A Test of Student Grade Satisficing by Experimentally Inducing Time Stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars studying scholastic achievement in higher education find that students have specific course grades in mind that satisfy their desires for academic performance. When students believe that they are on-track to achieve those grades, they divert resources to other endeavors. This paper tests a resulting hypothesis: Students balance higher grades on easier assignments with lower grades on more difficult ones. After experimentally inducing time stress by assigning students to participate in an experiential learning exercise, those busier with volunteer work did balance their higher grades on the easier, experiential assignments, against lower ones on the course exams. Additionally, the time stress produced a strong interaction effect. Among the busier students, the time stress reduced their course grades (those not related to the experiential learning), while among the less busy, those grades increased. Instructors should be aware that some course activities are less linked to learning than others. The educational consequence of student grade satisficing is that when instructors offer more credit for easier activities, which are less linked to student learning, they may be reducing learning overall. The role of grade satisficing in reducing students’ acquisition of knowledge is an under-explored topic, but it has powerful implications for student learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".