Is it ethical to limit marks based upon past performance?

Question

A professor has a habit of starting oral examinations by asking for or looking up grade averages and grades from other subjects and then taking them heavily into account when evaluating the student in question. For example, I was allowed to be even considered to get an A in Real Analysis III, because I got an A in Real Analysis II and had a good overall grade average.

Is it ethical or helpful to ever consider student's performance outside the course? If not, what about subjects tightly interconnected? But then, most mathematics is interconnected in one way or another...

Answer 1

What you describe is, in my opinion, horribly unethical!

Yes, past performance is often a predictor of present performance, but there are so many other factors involved as well. What if a student did poorly before because of any number of reasons, but have since stepped up their work, caught up, and really mastered the material? Or what if the student has been focusing heavily on this subject and has consequently fared more poorly in another subject?

It is manifestly stupid and counter to the entire notion of education to ignore good work by a student in one location simply because the student did bad work in another course or another time. Ethical violations are a different matter---it is reasonable to be suspicious of a student with a history of cheating---but grading a student poorly for having the audacity to exceed expectations is a rank betrayal of the most basic responsibilities of an educator.

Answer 2

No, I do not think that basing grades on past performance is fair. Grades should be based on the performance being graded, and it should be clear up front what exactly is being graded.

(Of course, if the syllabus explains that a grade will be based on homework and a final exam, then of course the grade would fairly be based on the final and the past performance in homework.)

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One possibility for using past performance would be an oral exam. If I know the candidate sitting in front of me is very good or very weak, I might ask more targeted questions - focusing on basic definitions for a weak candidate, or on advanced understanding for a strong one, to avoid wasting everyone's time with questions that are too easy or too hard. If (!) the oral exam can then follow the natural development and the examiner adapts the difficulty of subsequent questions to the candidate's performance on earlier questions, then I'd argue that this kind of "customization" is acceptable.

Answer 3

In general, what you're asking is an unethical practice. I could see some exceptions to this where such considerations would be reasonable:

• You are taking a multi-semester course sequence, and the instructor is willing to base final grades on progression and improvement, rather than a strict numerical average. For instance, if you've improved from a B- to an A over the course of the year, your final grade in the second semester would be an A instead of say a B+ average.

• You are being judged for something like a qualifying exam, in which performance in coursework over one's career can help to ameliorate poor performance on the exam itself.

Answer 4

I think this is unethical. All instructors are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity in grading and ought to do everything they can to minimize that; looking up a student's previous performance introduces a strong source of bias that was completely avoidable. An instructor who looks up a student's previous grade on an exam is going to go into the exam expecting the student to do well or poorly based on that previous grade, and people tend to be biased towards seeing what they expect to see.

I do understand why it's tempting for instructors to do this, though. I am a part-time instructor myself and have been a TA for many professors, so I see professors do things like this, and have been tempted to do it myself. Psychologically, I think the reason is that instructors are aware that grading is somewhat subjective, but that is also something that makes them uncomfortable. And they tend to feel uncomfortable if their grades look random: if people who did really well last semester do really poorly with this time, or vice versa, or if a student got an A- on one paper and a B- on the next and then an A on the next. Checking what grade a student got last semester, or on the last paper, feels like a way of double-checking your own grading, of getting a second opinion to double-check your sense of the student's performance on this particular task.

But the problem is that, far from being an effective way to deal with bias, the above procedure just magnifies its effects. The way it works in my experience is that if the student got a high grade last time, it's tempting to think, "Well, they're smart/a good student" and then give them the higher grade; if they got a low grade last time it's tempting to think "Well, even the lower grade is still better than they got the last time, so that's fine," or "This student is just lower-performing," and then give them the lower grade. And that's just not fair. But it feels secure and reassuring to an uncertain grader to know what other graders have given a person before assigning them their own grade, so unfortunately it happens.

Answer 5

I disagree with the notion that limiting marks based on past performance is necessarily unethical. If done without a valid reason (for example as a case of laziness on the professor's side), then it would very well be unethical, but there exist cases in which such a system is perfectly reasonable.

One reason that would justify the professor's system of grading would be one similar to the GRE's adaptive testing system.

If the professor knows that the student did poorly on his/her past course, the professor can then choose to administer an easier examination, which better distinguishes students of medium to low ability from each other. Similarly, if the student managed to obtain an A for the past course, the professor can then administer a more difficult exam to better distinguish students of relatively high ability from one another. Students who are given the "easier" exam would then not be able to achieve the maximum scores in the final grade.

This would be analogous to the GRE's system which uses the results of the first section to produce adaptively a second section which is scaled to an appropriate level of difficulty.

Answer 6

This reeks of typical halfassed professory. Instead of working to create an assessment (ie grading) method wherein he can comprehensively determine how well a student understands the topic, this professor has willingly created and accepted a sub-par assessment which requires reviewing previous performance.

"Well, the student failed my test... however, on related courses they passed. Therefore I must have a flaw in my assessment or my course, so I should let them pass because they should have understood it and my methodology can't tell me whether they did understand it."

That's what I'm reading as the inner dialogue.

However, at the same time, I love it. This is a very realistic method for complex topics which are not readily conveyed and/or the understanding of which are not readily assessed.

And then I come back to hating it again, because that's the professor's job. Professors generally don't like the course work and teaching and testing... too bad. I never liked folding shirts when I worked at a retail store, and I never liked NBC warfare training during my military service, but they were part of my job. I didn't get a pass just because I "don't like" them.

So yes, it's extraordinarily unethical!!

Not only because it's not giving you the grade you earned, good or bad, but because the professor is doing this in lieu of a portion of the job they don't like/find hard. The university (and thus, you/your creditors) is paying them for a job they're not actually doing! That's unethical; that's fraud.

But it's quite clever and realistic, so maybe... :(

Answer 7

You should check your professor's grading criteria against his grading rubric - if 'prior courses' is not listed on that rubric, it's not only unethical, but duplicitous and could be brought up to the Dean if your grade or others' grades reflect poorly because of it.

If it's not on the rubric, you could still bring it up with the dean as being duplicitous, but there would be less actual evidence to bring against the professor, and since it's an oral exam, you'd be hard-pressed to provide proof without some type of recording of the exam itself.

If it's on the rubric, you could bring it up with the Dean and ask if it's really allowed for professors to do so, but if they say 'yes' then you're completely out of luck.

However, it is completely unethical regardless of what the dean says - you may have some paths of recourse for it, but regardless of whether or not those pan out, it is still unethical, and you have every right to feel it is unfair.

Answer 8

It's very unethical in my opinion. I quickly explain my way of handling things when I examine students:

Questions and answers for oral and written exams are set before the exam. For each question I expect certain key-content to be mentioned. If all is mentioned, it's full score for that question, if not, the score depends with mathematical precision on the amount of content mentioned compared to the amount expected.

After an exam I publish questions and key-content. Every student can check what he did wrong and how his grade was made. I find this the only fair way: If you know what's expected, then you have full score and you have the right to know what you did wrong.

Answer 9

Although I agree it's unethical, similar patterns are sanctionned by the academic world.

To play devil's advocate, maybe your teacher is adequatly preparing you to the way things work in higher education ?

One of the most important criteria to get funding, a bursary , a grant, a publication or even a TA job is if you had that same sort of thing granted before.

It's a vicious circle where if you've never had one of these, chances are you'll never get one and therefore probably won't have the extra "humfes" (jobs, contacts, money, opportunities) necessary to be in the top of your field.

When you think about it, it's what a cv is for. While looking at your profile, a prospective employer looks first at what you've done –IF you've done the same job you're applying for, your odds are improving.

Answer 10

This scenario is ambiguous.there could well be and ethical abuse that the instructor is not doing his/her job, but the use of past performance as one input in the grade decision is not inherently an ethical abuse, depending on how one understands grades.

There is not widespread agreement about what grades measure.

Depending on whom you ask, grades might measure:

• how much a student learned in a course
• how much a student knows at the end of the course
• how much effort a student put into a course
• how well students complied wth course procedures
• what a student is capable of doing at the end of the course

And these comparisons could be relative to a fixed standard, or relative to other students in the class ("on a curve").

All of the above have been used in courses I have seen. I'm afraid it seems that grades in a course mean whatever the institution or instructor define them to mean. There are some practices that would be widely condemned as abusive, but grading based on total proficiency and using past achievement as part of that assessment seems to be to be within the realm of defensible practices.

If the standard is an absolute level of proficiency in a body of material, past work in the field is a helpful piece of information about a student's likely level of proficiency. In other words, if a grade in course N is intended to reflect how well a student can do tasks x and y, and tasks x and y require skills from course N-1, then it seems reasonable to use this information.

This is not how I would advocate grading, by the way, but it seems to fall within the universe of acceptable practices. If a professor believed that the only way s/he were comfortable asserting that a student attained the level of proficiency s/he believed warranted an "A" grade were if the student previously demonstrated mastery at the "A" level of prerequisite course material, and also had high overall mastery of other material as demonstrated by a high GPA, this decision strikes me as unfortunate but not unethical.

I would hope an instructor would allow other ways to demonstrate that mastery besides grades in a previous class; this example was unclear whether that was the case. When the instructor told the OP that an A was only in consideration because of past performance, I do not know if this was a general requirement, or the specifics of this case based on other assessments in this class.

If the instructor views grades as a certification to the student's future instructors, employers, clients, etc of the Instructor's assessment of the student's proficiency with course material (far from the only meaning given to grades, but one widely accepted one), then this can be justified as ONE input in the grade decision. Given the set of observations about the student (exams, projects, homework, etc), how likely is it that the student has at least (excellent/good/fair/poor) mastery of course material? If the goal is to give the hugest grade the instructor an justify with confidence level x, past performance is an I out that adds information to the decision function.

If the instructor based grades ONLY on what the OP described, that would be shirking the responsibility of the instructor. If the instructor said that the student's work in this course alone was not enough to definitively convince the instructor that the student was at an "A" level of mastery of course material, but that work combined with evidence of the student's past work raised the confidence level enough to justify certifying to future encountered of the student that the student mastered the course subject, that could be ethical.