Buying A’s

15 Jul 2011, Posted by Melissa Dalis in News, 2 Comments

Heads you get an A, tails you don’t, according to a study published Wednesday by a retired Duke professor.

Nationally, 43 percent of grades given out at universities are A’s, which is 28 percentage points higher than in 1960. At Duke, and many other private schools, earning an A is especially expected with the sky-high tuitions today, the study said.

Even when controlling for SAT scores, private universities give out about 5 percent more A’s than their public equivalents, said Stuart Rojstaczer, former professor of hydrology and researcher on the study, in an interview with The Chronicle Friday. Average GPAs for the recently graduating classes were 3.2 at public schools, 3.4 at private schools and 3.5 to 3.6 at Duke.

“In a sense, people are buying GPAs,” Rojstaczer said. “Private schools are getting a lot of wealthy kids from a lot of wealthy families that have expectations, and essentially they are getting slightly higher grades.”

This gap between public and private school grades is relatively new—until the 1960s, schools graded their students more similarly, regardless of the ability of the student body, he said.

“If you got a C at Duke, that meant you were average at Duke; if you got a C at Harvard, you were average at Harvard; if you got a C at Pembroke State, that meant you were average at Pembroke State,” Rojstaczer said.

Grade inflation also hasn’t always been so rampant—A’s used to mean “excellent”, whereas now they essentially mean “pretty good,” he said. Duke’s graduating class average GPA of about 3.55—about an A- on the letter scale—has risen dramatically since the average of 2.1 in the 1930s.

“At an average class at Duke, chances are more than 50 percent that you’ll earn an A, and that’s about a factor of three or four times more than it was in the 1950s,” he said. “Does that mean that there are three to four times more excellent students than before? No, it means that we’re grading easier.”

Students, however, aren’t necessarily working harder. In fact, Duke students on average are working  20+ hours less than they did 40 years ago, Rojstaczer said.

According to Rojstaczer’s study, which was published in Teacher College Record, a national trend shows that if professors don’t give high grades, they tend to get lower course evaluations. This causes deans and other people in their departments to complain, he said, adding that this new course evaluation system has profoundly impacted the way that professors grade.

While students’ GPAs are becoming more and more clustered in the previously very competitive 3.5-plus range, employers and admissions officers are focusing more on the GPA and less on the transcript, which is the opposite of what should be happening, Rojstaczer said.

“Employers don’t know what to do with the fact that we’re not grading realistically anymore,” he said. “Graduate and professional schools have decided to worry about GPA to the 100^th place to make evaluations, which is certainly not the way to do things because everyone’s bunched up.”

Simply looking at GPAs also ignores the fact that science classes tend to grade much more harshly than humanities classes. At Duke and most other national universities, science grades are on average 0.4 grade points lower than humanities.

“If you load up on a lot of science classes, and someone else is loading up on history and classics classes, they’re going to get much higher GPAs for their workload, and it’s not fair,” Rojstaczer said. “They’re implicitly making it more difficult for science and engineering students to go to law or medical schools.”

Students know this, which is why they often take humanities classes to boost their GPAs for their medical school applications. So students are taking easier classes, working less and earning higher grades.

“We’ve created a fiction that excellence is so common, and it’s not doing employers any favors,” Rojstaczer said.

School’s out!…of money

09 Jul 2011, Posted by Chinmayi Sharma in News, 0 Comments

Education might help foot the bill that government has been racking up for years now.

A domino effect has led to states nationwide whittling away at their budgets for education with newly implemented federal cuts. Summer programs, education in the arts and music, physical education classes and the general length of school days and years will feel the effects of a tighter fiscal leash on the nation.

In 2009 President Barack Obama officially endorsed longer school days and shorter summer vacations. Although this might be unpopular with our younger siblings in grade school, it is a viewpoint ubiquitously shared.

“For some students, the traditional school year is not enough to meet their learning needs,” said Lewis Ferebee, chief of staff of Durham Public Schools. “Some would also argue that our nation is behind when it comes to time in school, which has implications for our global competitiveness.”

Justin Hamilton, a spokesperson for the United States Department for Education, said in a New York Times article that, rather than having the opportunity to pass legislation or even endorse extending the school year, this branch of the government has had its hands full trying to maintain the current length of the school year.

Los Angeles has cut its budget for summer classes to $3 million from its original $18 million allotment. Several districts in North Carolina have followed suits, either reducing or cutting available summer programs altogether.

Some more extreme measures that may spread given current trends were taken in some districts in New Mexico, Idaho and other states that have resorted to cramming their school curricula into four-day academic weeks.

North Carolina, however, is attempting to resist these pressures.

“As a result of recent budget reductions, some school districts are shortening the school year to save money,” Ferebee said. “However, in N.C., students were required to have 180 days of school which was just increased to 185 by our state legislators…for the upcoming school year.”

The education department has not given any additional money to implement these new regulations, which may add stress to school administrators and teachers, Ferebee said.

He emphasized that measures have been taken in some individual schools to lengthen the school day and that the state strongly supports enhancing their children’s educational experience in any way possible.

“We have also tried to beef up our summer and intercession offerings to enrich and re-teach, to give our students an advantage,” Ferebee noted. “Bottom-line: we have to do whatever it takes to educate our young people—our futures is in their hands.”

Theoretically, our priorities are in order. Our end-of-the-month state and national credit statements should reflect these priorities as well.

As of now, the numbers don’t seem to add up.

Legalizing Mary Jane

06 Jul 2011, Posted by Ashley Mooney in News, 1 Comments

Marijuana, pot, cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, ganja—no matter what you call it, marijuana is one of the most widely used illegal drugs in the United States. And the debate over its legal status is even hotter than a burning bowl of the plant itself.

Legalizing marijuana has debated since the 1970’s. Marijuana is currently legal for medical use in 16 states. Possession of the drug has been decriminalized in several states, and legalization has even appeared on state ballots.

“When marijuana legalization was on the ballot in California in 2008, it specified there would be a hefty tax,” wrote Philip Cook, ITT/Terry Sanford professor of public policy, in an email. “That tax could have the dual benefits of providing revenues and limiting use.”

While taxing marijuana sale could mean serious revenue for states, there are still downsides to legalization. Cook mentioned that legalization could lead to a large increase in both occasional and frequent users, potentially affecting health, driving, and productivity in unforeseen ways.

“It is reasonable to suppose that there would be some increase in use,” Cook wrote, “and that the increase could be moderated by regulations and taxes of the sorts that we have for tobacco and alcohol.”

Another aspect of the debate is whether legislative change should come from the federal government or from the states.

Cook suggested modeling legalization policy on the 21^st Amendment, which provided states control over the distribution and sale of alcohol.

“The ‘laboratory of the states’ has always been a strength of our federal system,” Cook said. Allowing change to come from the states “provides an opportunity to learn something about the consequences of the various alternatives to prohibition.”

Noting the intensity of the debate, Cook said, “Marijuana policy may be one area where the public is so divided that we do not want a uniform national policy.”

There is a large margin of uncertainty when discussing potential consequences of legalizing marijuana.

“Our last experience with a free market [for marijuana] was [in] 1936,” Cook said.   “Whether it would be a good idea for some or all states to take the next step and legalize—and with what restrictions as to tax, age, and licensing—is not at all clear. Without any actual experience, we can only speculate.”

Double your phone’s battery life

06 Jul 2011, Posted by Melissa Dalis in News, 0 Comments

Your fifth game of Angry Birds will no longer kill your phone’s battery life, thanks to a new technology named SleepWell.

With so many applications and games flooding our phones and laptops, they are constantly dying—it’s often a miracle if they last throughout the day without being charged. SleepWell solves this problem by optimizing the energy spent on Wi-Fi, which is one of the primary sources of battery drainage.

Created by Justin Manweiler, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student at Duke, SleepWell mediates traffic at the network level in order to decrease the amount of energy wasted by phones and laptops using Wi-Fi signals.

“We want to make Wi-Fi work in a more energy-efficient manner,” Manweiler said. “There is a kind of fundamental problem with the way power saving has been done in that, as it was conceived, it was sort of planned for a network that has one access point. Real networks aren’t like that—lots of phones and laptops are trying to use the network at once, and all these networks lead to a lot of traffic.”

SleepWell controls traffic in a similar way that drivers often choose to leave and come home late from work in order to miss rush hour, Manweiler said. Rescheduling to avoid the traffic reduces the energy cost at no significant expense for the driver.

“Given that Internet traffic can tolerate a reasonable amount of latency/flexibility, SleepWell [access points] adjust their activity cycles to minimally overlap with others,” Manweiler wrote in his paper. “Each client frees up time to sleep, ultimately resulting in promising energy gains with practically negligible loss in performance.”

When hundreds of students at Duke are cluttered in the library, many of them will be sharing the same wireless channel and thus interfering with each other’s connections. Even at home, neighbors often share the same channel, Manweiler said. When all of these people try to wirelessly connect to the Internet at once, everyone’s connections are often weaker and slower.

“The algorithm is trying to isolate traffic,” Manweiler said. “We’re trying to add a little bit of scheduling on traffic so that the different access points are not trying to use the networks at the same time.”

Manweiler will first look to access point vendors in industry to use SleepWell, which was funded by National Science Foundation grants and contributions from Microsoft, Verizon and Cisco, he said. The technology works with any device that uses Wi-Fi and can easily be implemented at companies with a simple software update at their access points, he added.

Seeing that my laptop is dying as I finish writing this blog post, I can’t wait for the day that SleepWell is installed at Duke.

A natural gastastrophe

02 Jul 2011, Posted by Ashley Mooney in News, 1 Comments

The economy is on the rise, and so is energy.  Translation: more CO₂ emissions.

Last year global energy consumption saw its greatest increase in nearly forty years.

According to The Economist, consumption rose by 5.6 percent in 2010.  The last increase of this magnitude was in 1973.

With the exception of nuclear energy, all forms of fossil fuels and non-fossil-fuel energy sources grew in consumption.

The reason for the increase: recovery from the economic crisis and numerous emerging economies.

“Following the global economic collapse in 2008, mature economies such as the U.S. and [the European Union] cut way back on using energy,” wrote Lincoln Pratson, Truman and Nellie Semans/Alex Brown and Sons professor of earth and ocean sciences, in an email. “This cut back led to an overall worldwide decline in energy use even as developing economies that were not slowed by the economic crisis, such as China, India and Brazil, continued to use more energy.”

Developing countries need more energy to grow—rising standards of living and increasing populations all mean more energy consumption—and these countries are not always the most efficient in their energy use.

Rising energy use has numerous environmental implications. According to The Economist, carbon dioxide emissions have risen even faster than energy consumption—increasing by 5.8 percent last year—the fastest growth since 1969.

“The nations of the world will be hard pressed to keep CO₂ emissions at current levels, and in fact it’s more likely that these emissions will grow,” he said. “This in turn will increase the heat trapping capacity of the atmosphere and possibly accelerate global warming.”

Despite record growth in emissions, many countries are now switching from burning coal as an energy source to natural gas, which is both plentiful and emits considerably less CO₂.

“The positive side to this is that burning natural gas produces about half of the CO₂ emissions that coal does, so a shift to gas will help slow the rate at which we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, which in turn could slow global warming,” Pratson said.

However, there are downsides to using natural gas.

“The abundance of gas will keep its price low relative to the price of renewable technologies, slowing their adoption—at some point we are going to have to use more renewable forms of energy,” he said.

Despite strides toward more efficient sources of energy, as long as trends in economic growth and energy consumption continue to rise, so will emissions.