Okay, so maybe I’m confused about that whole correlation/causation thing. But something happened in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s to cause grade inflation in colleges.
The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement. Students’ entrance test scores have not increased (College Board, 2007), students are increasingly disengaged from their studies (Saenz et al., 2007), and the literacy of graduates has declined (Kutner et al., 2006). A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers. Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before.
Commuter schools (a university where a large majority of students live off campus) and engineering schools grade the hardest while private schools inflate grades by an average of 0.1 to 0.2 higher on a 4.0 scale.
(Via: Neatorama)
March 12th, 2010 | 10:01 am
Well, when you commoditize education this is what you are going to get. After all, the customer is always right. Just imagine what “grades” are going to look like when the majority of “students” buy their education online.
March 12th, 2010 | 10:03 am
For many years I have noticed this trend. When I graduated in the early 60′s, about 5-10% of engineers and nurses had a B average, or greater. Now it’s like 90-95% have above a B average, or above. Straight A averages were unheard of, and those “Cum Laud’s” had real meaning. That is really selling the students short, when they have to compete in the job market. It also gives them a false impression when they go against many foreign graduates who have a more rigorous program AND are not afraid to take on the tough AND many times boring jobs
March 12th, 2010 | 11:23 am
I agree that student-based evaluations play a big role here – but tenured professors should mitigate that factor more.
Perhaps tenured professors are partly habituated to the practice while trying to get the evaluations needed to get tenure in the first place.
However, I think the increasing number of contract and lecturer positions (as opposed to tenure positions) is also a major contributing factor.
March 12th, 2010 | 12:05 pm
Contrary to common belief, the grade is not a common unit of measure; there is no way to guarantee that an A in Engineering is equivalent to an A in English is equivalent to an A in Philosophy. Thus a grade in one field is not commensurable with a grade in another; any suggestion otherwise is simply a fiction. So we need to know not just the overall grades, but the field in which they are given. Moreover, grades are merely an instrument; the real worry is not grade inflation but degree inflation, and grades are merely one element of that. A college can do grades however it pleases as long as there is something in place to guarantee that the degree is still a real accomplishment. It’s at the degree end that the real dangers lie. (It’s also much harder to study.) But degree inflation is a form of credential inflation; if it is occurring, it will, like almost all forms of credential inflation, be driven by economics — the economics of trying to attract students and trying to compete with other institutions. The point Pat mentioned, about contract and lecturer positions, is a good one in this regard: adjuncts have less time, whether to grade carefully, and usually less flexibility for interacting with students, than other instructors do, but are increasingly shouldering the brunt of the teaching. That too is driven by economics.
March 12th, 2010 | 4:59 pm
You can absolutely 100% blame Vietnam. I once heard a (very, very liberal) college professor (from an Ivy League school) talk about how students would come to her saying if they didn’t get a better grade they would have to leave school and get drafted, and so of course she would comply.
March 12th, 2010 | 7:58 pm
Student evaluations are certainly part of the problem. To get or keep your job, you need positive evaluations. It is possible to be a tough grader and still get good evaluations, but it is significantly harder.
Another factor, less well known, is retention rates. How many students stay in the class, instead of dropping it, and how many pass the class and move on, instead of having to retake it? These numbers are significant to the college (as evidence that they are doing a good job, both to the taxpayers and to accreditation bodies) and there is a real, often not very subtle, pressure to have retention rates to be high. This creates pressure on the faculty to make sure that students pass.
Finally, I would point to the self-esteem movement as another contributor to this toxic stew (see Jean Twenge’s The Narcissism Epidemic for an excellent study of the problem). In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers noticed that the most successful students had high self-esteem. Ergo, self-esteem produces academic achievement; if we can get students to feel good about themselves, their grades will improve and their anti-social behavior will disappear. (It did not seem to occur to anyone that the causation went the other way around, that attempting something difficult and achieving it gave the students a good reason to feel good about themselves.) Students since then have been brainwashed with feel-good messages, to the effect of “I am wonderful just as I am,” schools and sports teams started giving out prizes to everyone who competed (it might make the non-winners feel bad, and we can’t have that), schools stopped honoring their valedictorians, teachers were forbidden to correct spelling mistakes (it might make the students feel bad), et cetera ad nauseam.
The upshot is that a major truth was completely lost: that although every human being has intrinsic worth, that is not the same thing as saying that every achievement (or lack thereof) is of equal merit.
As a result, most of the students who show up in my classes are used to getting As and Bs for just showing up and putting forth minimal effort. They are used to having any opinion, however poorly-thought-out, treated as equally valuable with the most well-reasoned argument. Therefore, when they are held to a real standard of excellence, and graded accordingly, they often do really, really badly (at least at first). And they get upset. Sometimes they get angry; sometimes they cry; often they drop the course. Fortunately, many times they step up to the challenge and discover the satisfaction of real learning, which is why I love teaching.
However, the truth is that the early stages of dispelling the self-esteem fog is, to say the least, difficult and unpleasant. It is probably the hardest single part of my job, psychologically speaking, and there is always the temptation to go a little easy on them… soften the blow… don’t give that well-meaning student a D, give him a C instead… that honors student is surely going to cry at getting a B, so maybe this paper merits an A… and with a moment of weakness, grade inflation continues.
March 15th, 2010 | 12:48 pm
[...] The Vietnam War, Yuppies, and RateMyProfessors.com Caused Grade Inflation- First Things Have we fallen into [...]
March 16th, 2010 | 7:57 pm
I have been a private highschool teacher for ten years. About five years into my teaching, the administration introduced to us the Baldrige model approach to education and changed our labels to business terminology. Mom & Dads were no longer parents but stakeholders. We were encouraged to lean towards grades that were heavily data driven. This approach, although beneficial and practical in subjects such as math and science, does not work so well in subjects such as religion, English, and even foreign language. The data driven grades lack depth but favor “proof to parents” that are stakeholders. Data can be easily manipulated to look however you want. Does this sort of business like approach to education weigh in on the idea of inflated grades? It seems plausible to me. It seems to me that teachers experience more and more in the private schools parents who demand higher grades because they are paying for them. Grades are given in the form of data driven assessments that may show higher grades but students are still scoring lower in more important areas of learning such as retoric, logic, and writing.
April 10th, 2010 | 2:27 am
I really resonated with Holly Ordway’s observations (3/12/10)– we must have lived in parallel universities! I’d like to add one additional factor mentioned by Rich Horton (3/12/10). The for-profit universities, both on-line and bricks-and-mortar, are putting the grade inflation epidemic on steroids. Many who graduated from the for-profits were weak students to begin with and they did not improve their academic prowess by attending one of these profit and marketing driven businesses. They are emboldened by their ridiculously high grades as undergrads, and by the time they get to my masters-level class at a private, not-for-profit university, they get very upset with anything less than an “A”. Each year, there are increasing numbers of them in my class, and therefore, increasing levels of drama and tears over the lower-than-”A” grades that many of them receive. The pressure to join in on the grade inflation frenzy is really amping-up. I invite you to visit http://www.gradeinflation.blogspot.com to see one person’s views on this issue.
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