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Colorado fights grade inflation
The University of Colorado has taken up the pressing and oft-ignored problem of grade inflation--and ACTA president Anne Neal has weighed in on the seriousness and importance of that endeavor:
People are quite familiar with the problem of monetary inflation. As prices rise higher and higher, the value of the dollar shrinks. The problem of grade inflation is similar: As student grade averages rise, the value to a student of earning a higher grade average declines. The consequences of grade inflation are as dire for students as monetary inflation is for the economy.The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation, has shown that, with only a few exceptions, persistent grade inflation exists in colleges and universities nationwide. Similarly, in their book When Hope and Fear Collide, Arthur Levine and Jeannette Cureton examined grading data from 4,900 undergraduates across a wide range of institutions. They found that the number of "A" grades given increased from only 7 percent in 1969 to 26 percent in 1993.
Conversely, the number of "C" grades fell by 66 percent.
This doesn't mean that American college students are getting smarter - only that professors are giving away grades that students once had to earn.
By its very nature, grade inflation is dishonest. It undermines the essential purpose of a grading system: to distinguish the excellent from the mediocre and the unsatisfactory.
Indeed, grade inflation turns the important moment of student evaluation into a sham - inflated grades do not tell students the truth about their academic performance, but unearned A's and B's do tell them that fraud and corruption are acceptable.
So rampant is grade inflation that grades have become all but meaningless; as Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has noted, grades have been reduced to "worthless tokens of self-esteem."
Students and employers are both poorly served when professors say students have done excellent work when they have not. When grade averages become unreliable indicators of effort and achievement, businesses must find other, more costly ways of distinguishing among job applicants. Meanwhile, recent graduates - many of them carrying a mountain of debt - are left wondering why there is so little correlation between their grades and their bankable skills.
Noting that grade inflation is more common in the humanities and social sciences than in the hard sciences, Neal goes on to suggest that one reason this country is failing to produce adequate numbers of college graduates with math and science skills is that grade inflation creates a conflict of interest for students who feel pressured to maintain sky-high GPAs. It's easier to do that in the softer disciplines--and students flock to them as a result.
Duke, Dartmouth, and Princeton have all adopted measures to neutralize the effects of grade inflation; as a public university, Colorado is setting an important precedent in following suit.
Posted by acta online at September 25, 2006 09:31 AM
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Comments
I am an adjunct at an elite university. I'm well treated. I have an office. I'm well paid. I get benefits. All of which represent an elightened policy regarding non-tenure-track faculty. BUT that yearly offer letter says that continued employment is contigent on satisfactory student evaluations. Keeping those high has meant lowering grading standards. A few semesters back, I decided to see what would happen if I awarded grades based on achievement rather than as a commodity students thought they'd paid for. Evaluations plummeted. The next semester I relaxed the standards again and there I was, right back at the top of the stack in terms of evaluation rankings, lauded by my chair for excellent teaching. I should be awarding about 2/3 C's, but I really need this job: As long as the inmates are in charge, they'll be getting A's from me.
Posted by: ec at September 25, 2006 11:14 AM
ec: I was going to post something about evaluations, but you really hit the nail on the head better than I could. I'm tenured, full professor, natural sciences, nobody has ever pressured me much on evaluations or grades, I do as much as anyone in my vicinity to fight grade inflation, but I see how the pressures work, especially on vulnerable faculty. As long as the goal is to keep the customers happy, improve productivity through higher graduation and retention rates, the talk about curbing grade inflation is mostly just hot air, to put it euphemistically. Maybe with some systematic rules as at Princeton, it can work. I will be interested to see how it works at Colorado. I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: anonymous guy at September 25, 2006 04:47 PM
Grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, when measured in terms of the changing percentages of A's and C's awarded, probably tells less than half the story. A much larger concern is that, during the same period of time, the level of intellectual engagement expected of college students with the great thinkers and thoughts of our culture seems to have declined precipitously. Thus one cannot in any way equate the pre-1950 'A' grade in the humanities or social sciences to the same letter grade today. A good and prescient book on this subject is Robert Nisbet's "The degradation of the academic dogma: the university in America". Although Nisbet sensed keenly the incipient change overtaking academia in the 1960's, I think he would have been shocked to see the state to which things have now arrived.
Posted by: Ken D. at October 2, 2006 03:29 PM