How can any particular grade-giver give out actual, uninflated grades, if this is not the status quo? For example, if a particular professor resists grade inflation, will they just wind up with very few unfortunate students in their class (especially with the rise in popularity of sites that report a professors typical spread of grades such as koofers.com, pickaprof.com [apparently now myedu.com?], and ratemyprofessors.com)? While it seems unfair to inflate grades, it also seems unfair not to inflate grades if the students will have to compete with other students who may not have received uninflated grades. Many students would want higher grades, many institutions would want their student bodies to have higher grades, many companies hire based partially on higher grades, many grad schools admit based partially on higher grades…
So being new to the whole publishing thing, but hopefully entering into it for the long term (as I intend to be a Computer Science professor), I have never thought about authorship. I have two main questions:
- What should an individual be expected to do to be included as an authro of some intellectual property?
- What actually determines who is listed (and in what order, since this seems to communicate information)?
When I googled (yes I actually use it as a verb because it’s the only search i seem to use, not sure how I feel about that…) authorship, to make sure I was using it correctly in describing this issue that I am contemplating, the first result was to the Harvard Med School’s Authorship Guidelines. I plan to read a bunch of such guidelines to think about what people generally expect and what is actually practiced. It seems like it’d be a form of plagiarism to approach authorship in some ways.
This feels very similar to grade inflation. I will probably be writing a paper on grade inflation for my Preparing the Future Professoriate class.