No Letup From Washington

Original Article

Summary goes here!

Quote an insider's words: 'If you don't do it yourself, others will do it for you.'

I don't like him - too calculative or sophisticate if you will. But at least there are some insides.

Please read comments on the original post and you will see the view of scholars - not one but more. The sophisticate and unwillingness is just unbelievable. And you wonder why people and administrations are upset with Universities?

The argument that 'GPA is a much better predictor' is not good enough. Because this leaves out a lot of pre-conditions. First of all, it is totally subjective. I can tell you that my A is definitely much harder to get than my peer instructors. Yes, if you compare my A students with my B students, they are definitely at different caliper. But I can't tell you that with my B students and other instructors' A students. And we all heard of grade inflation. Besides, even myself, can I flunk all my students just because they are ill-prepared? No, I will adjust my grades so I can show their differences and achievements. What does this lead us? If you can establish the curriculum standard and define clearly what is to be an A. Then I will agree that WITHIN that entity, the GPA is a good measurement. So how much will it cost to establish this across all the institutions?
The argument here is that to establish the GPA as a GOOD predictor, you need the same efforts as to establish good measurement. The thing is that everyone like to define the good, themselves.

I suspect that the GPA we have today is loosely defined statistical measure of the efforts of students. Assuming talents are equally likely distributed across the gender, race, geographic boundaries. Assuming teachers are generally un-biased and rank their students on things they learn. Also assuming that ... With all these assumptions, we COULD?? say that high GPA PROBABLY mean a students with right learning attitude and willing to put in efforts. These students will success no matter where you put them. Even if they were from a low standard learning community, they will put in extra efforts - even though with time crunches they may not catch up with their peers during the school year. But with life long learning, they will doing just fine.

But we have to understand that this is only a possible explanation to why GPA could predict. But it does not address what the public is asking for.