on the football field. The students walked across the platform, shook hands with the president and the dean, then went back to the bleachers.

(MSU photo. Other pictures are here.)

I had nothing to do with the program. I sat on the stage with the other department chairs, and I stood up when the guys from the Dean’s office read the names of graduating Sociology majors. But if it had been up to me, I would have made a large backdrop of this graph showing scores on the CLA, an assessment of how much students learn in college.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The authors of the report* summarize their findings

There is notable variation in academic experiences and outcomes across fields of study. . . .While appreciating the diverse causes of differences by field of study, we observed several patterns in our data:

Students majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields, including social science, humanities, natural science, and mathematics, demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.

Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains.

*“Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” by Arum, Roksma, and Cho. (Full report downloadable here.)

Oh, Brother

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture has a nice post – theory by Roger Gould, data by Cornel West. Gould is talking about status hierarchies and reciprocity. West is talking about feeling snubbed by “my dear brother Barack Obama.”

Everybody, it seems, is West’s brother. “I was under the impression that he [Obama] might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman.” In the interview, recorded by Chris Hedges, West uses the word another ten times.

It reminded me of a story my brother (my real brother, Skip) told me long ago, back when he was an undergrad at U Chicago. Ralph Ellison had given a lecture there, and afterwards Skip asked him if The Brotherhood in Invisible Man was based on a real organization.

“It’s not the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean,” Ellison said. He added that the idea of brotherhood had been used throughout history as a cover for a variety of unsavory schemes. “When someone starts calling you brother,” Ellison said, “stick your hands in your pockets. And cross your legs.”

Name and Profession - A Positive Correlation

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve known for a long time that the brains behind Playboy’s marketing strategy, especially in its early decades, was a sociologist – A. C. Spectorsky (in 1955, he coined the term exurb in his book The Exurbanites). Now, thanks to Scott McLemee’s Inside Higher Ed review of a new book about Playboy, I learn that the A.C. stood for Auguste Comte.

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve been skeptical about the influence of names – the research purporting to show that batters whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out, that students with D-names get lower grades than do A-name students, that women named Laura are more likely to become lawyers and men named Dennis dentists, or that boys named Tennyson are more likely to go to college in Tennessee. (The posts are here and here .)

But now with A.C., I may have to rethink this name thing.