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.

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