Mind the Quality Gap

Current proposals to increase college enrollments won’t magically increase Americans’ academic abilities. Indeed, there is already evidence that many students—even those who graduate—fall far below the traditional standard for college achievement.

That which follows offers a glimpse of the polarization of ability that is evident even today within a university. If college attendance is expanded further, admissions officials will undoubtedly ratchet down the ability roster, and the polarization will be even greater.       

First some background: I have been a professor of economics since 1968. I am currently in my 35^th year at Ball State University (BSU) in Muncie, Indiana. I have taught an array of courses over my career, with the freshman/sophomore principles of microeconomics course my most frequent assignment. I have not kept a count on the number of times I have taught this course, but it is surely more than 100.

For the last eight or so years, I have taught both an Honors section and a regular section of the microeconomics class in the fall semester. Honors students have been admitted to the university with exceptional high school credentials. At BSU, less than 10 percent of the students are Honors. While those students always appeared to perform at higher levels than their regular student counterparts, I never quantified the gap until last semester. Last semester, prompted by escalating concern about the consequences of juicing enrollments, I decided to set the two courses up to be as identical as possible and to measure the performance gap between Honors and “regular” students.

Accordingly, I assigned the same textbook, gave the same multiple-choice examinations, gave the same lectures, and had the same attendance requirements for both classes. The two classes even met on the same days—Tuesdays and Thursdays, one at 9:30 and the other at 12:30.

Were there still differences? Yes. Regular students usually take the course their sophomore year, whereas Honors students are typically first-semester freshmen, meaning that the regular students presumably have more college classroom savvy. On the other hand, the Honors students complete thirteen short-answer-essay homework assignments during the semester in addition to the common examinations. Additional course requirements and rigor are considered part of the Honors experience at BSU. I chose writing.

The tables below show performance on the three examinations. Column 1 shows the number of students taking the examination in each class, column 2 the mean score in terms of number of correct answers (the number of questions on each examination in parentheses), column 3 the range of scores, column 4 the standard deviation, and column 5 the t statistic that tests for differences between means (the 95% critical value for the t statistic is in parentheses).

It is no overstatement to say that Honors students performed considerably better. The lowest Honors score on each examination exceeded the mean score for regular students. The t statistics show that the differences between the means are statistically significant.

Were one to convert the mean scores into percentages, the percentage point gaps for each examination would be 20.8, 21.6, and 23.2, respectively. The grade point averages in the two courses were different, too. On a 4 point scale in which C = 2.0, the average was 3.67 in the Honors course and 1.91 in the regular course, roughly one and three quarters letter grades higher. As far as outcomes are concerned, the two courses were effectively two different courses. In my opinion, based on my experience in both classes, the writing component had only a slight influence on the students’ performance.

Should political efforts to spike college enrollments “succeed,” the above performance gap will only worsen. In addition, the performance range within the regular student population will also increase.

It isn’t surprising that Honors students perform at a higher level than their regular student counterparts. They’re Honors students precisely because they have higher levels of academic ability and engagement. But what level of polarization is acceptable? Or do administrators even think about that?

No BSU administrator has ever asked me about the performance gap between my two classes. Moreover, none of my colleagues involved in “dual” teaching assignments like mine has ever told me of being asked about the gap for their classes.   

A final note: I had the same attendance rule for the two classes. My rule: students can miss class four times with no punitive consequences for their course grade. (That’s two weeks of class!) Each absence beyond the fourth reduced a student’s course grade one letter grade.

Were there differences in attendance between the two classes? You bet. Absences per student over the semester were 0.76 in the Honors class and 2.84 in the regular class. In other words, the absence rate for regular students was almost four times that of Honors students. Forty-six percent of Honors students had perfect attendance; 19 percent of regular students had perfect attendance. If attendance patterns are proxies for student sloth, the sloth quotient increases as college admissions officials ratchet down the ability roster.         

I made a point of keeping the courses similar in content and grading standards and doing that showed the wide gulf between BSU’s Honors students and the rest.  If the country follows through on the politicians’ idea that still more young people should be in college, the result will be a further widening of the gulf between the students who are prepared for college and those who aren’t. In all likelihood, that will put professors under increasing pressure to dilute course content and inflate grades. That is another topic for research.