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Runaway inflation
Yesterday, The New York Times Education Life Supplement published data drawn from Furman professor Christopher Healy's national database of undergraduate grades. Healy's data show that there are plenty of colleges and universities producing "A" grades like gum-ball machines dancing to The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Examples: at Brown University, 67% of the grades awarded were A's, up 11 percent in a decade. Grinnell is at 50%, also up 11% in ten years. Macalaster's percentage of A's is 55%, up 10% in the decade. Seven years ago, ACTA observed in Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation that grade inflation is a reality and, just as monetary inflation undermines a nation's economy, grade inflation undermines the integrity of a college education (ACTA had more to say last year in Measuring Up: The Problem of Grade Inflation and What Trustees Can Do, and recently here on our blog).
Moral of the story? The problem is getting worse, and trustees need to review not just overall GPA trends of their institutions, but department-by-department distribution of grades (Education programs, in particular, are notorious for lax grading standards). Researchers like Christopher Healy at Furman and Stuart Rojstaczer at Duke manage to find both recent and historical data nationwide: trustees should insist that administrators provide them with the facts and figures they need to understand the trends at their institutions. And working with faculty and administrators, trustees and fiduciaries can then restore integrity to grading systems that are, on many campuses, badly broken.
Posted by Michael Poliakoff on April 19, 2010 at April 19, 2010 04:06 PM
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