The recent discussion around the comments of Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of The Summit, have reignited the question of grade inflation.
Facts are useful on this…the chart shows the increase in top degree classes over time
Data Source: http://www.stopgradeinflation.ie/TCD_GI.doc
[…] “The recent discussion around the comments of Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of The Summit, have reignited the question of grade inflation …” (more) […]
Brian, Am I being a bit thick here but I don’t quite get the y-axis!
Percent increase in class over period
Blame rushing for lunch on a Sunday
A garbled graph. Meaningless.
Not really Ashley.. Read the piece
Even if grade inflation is real, and even if TCD has less of it than other universities, can we definitely infer from that the quality of TCD programmes are of a higher quality than other universities.
I had to Brian. The graph is still meaningless, lacking axis labels and with an incorrect title.
[…] Brian Lucey’s recent post on grade inflation was interesting in that it presented some actual hard data, something that is often lacking in commentaries on education. Going back to the original document on which this data is based, it is interesting to examine how the percentage of Firsts changed in the period 1994 – 2008. The data are shown below for five of the seven universities. I’ve left out UCD because the available data did not include figures for the UCD Arts Faculty – a large faculty indeed. Also, NUIM is something of an outlier – in 1994 only 1.5% of NUIM graduates got ‘Firsts’, a factor of almost 5 below what the other universities were granting. The rise and rise of NUIM is, I suspect, a special case, and may well reflect the growth in population in the commuter belt, making that institution a lot more attractive to school leavers. It would be interesting to dig out the CAO figures for NUIM over the last 15-20 years. I suspect that entry standards have risen substantially. (That’s not to say that other factors on the teaching side mightn’t have changed as well.) […]
The percentage of students achieving a first from NUIM was 8 times higher in 2005 than in 1994. I have this right, yes?
Yes
Thank you Brian.
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