By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — A state panel studying grade inflation heard testimony today about possible ways to improve Arkansas’ method of identifying schools that hand out higher grades than students deserve.
Under the current system, an Arkansas school is considered to inflate grades if 20 percent or more of its students in grades 9-12 make As or Bs in algebra or geometry but do not pass corresponding end-of-course exams.
The issue has gained heightened prominence because the Legislature voted last year to link grade inflation to college scholarships funded by the new state lottery. Starting in 2011, the criteria for receiving a lottery-funded scholarship will be higher for students graduating from grade-inflation schools than for other students.
Testifying today before the Joint Subcommittee on Grade Inflation, legislative analyst Michael Brown said he has developed a proposal for measuring grade inflation that would be more accurate than the existing method.
Brown said his method would look at a school’s entire population, not just students who make As or Bs. It would treat a C average or an average end-of-course exam score as the mean and measure how far students’ performance vary from the mean, he said.
“If we have grades that are substantially higher than the end-of-course results, we have a grade-inflated school,” he said. “This is based off of statistical significance. The current methodology uses this 20 percent cutoff, which we discovered is very arbitrary.”
Instead of using an arbitrary cutoff, Brown said his method would look for statistical significance within the sample being studied. Even when looking at a sample as small as eight students, analysts could have 95 percent confidence in the accuracy of the results, he said.
When Brown’s method was applied to 2009 data from Arkansas schools, it found that 88 schools inflated the grades of students who took the end-of-course algebra exam and 111 schools inflated the grades of students who took the end-of-course geometry exam. The number of schools that inflated grades for students who took both courses was 49.
That’s not far off from the state Education Department’s finding that 52 states inflated grades in the 2008-09 school year, but Brown said his list of grade-inflating schools was “substantially different” from the state’s.
Rep. Les “Skip” Carnine, R-Rogers, who attended the hearing but is not on the subcommittee, said he questioned the appropriateness of the grade-inflation provision in the lottery law.
“Grade inflation belongs to (state Education Commissioner) Tom Kimbrell and those schools. In my opinion, it doesn’t belong in this legislation, period,” he said.
Rep. Linda Tyler, D-Conway, who also is not on the panel, said that before the annual list of grade-inflation schools was linked to scholarships, it was greeted with a response of, “So what?”
“This gave us a means to say, this is a ‘so what,’” she said.
