Egalitarianism - Yes, we should redistribute grades

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/05/egalitarianism?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/yesweshould

Egalitarianism

Yes, we should redistribute grades

May 9th 2011, 14:16 by M.S.

I NOTICED this post by Robin Hansona couple of weeks ago, teasing the question of how, if one feels that we should redistribute income to compensate for unfairness and limit socially damaging inequality, one could justify not redistributing grade-point averages for the same reasons. Mr Hanson riffs off a video of a waggish student asking a number of baffled campus-goers whether they would be willing to take part in redistributing their GPAs, and notes that students in his classes have been similarly stonkered. Since then XPostFactoid and Megan McArdle have both weighed in.

I find the dilemma here a little hard to seize for reasons that have surely been pointed out by many in comment threads, namely that we do in fact heavily redistribute grade-point averages, for many of the same reasons we redistribute income. This situation strikes me as more or less fine. In the very worst schools in America, some students have 3.0 GPAs, even though the students who earn a 3.0 GPA in those schools would be hard pressed to maintain a 1.0 GPA in America's best schools. Work for which students receive B's in poor schools would earn failing grades in top schools. Classes in many subjects even within highly competitive universities are explicitly graded on a curve, particularly some hard-science classes. All of this represents a profound top-down effort to ration educational-credit goods according to a predetermined ideal distribution.

The very structure of grading itself imposes a level of social egalitarianism that would be unthinkable in a free-market property-based economy. It is impossible for students to maintain a GPA higher than 4.0, or to score higher than 2,400 on their SATs. Each year about 0.2% of students get perfect scores on the SATs; if income worked like SAT scores do, America might have a maximum income somewhere around the cutoff point for the top 0.1% of earners, or roughly $2m a year.

There are certainly ways in which grades and income are profoundly different from each other. Indeed, in general, it's a good idea to think of the life of the mind as something separate from the world of commerce. Your grade is not something you buy from your teacher in exchange for correct test answers, and that's not a trivial distinction; it means that grades aren't fungible in the way money is, and you could get into a long analysis of how this plays out in the respective social purposes and philosophical underpinnings of grading v income, except that I don't want to. This may lead Mr Hanson to consider me a lazy thinker like many of his students, but really, it's simply that I don't think any such examination is necessitated by the question. We redistribute grades within educational institutions, both high schools and universities. And we redistribute access to competitive educational institutions by granting extra consideration to applicants from low-income or educationally deprived backgrounds. This all makes general sense whether you consider the goal of grading to be motivation to achieve greater performance, or whether you consider the grades themselves to be a type of good that should be awarded in such a fashion as to maximise utility. I suppose it might create some problems if you have some kind of latter-day Greek ethics of virtue in which grades should be tied to moral character and quality of execution for deep axiomatic reasons. But overall, I would be more interested in the question of whether Mr Hanson's students think we should regulate the distribution of income as strictly as we do that of grades.