roomthily

gjmueller:

How Insular Are Academic Departments?

Academic disciplines sometimes seem isolated from each other. Like seems to speak to like. This, it is sometimes worried, may lead to stultifying agreement within fields. Meanwhile, each field solves the same problem in different ways, unbeknownst to the next.

It simply isn’t true, it turns out, that scholars don’t cite research in other fields. Nor do all fields have the same level of insularity. Illustrating this is the network map featured by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The connections between disciplines represent how often academic articles published by scholars in each field link to other fields.

The B.A. Divide - 

Americans are better educated now than ever, but the distribution of people with college degrees is growing increasingly unequal.

And the clustering of people with higher education is creating greater disparities in regional incomes and unemployment. The places with high percentages of educated adults do better economically than do the counties with low proportions of adults with B.A. degrees. Better educated populations have higher incomes and lower unemployment.

via Daily Yonder

#1 Party School

by This American Infographic

Forty Questions: Grading Article In Teachers College Record

Average GPA over the time period 1930-2006 as a function of school type. Grey dots represent individual data points. Colored squared represent the mean GPA for each school type over time. Suslow (1976) shown for comparison.

The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement. Students’ entrance test scores have not increased (College Board, 2007), students are increasingly disengaged from their studies (Saenz et al., 2007), and the literacy of graduates has declined (Kutner et al., 2006). A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers. Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before.

Private and public schools graded similarly until the 1950s when grading practices for these schools began to bifurcate.  The reasons for this bifurcation are not fully understood, but it was during this time that quantitative measures of undergraduates took hold in graduate school and professional school admissions. It appears that sometime in the 1950s to 1960s, the major purpose of grading at colleges and universities changed from an internal measure and motivator of student performance to a measure principally used for external evaluation of graduates. As a Yale dean noted about Yale’s abandonment of their traditional qualitative assessments in favor of the common four point grading system, “We wanted to force graduate schools to look at the student, not at a grade point average. But to a large extent, our effort has been frustrated” (Polan, 1970).

fuckyeahinfo:

More People Are Going to College - GOOD Blog - GOOD

slantback:

If I had a guess, I think it’s precisely that attitude that creates all the economic advantages—its the way our society is organized, rather than anything about college itself. (via Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It? | Design & Innovation | Fast Company)