Today some of us here at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute listened to a presentation by Jimmy Jung, Assistant Director of Baruch’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Assessment. The presentation was called “Who are Baruch College Undergraduate Students?” and was intended, I believe, to give us an informative “map” of the student population at Baruch. And it started off that way. But soon, probably unexpectedly for the presenter, it turned into a conversation that touched on such topics as NY public school system and the pressures professors might feel when they are deciding on a grade.
The first statistic that raised some eyebrows was the breakdown of students by ethnicity. International students were listed as a separate population and not grouped with their ethnic groups as many of us would have expected. And the first generation immigrants, who might speak a language other than English at home, but who are permanent residents as opposed to holders of a student visa, are all listed together under “white”. It turned out that that is “the way the government requests” the student population to be broken up. And on top of that, there is a financial reasoning behind this, which is that since the international students were shown do better at the university than other groups, less budgetary resources need to be allocated to them as a group.
Next up for scrutiny was the statistic that Baruch is the #1 producer of accounting majors and CPA test takers in the US. It provoked a half-joking question, whether those test-takers were also “test-passers”. It seems that most of them are, but we didn’t get a specific percentage.
The diversity of Baruch students and the number of languages they speak was not that surprising to hear about, but what was interesting to know was that about 60% of undergrads at Baruch transfer in from another college, the majority from the CUNY community colleges. Now that I think most of us didn’t know. And it might be one of the reasons why in every class there is such a wide range of communication skills. Apparently the applicants who are rejected by Baruch because of their low GPA and test scores can go to a community college and later transfer to the same program at Baruch without necessarily having brought their writing and content knowledge to the same level as the original Baruch students. Some argued that the problems in writing can be traced back to the middle and high schools, and that the variable quality of NY schools can account for the variability in the skills of undergrads. Also, one study that was mentioned claims that the student’s grade in high-school English is the best predictor of college freshman year success.
The other statistic that proved to be controversial was that 94% of Baruch freshmen receive grades of As, Bs and Cs in their first writing intensive English course. This smacked of grade inflation for some of us in the audience. And although the presenter tried to reassure everyone that Baruch has been doing better than other institutions in regard to grade inflation, that still does not mean that there isn’t any of it going on, or that Baruch hasn’t reached ceiling in terms of grade inflation. This issue has sparked a whole conversation on the reasons a professor has for giving a certain grade. For some, if they saw that the person was making an effort and submitted all the assignments, they couldn’t give him a grade lower than a ‘C’. For others the dilemma was: if the whole class submits papers that are only “F-worthy”, can a professor fail everyone?
There were many other points raised; I am surely forgetting some. If anyone would like to continue this conversation here, or add some insightful statistics, please feel free to do so.
Thanks for this very thorough roundup ofthe discussion.
I would just add that to me it appeared that there was a sensible explanation for Baruch’s grouping of “International” students — those with visas who are not permanent residents or citizens — without reference to ethnicity. I imagine the point of breaking things down into ethnicity in the first place, in addition to tracking diversity itself, is to be able to monitor the performance and needs of particular groups. The speaker seemed to be saying simply that students here temporarily on visas tend to perform similarly (and similarly above average) whether they are from China, Ghana, Dominican Republic, etc. If that is indeed the case, I can see how classing them w/o regard to ethnicity is expedient. (Anyway, White, Black, Asian seem to me to be racial terms, not ethnic terms.)
Second, there is one thing I feel we never got around to in the grade inflation discussion, and which is not addressed at all in the troubling 94% ABC stats. That is, what is the breakdown among those As Bs and Cs? It seems to me that the big problem with grade inflation is Cs turning into Bs, and Bs into As, more than what’s happening with students getting Ds and Fs.
Thanks to all who asked probing questions, which brought life to the pagees of numbers.