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The
Phenomenon of Grade Inflation in
Higher Education
by Bradford P.
Wilson
What
is the extent of grade inflation in higher
education-what Yale officially refers to
as "upward grade homogenization?"
For that matter, does it even exist? I think
we all have a sense that grading isn't what
it used to be-that in today's academy, the
fear of failing has all but disappeared,
and that making the dean's list is no longer
a pipe dream for students of the meanest
capacities. I-an above average student (though
a bit of a goofoff) from a very high achieving
public high school-remember the anxieties
of my first year or so in college, when
no amount of discipline and application
seemed to be able to lift me beyond a B
in the various calculus, physics, computer
science, and chemistry classes that North
Carolina State required of its entering
science students. I got as many Cs as Bs,
and even an occasional D. Terrifying, and
a spur to industry at the same time.
I've been looking at reports
on the available data and find that, as
the Independent Counsel might say, there
is substantial and credible information
that grades have been inflating over a thirty-year
period at American campuses of every variety.
If you look at the tables in
Levine and Cureton's new book, When Hope
and Fear Collide, you find the percentage
of Cs and As students received reversed
itself from early 1969 to 1993. In 1969,
7 percent of all students received grades
of A- or higher. By 1993, this proportion
had risen to 26 percent. In contrast, grades
of C or less moved from 25 percent in 1969
to 9 percent in 1993.
It is sometimes said that grade
inflation is a phenomenon of the most selective
institutions but not of the vast majority
of the colleges and universities. The data
I've seen don't support this claim. The
Levine and Cureton surveys were of students
at every type of institution from two-year
colleges to research universities, and the
data were weighted so as to make sure they
reflected the composition of American higher
education.
Furthermore, when a person
looks at individual institutions that have
had the courage to study their grading patterns
over the past 25 or 30 years, he always
finds grade inflation, regardless of institutional
type.
What can be said is that, while
grade inflation is universal, the Ivies
have elevated it to an art form.
At Princeton, the median GPA
for the class of 1973 was 3.078. The median
GPA for the class of 1997? 3.422.
At Dartmouth, the average GPA
had risen from 3.06 to 3.23 from 1968 to
1994.
At Harvard, 46 percent of the
undergraduate grades given during the 1996-97
year were A-s and As, more than doubled
the figure for 1966, which was 22 percent.
The percentage of C+s and below has fallen
from 28 percent in 1966-67 to 9 percent
in 1991-92.
Let me mention one other thing
the data revealed: grade inflation has proceeded
more rapidly in the humanities than in the
natural sciences, in part, no doubt, because
of the absolute, objective, and quantifiable
measures of student mastery that exist in
the sciences. And also, perhaps, those in
the sciences have been slower to abandon
their intellectual honesty since the 1960s.
But consider the consequences for higher
education and its service to the larger
society. The relative integrity of academic
standards in the natural sciences in comparison
to the humanities, education, and the social
sciences acts as an incentive for our esteem-hungry
students to avoid the sciences in favor
of the softer, grade-inflated alternatives.
I honestly don't believe that the sciences
and mathematics are inherently more difficult
than the humanities when the humanities
are properly conceived and taught. In fact,
I at first went into the sciences in college
because it was so much, well, easier for
me to work a math problem than to figure
out what to say about something as complex
as an intelligent text, or a social structure
or, indeed, human nature itself. Today,
as University of Virginia professor Mark
Edmundson wrote last year in Harper's, "The
rigors of Chem 101 create almost as many
English majors per year as do the splendors
of Shakespeare." I regard this situation
as a scandal.
What Does It Matter?
Does it matter that the gentleman's C has
become the gentleman's B+ or A-? Some folks
think not. The notable progressive educationist
Theodore Sizer represents a considerable
body of egalitarian opinion when he attacks
"our absolutely myopic concern about
assessment, grading, and evaluation. We
have this mania for rating people…It's
really kind of sick." Well, if that's
a persons' view of the art of assessment,
he can hardly care whether the average GPA
has gone up or down over the years. There's
also the possibility that students are just
plain smarter today than they were 10 and
20 and 30 years ago, and therefore deserve
higher grades. This argument is usually
advanced by students, who, in their advanced
stage of smartness, ignore the brute fact
that over the same period that grades were
inflating most rapidly (1965-1980), average
SATs, ACTs, and, yes, GREs were in decline.
The highest purpose served
by the grading system, it seems to me, is
that of making distinctions, distinctions
between excellence and competence, and between
competence and incompetence. Lee Mitchell,
chair of the English Department at Princeton
and part of the university committee that
recently issued an honest and very fine
report on grade inflation at Princeton,
wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
"Grades should be a shorthand for genuine
discriminations among individual student
efforts; all other considerations need to
be secondary."
Harvey Mansfield of Harvard,
our Massachusetts affiliate president, sees
in grade inflation a corrupting of the young:
"A 'C' used to be the grade for an
average performance. Nowadays, it's a slap
in the face." Rather than tell students
the truth about themselves, professors choose
to flatter their students, and flattery,
Mansfield says, is harmful to students.
What Can Be Done
About It?
Well, a person can go after
grade inflation head on, or he can go after
it by going to its deeper causes, or he
can do both.
The head-on approach that has
lately been building a head of steam at
a few of the most selective institutions
is to include on student transcripts not
only the grade for the class, but also the
average grade for all students enrolled
in the class. Prospective employers and
graduate admissions committees could then
get a better idea of whether that A- is
to be admired or ignored, and the students
would then be less prone to shop for easy
grades.
Another way is "talking
it down," that is, asking, or even
requiring, schools and departments to review
their grading practices with a view to bringing
consistency and rigor to the process. This
is what Princeton, for example, is doing.
It's too early to tell how responsive faculty
will be to the cajoling of deans, chairs,
and colleagues. Collegiality ain't what
it used to be. And thanks to student evaluations
(another 1960s innovation) and the decline
in respect for authority, students have
learned the not-so-subtle art of blackmail
(particularly in getting what they want
from the legions of professionally insecure
graduate students and adjuncts who now populate
the classroom).
Some Other Suggestions:
- With the faculty,
tighten up the curriculum, both the general
education curriculum and that of the majors,
with a view to ridding it of options that
allow students to select academically
inferior courses and programs.
- Radically revise the
existing system of student evaluations
of faculty so that any evaluation focuses
exclusively on the academic content of
the course and the teacher's academic
seriousness.
- Greet student complaints
about low grades with the contempt they
deserve, and stop putting tough graders
in the dock.
Dispense academic honors to only the very
top students, say the top 10 percent,
rather than, for example, the current
82 percent that now receive honors at
Harvard.
- Continue to show you
care for your students by taking a critical
eye to their work. Tell them that you
are tough with them because you want them
to grow as quickly as possible into students
who, in the apt phrase of Prof. Edmundson,
are "unable to bear their own ignorance."
-The above was condensed
from a speech given by Bradford P. Wilson,
Executive Director, National Association
of Scholars, at a meeting of Virginia Association
of Scholars, Radford University, Oct. 24,
1998.
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