Deflating the Grade Inflation Scare
A sociologist and an economist look at collegiate grade inflation and find a bogeyman that doesn’t frighten them at all.
By: Richard Korman | December 15, 2009 | 15:05 PM (PDT) | 
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Researchers look into collegiate grade inflation and find an issue that's a whole lot of nothing. (stockxpert.com)
Remember what it felt like when you were battling for a C in Chemistry while your roommate pulled an easy A in Introduction to Theater?
If you do, you’re going to hate a new study of rising grades at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Right from the start, Alexandra A. Killewald, a doctoral candidate in sociology and public policy, and Paul N. Courant, a professor of economics and public policy, dispense with the usual harrumphing about falling standards and professors who rain A’s and B’s on unexceptional students.
“The term ‘grade inflation,’” Killewald and Courant say in a sarcastic first sentence of their paper in the summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “covers a multitude of phenomena, some of which are even alleged to be sins.”
Looking through an economic prism, the authors interpret grades in part as marketplace signals. With two exceptions, they see the gradual grade increases they found as mostly harmless, a practice that “is costless” to faculty and “makes students happy.”
Some teachers can’t resist “the opportunity to (in effect) print money,” they write.
And about the only time faculty graded tough was in required or high-demand classes with objective tests, with answers that were either right or wrong. Those conditions allowed the professor to grade freely “without the penalty of tsouris from students” who come back and argue, says Courant. “When you get those two things you’re likely, but not certain, to get tougher treatment.”
To be sure, there is much anecdotal and some statistical evidence of falling educational standards, and numerous fixes tried and suggested – greater numerical specificity, ranking students within a grade, separating teaching from evaluation or limiting A’s, as Princeton has done. But suddenly changing practices, so that math grades like English, could be unfair to students and misleading to graduate school admission committees, Courant suggests.
Killewald and Courant fit more neatly into the scholarly camp that sees the very term “grade inflation” as a headline in search of a story, a phantom kept alive by the media with anecdotes from Amherst and Cambridge. A more fruitful idea, skeptics suggest, are studies that examine all the different ways grades are given and used — thus the title of Killewald and Courant’s paper, “What Are Grades Made Of?”
Courant had been a provost at the University of Michigan, so he had an interest in the subject. He says the grading study came about when the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, reading another paper on the subject of grades, said, “‘Gee, I wonder if there’s a supply side to this industry when departments have strategies for giving grades for becoming bigger and smaller.’ And I was the economist most likely to acquire the relevant data and still have a friend in the registrar’s office.”
To work on the study with him Courant brought in Killewald. Both are in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where Courant is the Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy.
They looked at undergraduate grades from 25 departments in the college of literature, science and the arts from fall 1992 to winter 2008. During the period of study, grades at the school weighted by credit hours (meaning a grade given in a three-unit course counts as much as three grades in one-unit courses) rose only fast enough, about .01 of a GPA a year, to turn a B (grade of 3.0) into a B+ (grade of 3.3). Not exactly a fast-rising cake left in the oven.
The departmental differences are well known. By tradition and practice, science and math grade hard, using more objective test measures, and the humanities, with interpretative methods of evaluating students, grades easier. Upper-division classes, where students have selected their majors and are good in the subject and better known to faculty, grade easy, too, they say. And grades are used to attract or thin enrollment in classes and departments, with required courses typically grading harder.
Here’s one way it plays out. Killewald and Courant found that fourth-semester French and Spanish — the semester needed to meet the school’s language requirement — grade hard while upper-level language literature courses taken mainly by majors grade easy (close to A-). That makes sense as faculty play tougher with students in required, or grade-inelastic, classes while going easier on departmental majors.
Otherwise, how to explain the anomalies — such as upper-level chemistry and physics (average GPA 2005-2007 3.28) and philosophy (3.27) grading within a hair of one another? “Chemistry and physics are departments you think of as tough,” but at the upper level, they aren’t, notes Killewald.
The same logic doesn’t apply to English 125, required freshman composition. The interpretive nature of the grades opens the door to pouty students quarreling about their marks. So instead, the department uses the opportunity “to signal the quality of their best students in early classes by giving handfuls of A’s and even A+s, along with encouraging comments, while giving good grades to middling students as well,” the authors write.
In the bigger picture outside Ann Arbor, there are troubling anecdotes that faculty use lenient grades as a form of social promotion, that professors, imagining themselves to be Dewey’s true disciples, kick off new classes by announcing no one’s getting less than a B — letting themselves and the students off the hook — that there’s no honor left in belonging to some honor societies. LINK
Grading practices, however, belong to individual departments and apples-to-apples comparisons even within a school are hard. The whole idea of grade inflation assumes education can be seen as units of a comparable commodity or that aptitude and measures of performance can be quantified.
“There is no same product for which teachers could be paying either the same price or different prices,” writes Lester H. Hunt, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin and the editor of Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2008).
So, if gradual increases in grades aren’t a sin against undergraduates or society, any new grading practices should be enacted cautiously. At Cornell, the practice of posting median grades on the Internet, begun more than 10 years ago, has apparently flopped, accelerating the upward march of marks. An updated study of what happened at Cornell appears in the same summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Students, unsurprisingly, tend to spruce up their GPAs with easier-grading electives or courses of study.
No one who is an intelligent user of grades can believe anymore that grading norms are identical across fields, says Courant, and any solution to the problem that ignores that is just dumb. What’s more, suggest both authors, an entire cohort of students would be surprised — and an entire cohort of graduate admissions committees might make bad decisions — if math suddenly graded like English or vice versa. “To the extent everybody knows the chemistry department grades harder than English department, people looking to judge chemistry can make pretty good judgments and the same goes for English,” says Courant.
Even in a department that grades generously, Courant adds, straight A’s are hard to get. And really in any field, it’s possible no matter the background-grading standard, a professor can still give a student a bad grade as a wake-up call or a good or great grade as an indicator of high quality. “So it doesn’t bother me that math is grading an intro course with a median a bit below B and English is grading where it’s about a B-plus,” says Courant.
Of more concern, say Courant and Killewald, is when students shop for easy-grading classes. That runs counter to Courant’s ideal for university education, which is broad-based and invites students to sample widely. And Courant worries that the differences between departmental grading scares students away from math, science and related professions.
The other problem is that, unlike monetary inflation, grades have an upper bound that bunches everyone tightly together at the top. That may be a good reason to go in the other direction, away from numerical specificity and closer to the system used at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter book series. Passing grades include Outstanding and Exceeds Expectations, and failing grades include Poor, Dreadful and Troll.
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Speaking from my own experience in college and graduate school, I have found grading to be nothing but a crap shoot on many occaisions. Often, professors do not grade you based on either effort or ability, but on whether they just happen to like your work. I have experienced professors who have shown atrociously poor judgement in grading; not only was there no grade inflation, but the exact opposite of this. You can work your tail off and get nothing but a lousy C while other students receive As and Bs by merely coasting through a course.This is why grades should be abolished; they are not necessarily an accurate reflection on students and grade point average can be highly misleading.
Richard Korman replies:Grading dates to a time when scholars believed you could accurately measure a mind or intellectual achievement. And everyone has stories about grading horrors. But I wouldn't abolish grades, as Robert Berger suggests in his posted comment, because comparisons still are needed and students need feedback in the form of comparisons. Of course learning is much more complex and grades shouldn't be the central point of study and teaching, as often happens. Doesn't anyone else believe this is true?
If grades rose 0.01/yr over 15 yrs,. how does one calculate an increase of 0.3?I do not believe that "a GPA" is a unit; the GPA numbers are abstract.
Richard Korman writes:The criticism posted above is correct. I wrote that a .01 rise in GPA over 15 years amounted to a .3 increase. I should have written what the authors said in their study, that at that rate of increase a grade of 3.0 would rise to 3.3 "over about 30 years." The mistake is mine.
Having just finished reading 22 term papers and 22 final exams, the agonizing grading process is still very fresh to me. Truth is, once you leave the realm of multiple choice, right-or-wrong, grading is very subjective. The most difficult part of it, from an educator's point of view, is factoring in writing ability and the thought processes that support it. There is an asymmetry in how we (society in general) look at logical thought and its expression, relative to other skills. Nobody thinks it's unfair to flunk a math student who gets calculations wrong (no matter how much he/she studied), or for that matter to kick off the baseball team somebody who can't hit a curveball (no matter how much he/she practices). But there is a hesitance, in college and in society at large, to give a poor grade to somebody who just can't write a coherent argument; it's like flunking somebody because they are overweight or are left-handed. It's not considered fair. Try giving a poor grade to a student who has done a lot of work on a project, invested a lot of research time, and handed in an incoherent paper. Try telling them, "You received a low grade because you are a terrible writer." Think you will get a complaint on that one, if not a formal appeal? So allowances are made for students who can't articulate what they're thinking (and since they can't articulate you can't really be sure what they're thinking) and certain types of skills don't get sufficiently rewarded and certain deficiencies don't get properly penalized. These biases in grading have convinced me that it should all be done on a pass/fail basis. Want to evaluate a student's qualifications for graduate school or employment? Look at the courses they passed and the work samples they can submit.
Richard Korman replies:Well put by Mr. Braconi. Where were the writing teachers who were supposed to be giving the tough grades in writing so that other subject matter teachers don't have to? Students arrive at college unprepared to write at college level or their writing slips under the pressures of college study. College students who write poorly may be poor writers but many of them also are just poorly organized and don't start writing soon enough and leave time to revise and clarify what they mean.
Richard Korman replies:Well put by Mr. Braconi. Where were the writing teachers who were supposed to be giving the tough grades in writing so that other subject matter teachers don't have to? Students arrive at college unprepared to write at college level or their writing slips under the pressures of college study. College students who write poorly may be poor writers but many of them also are just poorly organized and don't start writing soon enough and leave time to revise and clarify what they mean.
This is an interesting article, but the paper it's based on isn't really research. The authors took selective data from one institution and used it to write an extended opinion piece that contains errors of fact.
Their statement "American colleges and universities are now in at least the fifth decade of well-documented grade inflation" is simply not true. As I and others have noted (some wonderful and forgotten work was done by an administrator at Michigan State who might have coined the term grade inflation) the mid-1970s to mid-1980s were a period of grade stability. Also, there likely always has been pressure to dilute the currency of a grade. Grades have never been static.
Their statement "no systematic data exist for comparing course grades across colleges and universities" is simply not true. There are public data everywhere online. It would be quite easy to collect such data in a systematic way from many institutions and analyze for national trends. Writing a paper based on data from one institution and claiming no other comparable data exist is simply being lazy.
Ignoring the errors in the original paper, the authors state that grade inflation is "costless." This is simply not true. If you add up the continuing effects of grading softer and softer over decades, the impact is damaging. It leads to a less serious classroom. It leads to motivation problems on the part of students. Over the last forty years, study hours have declined by roughly half nationwide. Students now study only about 14 hours a week partly because expectations are so low. They are learning significantly less than they once did. Studies show they are less engaged in learning and that their ability to comprehend complex English has decreased. Textbooks have been dumbed down; an author in my own field of study had to write a "lite version" of his longstanding textbook at the request of his publisher. I know personally that I had to throw out the use of calculus in my junior level classes because I could no longer assume that students - despite having taken and passed calculus in college - understood it in any way shape or form.
It's not even clear that students are "happy" about rising grades. It’s true that many of the slackers are happier. They get to earn a high grade with little effort. But one of the stranger things that I've observed is that as grades have gone up, students with ambition have become even more neurotic about their GPAs. For example take a student from a place like Yale, which has one of the most lax grading practices in the nation. Let's say you were a pre-law or pre-med student there and you wanted to get into a top professional school. You'd want to earn honors upon graduation. Last year, to earn honors of any kind (be in the top 30 percent of your class or better) you needed at least a 3.76 GPA. Getting a B would be a major setback for any student with high goals. That's why students today are arguing over grades less than an A-; they are worrying about their GPAs to the hundredths place. One of the stranger things about grade inflation is that it has created an environment where many of the best students (and some students who want A's even though they produce only average work) are more obsessed about grades, not less.
Grade inflation is symptomatic of a college environment where learning is subsidiary to the “college experience.” We do a disservice to outstanding students by creating a wan experience in the classroom designed to keep slackers happy. We fail to reward excellence, choosing to lump outstanding performance with mediocrity.
The effect of grade inflation isn't simply a rise in a number. The level of achievement represented by a college degree has diminished. That's a significant cost to a nation that depends on an educated workforce for its competitiveness.
Stuart Rojstaczer
Speaking from my own experience in college and graduate school
Richard, as you well know since we're friends, we both attended a state university with a well-deserved reputation for grade inflation, though I think this was often dependent on the department and the professor. I took freshman chemistry and really had to bust my butt to earn a decent grade. Many of my dorm-mates had to drop the course because they were pulling C's or less. Things were much easier after I became an English major. I rarely went to class because I was engaged in other (worthwhile) pursuits, but I left college needing about 28 credits to graduate to pursue a career that did not really require a degree. When I decided in my 30's to try for medical school, I needed to first complete my BA. I contacted most of the professors from my upper level English courses, where many of my incompletes were earned. Almost all let me off the hook--8-9 years later--with a relatively easy assignment, which, in at least one case, had nothing to do with the subject matter of the original course. They all gave me A's. On the other hand, when I later enrolled in pre-med at another state university--a good one--and took a standard pre-med curriculum (organic chemistry, phsycis, physiology, microbiology, etc),I had to really bust it to earn a decent grade. I think most would agree that grade inflation occurs more in liberal arts courses than in math/science courses, and is characteristic of some institutions but not others.
Written By:Richard Korman
Richard Korman is an award-winning journalist, Web site manager and an author. His freelance writing has appeared in Business Week, The New York Times, and Newsday, while the Library Journal selected his biography of inventor Charles Goodyear as one of the best business-related books of 2002. Korman's career has included ghostwriting advice about sex and relationships and a CD called Write to Influence, about improving everything from e-mails to essays. He has a son and a daughter, both college students, and claims to be the loudest rock 'n' roll keyboard player in the Hudson River Valley, north of New York City, where he lives.
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