I just handed in grades, so I'm thinking about, well, grades. I only had eight students this semester, and I decided that I was OK giving only A's and B's (good group of students!). I noticed an interesting pattern when I converted their grades into the final form. I'm not allowed to assign an A+ or a D-. I did want to distinguish the top score from the other grades, but without an A+, that's tough. However, graduate students here are on a different scale, H-P-L-F for High, Pass, Low, and Fail. The H is supposed to be harder to get than an A; the P is the broad side of a barn; and the L should be rare (and bad) but at least you didn't Fail. Well, the top student this semester is a graduate student, and I was very happy to assign an H.
The pattern that struck me was that all of my B's were the other graduate students in this class! Since the H is harder to get than an A, I think there's a dis-incentive to put in the extra work to get a regular A (that translates to a P) and any form of B (that also translates to a P). So I had one graduate student who aimed for the stars and earned an H, a handful of undergraduates who worked hard and earned A's and A-'s, and a handful of graduate students who worked and learned and earned all flavors of B's that became P's.
So the piece of paper I just turned in looks much more boring than the actual grade distribution. This, in turn, makes me wonder why I worked so hard on assignments and grading. I've been teaching long enough that I know how to get a reasonable spread on grades from the questions I ask. I did that this time around, but on that last piece of paper, the only one that matters, it didn't show up. If this happens again, I wonder what sort of teacher dis-incentive it will generate?
