Grade Inflation Is Serious

Commentary

One of the planks in the “compact” that the Trump administration has proposed to several colleges has to do with a problem that hasn’t received much attention in recent times, at least not in government circles. It’s one that doesn’t appear to have any political valence, no right or left orientation. The problem is grade inflation in higher education.

In 1960, only 15 percent of grades given fell into the A range. By 2000, an A became the most common final grade in college courses, and by 2013, an A or A minus tallied about 45 percent of all grades awarded.

The Department of Education wants the schools to do something about it, to reduce the number of A and A minus grades and get back to a reasonable distribution. It released a blog post at the end of September stating that the rate of A grades has reached “comical proportions.” It attributes the inflation to “consumer demand” for high scores and to students choosing easy courses, along with the fact that, for faculty, “happy students are easier to deal with” (they also give strong course evaluation scores). Those attributions sound correct to me.

Hence the compact requires that signatories “acknowledge that a grade must not be inflated, or deflated, for any nonacademic reason, but only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject that the grade purports to represent.” The overall result must be a reasonable distribution of scores, a bell curve, or else the yardstick doesn’t sufficiently distinguish among the talented, the average, and the below average.

When too many students cluster at the high end, the area of excellence, it starts to look like the situation in Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” When I mentioned that fact to a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education who interviewed me on the issue recently, she posed the situation in which most students in a class do the work diligently and perform well and thus deserve an A. I explained that such classes do occur, perhaps often, but they only show that the professor has not assigned enough work and scaled up the challenge enough.

The clearest sign of the unreliability of grade inflation is the widespread conviction among employers who hire a lot of recent graduates that a high GPA doesn’t necessarily represent an individual with superior skills and knowledge and work ethic. When a 3.5 GPA is common among the pile of applicants for a job, it doesn’t look extraordinary. To pare down the stack, the employer must look elsewhere for distinctiveness.

To fix the system, then, is a no-brainer. How to do it, though? Everybody understands the problem, and the ones on the front line responsible for assigning grades—the professors themselves—feel the pressure at the end of every semester when final papers and final exams come in. I felt it, too, throughout my teaching career, and I succumbed often.

The prospect of this reform progressing smoothly is dim. Nobody on campus is going to like it. Students push for it, of course. They avoid a teacher with a tough reputation whenever they can. Parents push, too, smiling as they see their kids advance toward graduation. They’re getting what they paid for. Faculty like it for the reasons the compact mentions: It lightens their teaching labor. Students who get an A on a paper don’t come to office hours and complain or ask for help on the next assignment. The implicit contract is, “I’ll give you As and Bs and you won’t bother me.” Finally, college administrators like it because fewer students drop out or transfer or burden academic and psychological counseling services, and tuition money continues. The wheels keep turning, the campus goes on.

Apart from those group interests there is another stumbling block to reform. It is the fact that grade inflation doesn’t emerge as a problem until after the students leave the school. They graduate with good grades, put their record down on their résumé, and apply for jobs. They get hired, commence with their duties, and receive a reality check. It turns out that the work they complete isn’t very good. Their numerical and verbal skills are weak. The GPA they compiled in college is exposed as a lie.

However, at that point, nothing can be done. The academic record is set; it can’t be corrected. Professors and administrators who managed the system that overestimated the talents of the student can’t be held to account. It’s too late. None of the people responsible ever know what has transpired. People in higher education have no reason to change their ways. Furthermore, professors are quite protective of their autonomy. They’ve been operating on a loose set of rules for a long time, running classes as they see fit. No one has more expertise than they have when it comes to grading.

There will be widespread resistance to this reform, even among the schools that agree to it, although the resistance will have to be quiet and subtle. The next three years in the running conflict between the administration and higher educators in the United States are going to be interesting.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.