Recently, grade inflation at American universities has been in the news . . . it’s been a bit of a conundrum on the local level as well . . . while we have the “best and the brightest” students, it seems awkward to grade them with the same standards as other schools. Unfortunately, the trend has been towards higher and higher grade averages until grades become meaningless as the top students and the lowest students become distanced by only a few grade points. A recent study found that nearly half of all grades awarded at Harvard are in the A- to A range and a few years ago Harvard award honors to ninety percent of its graduates while Princeton is giving about 47 percent of it’s students an A and other schools are experiencing similar trends.
How do the so-called elite universities deal with the problem? Princeton recently proposed that faculty award an A grade only to 35% of students in a course. This sort of arbitrary system may seem heavy-handed but at some point something has to be done. An honors degree isn’t really very honorable if only one in ten folks don’t have it.
Of course, some folks will say that grade inflation is based upon rising qualities of students, but this doesn’t actually seem to be the case.
While there are many factors contributing to grade inflation, it is fiscal policy that seems to be overwhelming. When schools begin viewing students as clients to be kept happy, grades rise based upon attitude rather than upon merit.
Another factor is isolation of grading. Many faculty are unaware of what the trend or average is within their discipline. By having the data available to them, they are more likely to grade towards a trend rather than arbitrarily high . . . particularly if a public policy of what the typical average performance assumption were. So, if in discussion and policy they have decided that “all things being equal” a typical grade should be a B- in their discipline, then they are more likely to grade towards the median trend . . . albeit with the freedom to turn in a higher average when they honestly feel they have a class of high-rather-than-medium performers.
The tendency to grade high is more prevalent in some disciplines than others. Michael Berube points out:
English departments have basically worked on the A/B binary system for some time: A’s and A-minuses for the best students, B’s for everyone else and C’s, D’s and F’s for students who miss half the classes or threaten their teachers with bodily harm. At Penn State, A’s accounted for 47 percent of the grades in English in 2002. The numbers are similar for sociology, comparative literature and psychology — and indeed for the College of Liberal Arts as a whole. The sciences and engineering, notoriously, are stingier.
Unfortunately, recalibrating is not the only answer. The job market makes it very difficult for graduates to compete without higher grade averages. In Taiwan, most universities artificially inflate international grade transcripts to increase the rate of acceptance in overseas schools and competitive local employers will not look at students with GPAs below a certain average. One professor at Harvard actually gave his students two grades, one that was public for the registrar which was inflated and another that was private and showed actual judgement of student performance.
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