It's official: grade inflation exists. Duke environmental science professor Stuart Rojstaczer--who confesses that he has not given a "C" in more than two years--has done the homework no one else would do, and has posted the results on his newly created web site, www.gradeinflation.com. Rojstaczer studied grading trends over time at 66 colleges and universities in order to document the nature and extent of a problem that most agree exists but that no one knows how best to address. Along the way, he found some interesting things: that less than 2 percent of grades given at elite institutions are D's or F's, for example, and that at schools such as Pomona, Duke, Harvard and Columbia, about half of all grades are A's.

Rojstaczer has come to some disturbing conclusions: that students avoid taking courses from professors who don't inflate grades, that they evaluate such professors less positively than professors who give easy grades, and that professors respond by inflating grades; that grade inflation deprives students of an incentive to study hard and that it also deprives them of the ability to recognize when they have learned; and that as such it severely erodes the concept of meritocracy to which higher education is supposedly dedicated.

Rojstaczer offers several explanations for the grade inflation that has infected college campuses since the 1960s, citing professors' Vietnam-era tactic of enhancing grades to help men students avoid the draft, and noting, too, how the massive tuition hikes of the 1980s created a consumerist mentality in parents and students, many of whom figured that the least all that money could buy was a transcript lined with pretty rows of A's. What he does not mention: universities' growing reliance on graduate student and part-time instructors, whose combined lack of experience, lack of authority, and lack of job security make giving out the easy A an important survival strategy; and the cumulative effects of racial preferences and higher education's increasingly adamant "celebration" of diversity, which, as Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield has trenchantly and controversially pointed out, practically demand a lowering of academic standards across the board. It's worth noting that the two inflation spikes Rojstaczer attributes to anti-war protest and consumerism also correspond, historically, to the advent of affirmative action in college admissions and the rise of the campus diversity craze in the wake of the Bakke decision.

In fairness, Rojstaczer is in the business of documenting and describing a trend, not psychoanalyzing it. At the same time, it is hard to imagine successfully combatting grade inflation in the absence of a clear understanding of its causes and its rationalizations--not least because there is now an entire generation of university teachers that is itself the product of a grade-inflated education and because that generation makes up for its lack of intellectual rigor (one might even say its lack of comprehension of intellectual rigor) by strenuously denying traditional concepts of merit (this is most rampant in the humanities and social sciences). I was born in 1968: on this issue, I know all too well, and all too personally, whereof I speak.

Opponents of grade inflation tend to assume that if we can just all agree that grade inflation exists, then we'll all be able to concede that it is bad, and then we can just all stop inflating grades. Rojstaczer's study aims to be Exhibit A in this project: he has proven to all those grade inflation deniers out there that they are categorically wrong (as with so many other inconvenient historical events, there are those who pretend this one has not happened). But this is just the first, essential step in a project that many will resist, refuse, and even attempt to sabotage--for both selfish reasons (it takes a lot less time to deliver an inflated A than to explain to a weeping student why she got a C) and for political ones (some colleges have lowered standards so far that they literally cannot afford to raise them).

A case that illustrates this last point is currently brewing at Brooklyn College (better known as the school that screwed over history professor KC Johnson for failing to exhibit proper political opinions). I'll have the details in subsequent posts this week.

UPDATE: Stuart Rojstaczer writes to clarify that "the argument of Mansfield that affirmative action is a significant component of grade inflation isn't borne out by the data. For example, the percentage of black undergraduates nationwide, essentially stable from 1976 to 1994 (10.0% in 1976 and 10.7% in 1994), is not synchronous with the renewal of grade inflation in the mid-1980s." It will be interesting to see how Mansfield and other academics who espouse the theory that affirmative action has had much to do with grade inflation reconcile their personal observations and experiences with the numbers.

The existence of grade inflation (and its related problem, grade compression) is undeniable. A must-read on this topic is Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing? [PDF file]" by Henry Rosovsky and Matthew Hartley.
This is a very careful discussion which finds little support for Mansfield's contention re: diversity, but which does find support for the Vietnam war connection (to my surprise, I had always been inclined to discount this explanation). At the end of the day, I think it has a lot to do with the student as consumer: note that grade inflation has been more pronounced at elite institutions, where students/parents pay steep tuition fees. And more broadly, with a decline in the university's authority (of which the growing reliance on adjuncts is both symptom and cause).

Increasingly, students don't come to college to learn -- either for intellectual challenge or for knowledge which will be of practical value in a career. They come to college to get a credential..and this credential is valued for the circular reason that it is valued.

The whole thing is indeed a bubble reminiscent of stock market bubbles, as Prof Rojstaczer points out in a slightly different context. And while bubbles may last a long time, they always eventually collapse.

My interest in this topic was piqued some time ago when I noticed that, based on published data, I would have no chance of being admitted to my alma mater (known as a very selective and prestigious university) today -- the GPA and test scores of the supposedly average student outstrip mine. Yet in working with some recent graduates I also noticed that they didn't seem able to think all that well, and their writing was even worse. And I know this is very un-PC of me, but I will remind you that I am just reporting my own observation, and then go ahead and make it: On average this problem is worse among non-whites.

I completely agree with the comment about getting a sheepskin: Many students seem to care more about where they go and what their grades are than about what they learn. But when most professional and graduate schools select students without conducting personal interviews, I cannot really fault the students for this behavior.

Well, shit. I must have missed out on grade inflation when I went to college from 1994-1998. When I deserved a D, I got a D (twice), and when I deserved an A (three times in my college career), I got an A. Overall GPA: 2.92 @ Georgetown University, as a double major in English Literature and Classical Languages. And I was a 4.0 student at the best public high school in Michigan.

I'm not surprised that it happens, but I sure as hell missed out, and so did a lot of my friends.

I had taught business courses at major universities for 8 years and had gone back into the private sector and then was asked by a friend to teach a night school class in an MBA program a few years ago. I was the recipient of some severe hate mail after I gave 5-6 students well deserved C's. One or two didn't even deserve that. They also complained very strongly about me to the administration. It seems that their employers wouldn't pay for their courses if they didn't get a B or better.

Many also objected to assignments that required them to read as much as 90-100 pages of material each week and didn't like preparing material for the weekly class. They just wanted their degree and to be entertained by the teacher each week and at least a B for showing up.

Ah... all of us at Public Schools eagerly await the downfall of the Ivy League and their over-rated, overly-expensive diplomas. I can tell you that Purdue University got the reputation it has because they flunk out 2/3 of their Engineering students, and rake the Management students over the coals too. These are just 2 of our programs that prove that if you pass out bad grades, only the best will be left!

The general inflation is a problem for professors who want to do the "right" thing because "right" is hard to define.

If you give a student who did good work a B+ while other professors give an A for the same work, then haven't you penalized a student on a relative scale? While you have maintained your standards, the student is the one who pays the price.

I really don't see why grade inflation is seen as such a big problem. After all, it is relatively easy for employers/graduate programs to adjust to it. Instead of looking at the letter grade, employers and graduate programs should simply look to a student's relative ranking within his or her institution and the quality of that institution. No matter how much grades are inflated, not everyone can be in the top half of the class. Thus, if you know that you want to hire someone from the top half of an institution like Harvard, it doesn't really matter whether top half means above a 2.0 average or above a 3.0 average.

Grade inflation could be wiped out at a single stroke by reporting all grades on the curve. For example, at schools where half the students get A's in a course, the grade for that course should be reported as "in the upper half", etc. The students who actually do well in the course then become a potent lobby for reversing grade inflation.

The problem with using ranking is that if everybody gets A's, then everybody has the same rank.

"The students who actually do well in the course then become a potent lobby for reversing grade inflation." Good theory. Who listens to students?

The easy way out of this problem is to treat grade inflation just like monetary inflation: calculate the appropriate grade deflator for each class and section, then publish both a nominal grade and a real grade.

Another approach to dealing with range compression is to increase the number of subdivisions in the upper ranges.
F -> F (for those cases where an F is administratively mandated)
B- -> D
B -> D+
B+ -> D
B++ -> D+
B+++ -> C-
A--- -> C
A-- -> C+
A- ->B-
A -> B
A+ -> B+
A++ -> A-
A+++ -> A
A++++ -> A+

I broke my ass in law school (Catholic University), and only managed an "A" once. That school enforces a grade distribution scheme -- an enforced median and mean. Working very very hard, and then only receiving an "83" as a final grade was such a rude awakening to me (really, it tore me up emotionally, as it did many of my classmates) because I was used to getting a very pleasant row of "A"'s during my undergraduate work (at a state school in NJ), regardless of the effort I put in. I am now strongly in favor of the enforced median & mean model.

I taught a couple classes at our local university last year, as an adjunct professor. I was given a long list of things my students had to learn in the course and I made sure that each project was designed to accomplish that. I did my best not only to grade fairly and objectively, but to keep my students aware of what grades they were earning and why. I threw in chances for extra credit, too, even though I disagree with the whole premise of extra credit at the college level.

I had one 23-yr-old student who didn't want to be in my class and refused to learn the material. He did just enough work to get by and ended up with a C-, which -- since my class was required for his major -- meant he had to retake the course to get a higher grade. This was no surprise to him -- he knew all along he wasn't earning a passing grade. He just didn't understand that I had no intention of passing him anyway.

He freaked. His parents freaked. The chairman of the department freaked. I held firm until they revealed this "poor boy" had a physical disability (funny, I hadn't noticed that before). Then I constructed a special extra credit assigment -- writing a five-page opinion paper that proved he understood one set of elements out of three covered in the course. He could have written the paper in one afternoon, had he bothered to learn anything during the semester. The chairman told him he could have the rest of eternity to write the paper and changed his grade to a C. He's graduating in a month and I haven't seen one word of that paper yet.

I'm not teaching at that university any more.

Scipio,

I missed out too, around the same time. I graduated from a State school in 1998, and had to work really hard for my 3.008 GPA, while working almost full-time to pay for it.

I went back, though, to a different State school in a different state, and saw what Grade Inflation was all about. It is really scary how bad it is. Most teachers do not evaluate writing based on anything at all. Bad grammar, bad spelling, bad word usage, all are acceptable. I made the dean's list with minimal effort, was inducted into Honor societies which had no previous use for my 3.008 GPA without even applying, and was generally praised for what I considered to be sub-standard performance. I wish this were not a problem, but it is.

Douglas,

As for grading on the curve, I don't know. I have actually been in objective classes with multiple choice tests that were graded on a curve, and it hurt some people who did well. I wouldn't mind it in a literature class, but I don't think it works well in the sciences.

Catherine

As a visiting instructor, I think grade inflation can be a career killer. I teach at a university with rampant inflation -- but in a department which works very hard to combat inflation and which on average, gives the lowest overall grades on campus. The problem is that students in my class get higher grades elsewhere, and flay me on my evaluations for being too stringent a grader.

I currently attend Indiana University, and I can relate to some of the experiences mentioned in the above posts. I am in the Kelley School of Business, a top 10 undergraduate business school (not bragging, but using this statistic to make a point). As part of my curriculum, I am required to work on numerous team projects. I have been "shocked and awed" - to borrow a phrase from pop culture - by how poorly some of my peers write. While my writing may not be perfect, I have found that it is far and away better than that of my peers.

I have also witnessed students berating a professor because they cannot perform well in a given class. A friend of mine didn't attend a class all semester, and complained to the administration when the professor "awarded" him a C- (he did decently well on the tests). I have tried pointing out to him, and other friends like him, that you are SUPPOSED to be held accountable for your actions. This concept seems totally lost on these people.

Another example of such slacking will defy logic. I have a friend who is majoring in accounting, a tough major to be sure, and he is much like the person mentioned previously. He left one week early for Spring Break, which shocked me. He always complains about not doing well and about how professors are so unfair, yet he still does things like this. To my surprise, I heard yesterday that he's probably not coming back to finish the semester and will have to go to summer school in addition to attending yet another semester in order to graduate. Hedonism, anyone?

Delayed maturity.

Two points. One, in response to Jim's post above, where the student got a bad grade for not coming to class, but still doing ok on the tests. My question, if he can indicate, by taking the test and doing ok on it that he knows the material, why does he need to go to class? Isn't that the point of the class? To teach the material on the test? I get really annoyed by professors that get angry for someone not coming to class, but then give tests that you don't need to come to class to do ok on. At that point, class is just a waste of time.
Second, while I'm no fan of grade inflation, I think the statistics for places like Harvard etc...are misleading. The numbers for the kids in those schools are so high. It's not like your average classroom. An average high school classroom might have an ordinary distribution of intelligence. A normal college would have a slightly compressed distribution grouped on the side of higher IQ. Harvard and others have students that are fairly all equally brilliant. Thus, if its an objective subject (say math) it stands to reason that you would have more people mastering the subject matter and thus a classroom with half A's is entirely concievable.

The point of class is to teach the material on the test???

Exactly backwards, of course.

And I also would have thought that one of the benefits of attending an elite university such as Harvard would be an extra-challenging curriculum to push all those brilliant young minds. Not what the students want, of course, and now that a college degree is required for advancement in virtually every professional field, one we dare not give.

Ok. so "teaching the material on the test" was phrased badly. My point is that the test is supposed to be a reflection (and measure) of what one learns in class (ergo...the professor is teaching the test). If the test does not reflect the classroom work (or someone can do fine on the test without going to class) why go?

Secondly, while one might think that elite universities "would have more challenging curriculum" the fact of the matter is that there is such an infinitesimal difference in abilities at that level, that trying to differentiate just so you won't have a heavy distribution of A/B's is frankly unfair to the students. My point wasn't that grade inflation doesn't happen (or even that it doesnt' happen at Harvard et al.,) but rather, that it would make more sense to cite statistics from schools that are more representative of the general college population in support of the point.

I'm open to the idea of doing away with grades altogether (note: I don't mean that I actively support the abolition of grades, just that I'm willing to entertain arguments in its favour). But since we do have grades, I'd like to see them deflated.

In practical terms, the problem with grade inflation is that of grade compression. It becomes increasingly difficult to make meaningful distinctions. In fact, the differences amongst students are not infinitesimal. Some students are below average, some average, some good, some excellent. This should translate into D,C,B,A. But with C now a punishment grade, almost all grades must be compressed into a narrow range between B- and A. It doesn't matter whether it's Ivy League or second- or third-tier: students should be graded in relation to their peers. Sure, the standards will be higher at Harvard, but then, students there should be graded in accordance with these higher standards (isn't that why a degree from Harvard carries more prestige than a degree from a second- or third-tier school?).

If you think professors should teach to the test and that students shouldn't have to attend class, you may well be on the cutting edge of pedagogical trends: i.e., the growth of online "learning" initiatives.

I think Matthew is being wilfully misunderstood on the "teaching to the test" issue. He doesn't mean teaching the contents of a standardized test somebody else made up instead of the appropriate classroom curriculum. He's talking about tests that the teacher generates to go with the classroom curriculum. Hopefully the teacher is teaching the material that will appear on his own test. If a student does well on the test, that shows he or she has mastered the material.

The solution to the problem of students who can ace tests without going to class is - let them take a bypess test for credit. I took CLEP exams and acquired 30 hours of credit before I started college, and took an additional test to bypass freshman English. It saved me a lot of time and money. Same with AP tests offered today. Where's the harm?

Great job. We need to create a national movement on this issue.

The following piece on Grade Distortion (e.g. the combined problem of disparities inflation) was written by David T. Beito, President of the Alabama Scholars Association and Charles W. Nuckolls, Director of the Alabama Scholars Association. For additional data (including tables and sources), see www.alabamascholars.org or write to me at beito@alabamascholars.org

Sincerely,

David T. Beito

Report on Grade Distortion at the University of Alabama

Throughout the last year, the issue of grade inflation has often been in the national media spotlight. Shocking revelations about the skyrocketing rise in the percentage of A's and the promiscuous granting of Honors awards at Harvard University especially have fueled debate. Despite this, some teachers and parents in Alabama might choose to console themselves with the theory that grade inflation is limited to the Ivy League or other elite private colleges. They would be wrong to do so.

The grade inflation epidemic has infected the flagship institution in our state, the University of Alabama. To fully comprehend the extent and nature of the problem, it must be examined as one component in a larger phenomenon: grade distortion.

We define grade inflation as the increasing percentage of high letter grades awarded to students over a defined period, unrelated either to improvements in student abilities or changes in instructional quality. A second subset of grade distortion is grade disparity. In some ways it poses a far more serious threat to educational quality and basic fairness in grading. The level of grade distortion can be measured by calculating the differences between units internal to the university (colleges or departments) in the percentage of higher letter grades awarded to students in a defined period.

First, let us consider the best known component of grade distortion: grade inflation. The earliest available statistics for the University of Alabama from the early 1970s reveal that grade inflation was already well underway. An average taken of all four full semesters (spring and summer) between the fall of 1972 and the spring of 1974 show that A's represented 22.6 percent of grades in all undergraduate courses. This was considered so high that the Office of Institutional Analysis at the University of Alabama (now the Office of Institutional Research) warned at the time that "the percentage of A's and I's awarded has been steadily increasing" especially among undergraduates.

Unfortunately, these warnings fell on deaf ears and grade inflation accelerated to new highs during the next three decades. Today, it has reached crisis proportions (please see www.alabamascholars.org for a full report). In the last full semesters (fall 2000 to spring 2002), the percentage of A's in all undergraduate courses has risen to 31.1 percent, a startling 37.6 percent increase since 1974. One of the worst offenders is the College of Education where A’s now constitute 55 percent of all undergraduate grades.

What has caused grade inflation at the University of Alabama? In 1996, the Office of Institutional Research concluded that grade inflation was due to "admission of better prepared high school graduates." While it is not our purpose here to examine possible causes for grade inflation, there is little evidence for this claim. In the last 30 years, the average ACT scores for entering freshmen have increased by relatively little (from 22.9 to 24.5), an amount difficult to reconcile with the 37.6 percent increase in undergraduate A's over the same period. According to Bob Ziomek, director of ACT program evaluation, this small rise “doesn’t explain the whopping increase in A’s being awarded.”

Now, let us turn to the more serious component of the problem. We call it “grade disparity.” To view the issue in isolation, we have focused on the percentage of A's in the departments of the College of Arts of Sciences, the largest college at the University of Alabama. In addition, we have limited our analysis to 100 and 200 level courses, the so-called gateway courses for freshmen and sophomores.

Because such courses are of an introductory nature, a traditional goal is to winnow out students before they can advance to more advanced courses. Thus, the percentage of A's in gateway courses is generally, or should be generally, lower than in 300 to 500 level courses. If the percentage of A's consistently exceeds 20 percent at this level, we believe that a serious grade inflation problem exists.

The disparities between departments in 100 to 200 level gateway courses are striking. The most inflationary department in the College of Arts and Sciences is Women's Studies. In the last two years, the average percentage of A's in that department averaged an almost unbelievable 78.1 percent. Other highly inflationary departments are Theater/Dance (51.4), Religious Studies (48.5) and Music (48.1). The five least inflationary departments are Biological Sciences (11.1), Geography (13), Geological Sciences (14.2), Math (14.6), and Anthropology (14.8).

Though both of our departments (Anthropology and History) fall in the 15 percent or lower range, we certainly do not claim innocence. The differences are relative at best. Grade disparity exists within nearly every department on campus. The Blount Undergraduate Initiative is a case in point.

During the last two years, the percentage of A's has varied dramatically in courses which randomly assign students and give the exact same readings. In the spring semester of 2002 (which is typical of previous semesters) one instructor gave 81.7 percent A's in such a course while another gave 37.4. The other five awarded 53.7%, 46.6%, 38.4%, and 46%. In the Fall of 2000, the numbers are nearly as disparate: 55.1%, 38.6%, 56.2%, 47.0%, 47.4%, and 58.3%. In the spring of 2001, the class averages for number of A's awarded were: 64.5%, 18.7%, 56.2%, 69.8%, 83.2%, 18.7%, and 71.5%.

Grade disparity of this extreme nature serves to undermine educational quality and standards. It also shortchanges the best and hardest working students. When grade disparity is rife, as it is at the University of Alabama, the overall Grade Point Average can no longer be said to adequately reflect comparative abilities. The grade of the A student in the course which demands little effort is placed on an equal plane with the student who has to struggle to earn the same grade in a more difficult course. The system creates perverse incentives for students to "shop around" for professors who have reputations for giving "easy A's" and serves to degrade the efforts of those students who might otherwise take "harder" courses. Under such a system, the student transcript loses its value a source of information for potential employers who need to judge the comparative qualifications of UA graduates.

What can be done to reduce grade distortion? The Alabama Scholars Association has proposed that all student transcripts not only include the grade for the class, but also the average grade for all students enrolled in the class. Prospective employers could then get a better idea of whether that A- is to be admired or ignored, and the students would be less prone to shop for easy grades. Unfortunately, the Faculty Senate has refused to approve even this modest proposal. Indeed, it has failed to take action of any kind. The University administration had proved equally unwilling to act. For this reason, the Alabama Scholars Association recommends that the Alabama State Department of Education publish an annual “grade distortion audit.” Such an audit will serve to publicize the problem by showing the comparative levels of grade inflation and grade disparity in high schools and colleges throughout the state.

By Charles W. Nuckolls, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama and Director of the Alabama Scholars Association, and David T. Beito, Associate Professor, Department of History and President of the Alabama Scholars Association.