Variations in the Grades of High School Pupils
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
By Clarence Truman Gray, A.M. Educational Psychology Monographs, No. 8. Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1913. Mr. Gray, an instructor in the department of education of the University of Texas, presents “a relatively simple method by means of which any high school principal can study the condition of the grading in his own school and take due steps to remedy the faults that he may find.”
“The specific problem,” the author explains, “is concerned with the relative standing of pupils in the different years of the high-school curriculum, as indicated by their marks and grades. Suppose a pupil at the end of the first year has a mark of 80 points (per cent), then our first problem is to determine whether this pupil’s mark for the other three years remains near 80 points or goes up or down. Again, we may give the problem a somewhat different turn by using relative position rather than points. If we divide any class into five equal parts, putting the highest grades in the first quintile, our problem would be to determine whether any given pupil does or does not remain in the same quintile throughout the four years.”
Although later in the book Mr. Gray explains the individual causes for variation in the case of fourteen pupils personally known to him, he would in general refer variations in grade entirely to eccentricities in the marking. It seems to be his theory that while teachers are “human, all too human,” their pupils have the inhuman constancy of well regulated little clocks. It is not surprising, therefore, that he overlooks specific interest in mathematics, language, or science, and the effect of such interest in producing steady or erratic habits of work. Quite without asking whether a taste for mathematics (or its reverse, a special distaste for figures) is to be expected to occur more or less frequently than a gift for some other branch of the curriculum, he asserts, “There is no obvious reason why pupils should make a higher variation in one subject than another.”
For the purposes of this monograph, grades were obtained for groups of approximately twenty-five students in English, History, Mathematics, Latin, Modern Languages, and Science, from each of ten public high schools, two in Chicago and eight in Indiana. “In the averages, the greatest variation is in Science, with English next. The large variation in Science can possibly be explained by the fact that the material used in the different years is unrelated. … The large variation in English seems to be due in a large degree to the erratic grading of this department in many of the schools.”
Mr. Gray assumes that “a teacher gives grades to the individuals of her class in order to communicate to them her estimates of their ability”; but he concedes, “of course the term ability means something very different in English from what it does in mathematics,” and here again he offers a bare statement with no hint of the discussion that has raged around these two moot questions. He shows the “curve of error” as the curve for the probable distribution of ability, but lie naively omits to correct it for elimination or for the distribution of grades above the passing mark of 70. From a study of 8969 grades at Harvard College he finds that the percentage of students falling into the five quintiles was 7, 20, 42, 21, and 7 respectively, and he apparently regards this as substantiating the regular form of the uncorrected and unskewed curve. The most interesting pages in the book are those which give results obtained by having six different teachers grade independently the same sets of papers, eleven in mathematics and twenty in English, and comparing the grades to find the variations. They were all “highly trained experts in high-school work (not college teachers), so that if the grading of any one stood alone, no one would question the validity of the grades.” Thoughtful students of educational problems will hardly be willing to follow Mr. Gray to his abrupt conclusion, “Teachers’ marks are essentially unreliable.” They may none the less heartily endorse his opinion that “There is urgent need of a standard which can be used by different schools, different departments, and by different teachers.” Many educators believe that such standards are being set by the Courtis tests, and by other tests of excellence like the Hillegas composition scale, and the Ayres spelling scale, all of which Mr. Gray fails to mention.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.