As part of University of Colorado president Hank Brown's decision to tackle the tough issue of grade inflation, CU regent Tom Lucero is inviting members of the public to contribute their thoughts on the subject:

Even cum laude graduates sometimes lack the skills needed to succeed in today's workplace. This can prove to be an expensive and frustrating problem for new employers who must allocate the time and resources to adequately train new-hires.

I would like to invite you to participate in a discussion about grade inflation and its impact on the quality of our college graduates.

--What influence does grade inflation have on individuals, society and the economy?

--What are your experiences with the caliber of work from recent college graduates?

--What measures can be taken to better prepare students for life in the real world?

We are beginning a debate at the University of Colorado about the important issue of grade inflation. Please send your comments and thoughts to tom.lucero@colorado.edu.

Additionally, there will likely be opportunities to make a formal, two minute presentation to the CU Board of Regents at our meeting on October 4, 2006. In many cases, a college degree is merely a filtering mechanism for future employers, proving that graduates had the ability to finish something that they started. Every degree should be worth more. Students should graduate with certain fundamental skills, including the ability to write clearly and think critically. All graduates should be able to immediately add value to the workplace and society.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni took up grade inflation in its 2003 report, Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation. It's a good starting point for anyone interested in thinking about the issue.

I'm usually puzzled when I see reports of grade inflation. At my university, there are some departments that have higher GPAs, but they're the ones that traditionally have had lower standards for grades (education, speech com). History and math courses average C to C-. Upper-division courses in every major, which are mostly populated by majors in those fields, have higher averages, but that's neither surprising nor bad. Still, have standards slipped? Probably, but not uniformly.

What I've said is, of course, anecdotal, but then I'm not alone in that. Here's what the author of gradeinflation.com has to say: The author believes that the resurgence of grade inflation in the 1980s principally was caused by the emergence of a consumer-based culture in higher education. Students are paying more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the reward of a good grade for their purchase. In this culture, professors are not only compelled to grade easier, but also to water down course content. Both intellectual rigor and grading standards have weakened. This conjecture is based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove.

In 2003 the Penn State University Faculty Senate(UFS) produced a report on grade inflation at Penn State. (You can find the report here: www.psu.edu/ufs/agenda/mar25-03agn/mar25-03agn.html.)There are two points to note about the report.
First, the current period of grade inflation began in 1987 which is the same year that the University instituted student evaluation of teaching. At Penn State these evaluations are called Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTE). While the conclusion is obvious that this triggered the inflation the report tip-toes around it.

The second point to note is that each college had different grading standards, but inflation occurred in all of them.

The report contains some very weak recommendations on how to deal with the problem.

Like Colorado before it Penn State now faces the dubious distinction of ranking high in the Princeton Review as a party school. Don't look for Penn State to take the same course of action as Colorado. Reversal of this troubling trend will take genuine intellectual leadership from President Graham Spanier. Unfortunately, he is ananti-intellectual and therefore incapable of providing such leadership. His response to the ranking has already begun. It is based on marketing considerations. Beginning today Penn State has banned alcohol consumption at football tailgates while the game is in progress. This won't solve drinking problem at Penn State, but it has already generated positive headlines. That is all that counts for Spanier.

I incorrectly typed the URL for my blog in the last post. It is correct below.

I just recently retired but before that I ran 3 projects for one of the major banks in the country. My experience with the recent graduates was that in the field of IT the graduates were very knowledgeable in IT and had not a clue how business worked. It seems to me that a bigger problem than grade inflation is the lack of real life in what is taught. Granted my company had its own ways of doing business, but there are certain things that are true across the board and the graduates for the most part did not have a clue.

I think the other thing that is needed is more cross-fertilization of majors so that the graduates when they enter the work force can see how things relate. When you couple this with my first paragraph, it boils down to the students may know how to debug a set of instructions but they do not seem to understand cause and affect. When you do something here, it changes something over there and there and there. Grade inflation does not correct that. Experience or knowledge in how different areas of a company or an organization affect other areas of that company or organization is what is needed. When that is done, then I think that the knowledge will translate in the students really earning the grades they are currently handed.

What the president of Univ of Colorado really needs to do is sit down with a bunch of people who hire his graduates and let them share their experiences with him. That could change the culture of the university and in the long run correct the grading imbalance he has talked about. I think he is looking at the wrong end of the horse on this one.

It's a good idea on Lucero's part to get some public discussion going, and I hope we will see more of this.

One increasingly-common issue with new hires is the excessive, unreasoning, and prickly "self-esteem" that has been inculated in many young people. This is different from the skills mismeasurement caused by grade inflation, but is obviously related, in that grade inflation prevents people from becoming accustomed to honest feedback.

See my post Superheated 'Steem Hits the Workplace.

At many universities your teaching is primarily evaluated on Student Evaluation of Instruction numbers, and done so in a statistically fallacious manner. For example, it is sufficient to note that someone's numbers are below departmental average to give them a bad teaching review. Of course this determines a priori that around 50% of any department's faculty can always get a bad review! Needless to say, this is extreme pressure to inflate.
In response to the grade inflation worries many universities have recently began judging faculty teaching on on numbers of drops and grade inflation as well. Tenured professors overwhelmingly don't take this seriously. However, for junior people the result is that anyone can be attacked by any administrator or senior colleague who doesn't like him or her, because it is metaphysically impossible to have good SEI numbers and a low number of drops without inflating.
The fact that half of the professoriate isn't even tenure track now makes this significantly more troubling.
I think it is clear that there will never be a decent solution to grade inflation until we stop using SEI numbers: (1) instead of real teaching evaluation (which takes some work), and (2) as a way for administrators and tenured professors to increase arbitrary power over the non-tenured and non-tenure track.

It is also challenging for departments where there has historically been less grade-inflation to buck the trend of grade inflation. I teach in the sciences and have become used to my non-majors introductory-class students coming to me with the complaint that "I get an A in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY OTHER CLASSES. So why I am I getting a C from you?"

My explanation: the material is difficult, it is presented in a different way from, say, the humanities, and they may not be used to that. I also tell them that I have high standards (which is true). I don't make the class impossible; there is a person or two each semester who earns an A.

it's especially frustrating in dealing with majors from another particular department on our campus - they often come in and take some of their classes as "support" or "elective" classes for their major. Many of them do miserably, and complain bitterly because we make it "too hard" for them. (Of course, our countercomplaint is that their major makes it "too easy" for them and they get lazy).

Perhaps better cross-campus dialog would help? I get the feeling in some departments or for some faculty, standards have slipped, and they need to pull them back up. I've had a few students in my non-majors class that I'd consider functionally illiterate; how have they been passed through to as high as junior status without someone AT LEAST having them evaluated for learning disabilities or perhaps suggesting they need remediation?