Last week, the New York Times’ Economix blog posted about some interesting research on grade inflation and its effect on the job market and grad school acceptance. The post was accompanied by a nice graphic showing the evolution of grade inflation over time.

For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s,  grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.

In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more. The chart below shows average G.P.A.’s from 1930 to 2006. Gray dots represent individual schools’ average G.P.A’s. The blue and green lines represent the average G.P.A. for each school type — public or private — over time:

Gray dots on their graph represent individual data points, and colored lines indicate aggregated trends.

(Click to view full size.)

The Times continues, “The authors [of the report] suggest that these laxer grading standards may help explain why private school students are over-represented in top medical, business and law schools and certain Ph.D. programs: Admissions officers are fooled by private school students’ especially inflated grades.”

Click here to read the full post from the New York Times.

We recently put out a beta version of our upcoming print, A Visual History of the American Presidency, on Mturk for proofreading and suggestions for improvement. We’re still working out the final kinks and incorporating suggestions from beta users/viewers, but we’re looking forward to a release soon! In the meantime, check out some turkers’ reviews:

“I felt that the chart was very informative and useful.”

“Overall: Great looking poster, the graphs and charts make it easier and more interesting to read. [The] simple color scheme is appealing to the eye.”

“I thought this chart was very informative and historically accurate.”

“I found the abundance of information enriching!”

“I like the poster. It’s clear and easy to read.”

“Overall, I found it fascinating… The poster is very informative and displays a ton of information is a graphic and engaging way.”

“Excellent document.”

“I like the overall presentation of the chart. It was easy to follow and whoever made it did a good job.”

“The chart is well designed and the information seems accurate and useful.”

“I found the chart very interesting (I’m not American so it taught me a lot).”

“The poster is amazing… I really think your poster is textbook worthy. Very well detailed and very accurate.”

To be the first to see the print when it’s officially launched, sign up for our e-mail list by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking “Contact us.”

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Gallup’s interactive “Presidential Job Approval Center” has some great tools, but using their widget, one can only compare four trend lines (ie., the job approval ratings of four presidents) at a time — it would be nice to see a more comprehensive visual comparison. Using Gallup’s data, I played around in Excel and Illustrator and created the following chart.

The chart details each president’s job approval at 460 days in office (the length of Obama’s current tenure), each president’s all-time high and all-time low approval rating, and average approval rating. You can tell at a glance which presidents experienced the most tumultuous terms: Truman, LBJ, Nixon, and G.W. Bush each have wide spans from highest to lowest approval ratings, and quite different “current” (460 days in) ratings than their eventual averages.

Our new Visual History of the American Presidency contains a column in which the presidents are ranked on a one- to five-star scale; I included our rankings in the chart below, along the x-axis (there are no five-star-ranked presidents in this time period).

Click to view full size.

So what do you think? Is this chart a useful visualization of Gallup’s data? Did we get the rankings right?

The online news site Raw Story posted an analysis a few weeks ago noting the 600 percent increase in split votes on the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2009.

Raw Story includes a table in their article listing FEC votes from 2003 to 2009; I made a quick chart of that data and added in a notation every time a seat changed hands. (The FEC has six commissioners, three Republicans and three Democrats, at all times. Commissioners are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate.)

Click to view full size

The Raw Story article provides a good explanation of the partisan gridlock the FEC experienced in 2008 and why certain recent GOP appointees have led to the uptick in split votes.

Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen and the original author of the study, explained, “The Federal Election Commission is hopelessly deadlocked, and the caucus of three Republicans really have realized that the best way they can prevent the enforcement of campaign finance laws is just by voting as a bloc to deadlock everything. Without a four-vote margin, the FEC can’t act.”

“At this point we have a dysfunctional FEC,” Holman continued. “It’s an agency that simply does not function anymore.”

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, the day women’s earnings finally catch up with men’s earnings for the previous year. After engaging in an argument with a friend over the merits of the equal pay argument — he maintained women had less market value in the workplace than men (due to traditionally having less education, working less hours, etc.) — I drew up a quick chart showing the history of men’s and women’s annual salaries over time, with a line added in representing the number of women obtaining Bachelor’s degrees.

The numbers are imperfect; they don’t control for occupation, industry, race, etc., but it shows how women’s skills are increasing at a disproportionate rate to their salaries. (Once you control for factors like education and experience, the wage gap gets slightly smaller, but persists.) Click to view full size:

Leave any comments below! For more info on the gender pay gap, click here.

A few weeks ago, we tweeted about the chart below, posted by Yale professor Chris Blattman on his blog. The graph was first posted on the Aidwatch blog, here. Click to view:

The graph’s original author criticized the new, trendy “3-D” approach to development, writing that we must “hold our politicians accountable when they sacrifice Development big-time to achieve small-time (or sometimes illusory) Diplomatic or Defense goals.”

Jérôme Cukier, the OECD’s data editor (OECD numbers were used for the pie chart), thankfully decided to respond. He used Tableau to create interactive graphs of aid flows to fragile states: a few screenshots are below, but Cukier’s actual post is worth a full read. Nice to see an awful graph transformed into something similarly simple, but much more useful and informative — click on each image to view in full size, and click here to read Cukier’s description of his process.

It’s Emancipation Day here in DC, marking the 148th anniversary of the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. According to the National Archives, “the act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called ‘the national shame’ of slavery in the nation’s capital.”

The holiday often passes unnoticed, even by those living in DC — but the DC Emancipation Act was actually an important precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation. The language of historic legislation is hard to get through, so to save myself the trouble, I used Wordle to make a quick word cloud of the Act’s major sections – click to see in full view:

Today’s tax day, and with everyone around us complaining about high taxes, we wondered how the U.S. measures up to other OECD countries. Turns out, most Americans have a significantly lower income tax burden than residents of most other developed countries — but does that mean Americans are happier? We found each country’s Human Development Index (the UN’s attempt at measuring quality of life) and attached it to the right-side axis, connecting each set of bars with its corresponding ranking. (Of course, a high HDI rating doesn’t necessarily lead directly to happiness, but it is an indicator.)

The chaos of the connecting lines is indicative of the disconnect between low tax rates and high quality of life; in fact, there seems to be a link between high tax rates and high quality of life. Click to see full view:

For more information on how the OECD collected its data, click here or read this article. For the 2005 HDI rankings, click here.