Gender Fairness in Today's School by Jim Dueck

Author:Jim Dueck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 6

Grade Inflation Is Not Uniformly Evident

Grade inflation arising from low standards in our classrooms has been documented in the previous two chapters, and this problem is virtually universal across North America. Numbers don’t lie, and the concern should be more than disconcerting: It should be distressing. There is no value to our society in giving undeserved credit to students or by defrauding taxpayers of the full value of their tax dollars. The greatest harm is perpetuated in our workforce, which is developing a mind-set that considers maximum effort as being unnecessary.

The inconsistent assessment of students’ academic achievement has been a long-standing problem that is too frequently disregarded because the information has not been transparently presented for public scrutiny. While this lack of transparency is an issue, inflated marks are seldom disputed by students or their parents. This is especially so when the pattern shows that these high marks are not irregular “blips” but an ongoing problem throughout the school system.

This concern about low standards in the classroom focused, in chapter 4, on two Canadian provinces with high-achieving fifteen-year-old students, as measured by the 2015 PISA international assessments. Both British Columbia and Alberta classrooms in senior high schools demonstrated significantly consistent grade inflation in teachers’ classroom marks when compared to their provincial test results. The broader view, presented in chapter 5, demonstrated how pervasive the problem is throughout educational systems. Not examined in these chapters, however, is whether grade inflation occurred equally across all student populations,which is the specific focus in this chapter.

GENDER UNFAIRNESS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

A suitable means for beginning this chapter is a comment made by British Columbia when it responded to a request for information, specifically: “Provincial reports indicate a relatively high correlation between the classroom and exam marks across gender and do not suggest that classroom marks exhibit gender unfairness.” However, an analysis of their 2015 school year results makes it difficult to corroborate this conclusion. Recall that this jurisdiction rolls up the higher-achieving marks, with C+, B, and A placed into one category.

•English 10: The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to female students on the exam is 13 percent, but in classrooms it is 18 percent, or plus 5 percent.

•Math 10 (Precalc): The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to female students on the exam is 1 percent, but in classrooms, it is 6 percent, or plus 5 percent.

•Math 10 (App): The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to female students on the exam is minus 6 percent, but in classrooms, it is plus 3 percent, or plus 9 percent.

•Science 10: The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to female students on the exam is 1 percent, but in classrooms, it is 9 percent, or plus 8 percent.

•Social Studies 11: The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to female students on the exam is minus 1 percent, but in classrooms it is 13 percent, or plus 14 percent.

•Civic Studies 11: The advantage (scoring C+, B, or A) accorded to

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