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June 3, 2005 Reality Check

Grade Inflation and Abdication

By John V. Lombardi

Over the last generation, most colleges and universities have experienced considerable grade inflation. Much lamented by traditionalists and explained away or minimized by more permissive faculty, the phenomenon presents itself both as an increase in students’ grade point averages at graduation as well as an increase in high grades and a decrease in low grades recorded for individual courses. More prevalent in humanities and social science than in science and math courses and in elite private institutions than in public institutions, discussion about grade inflation generates a great deal of heat, if not always as much light.

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While the debate on the moral virtues of any particular form of grade distribution fascinates as cultural artifact, the variability of grading standards has a more practical consequence. As grades increasingly reflect an idiosyncratic and locally defined performance levels, their value for outside consumers of university products declines. Who knows what an “A” in American History means? Is the A student one of the top 10 percent in the class or one of the top 50 percent?

Fuzziness in grading reflects a general fuzziness in defining clearly what we teach our students and what we expect of them. When asked to defend our grading practices by external observers — parents, employers, graduate schools, or professional schools — our answers tend toward a vague if earnest exposition on the complexity of learning, the motivational differences in evaluation techniques, and the pedagogical value of learning over grading. All of this may well be true in some abstract sense, but our consumers find our explanations unpersuasive and on occasion misleading.

They turn, then, to various forms of standardized testing. When the grades of an undergraduate have an unpredictable relevance to a standard measure performance, and when high quality institutions that should set the performance standard routinely give large proportions of their students “A” grades, others must look elsewhere for some reliable reference. A 3.95 GPA should reflect the same level of preparation for students from different institutions.

Because they do not, we turn to the GMAT, LSAT, GRE, or MCAT, to take four famous examples. These tests normalize the results from the standards-free zone of American higher education. The students who aspire to law or medical school all have good grades, especially in history or organic chemistry. In some cases, a student’s college grades may prove little more than his or her ability to fulfill requirements and mean considerably less than the results of a standardized test that attempts to identify precisely what the student knows that is relevant to the next level of academic activity.

Although many of us worry that these tests may be biased against various subpopulations, emphasize the wrong kind of knowledge, and encourage students to waste time and money on test prep courses, they have one virtue our grading system does not provide: The tests offer a standardized measure of a specific and clearly defined subset of knowledge deemed useful by those who require them for admission to graduate or professional study.

Measuring State Investment

If the confusion over the value of grades and test scores were not enough, we discover that at least for public institutions, our state accountability systems focus heavily on an attempt to determine whether student performance reflects a reasonable value for taxpayer investment in colleges and universities. This accountability process engages a wide range of measures — time to degree, graduation rate, student satisfaction, employment, graduate and professional admission, and other indicators of undergraduate performance — but even with the serious defects in most of these systems, they respond to the same problems as do standardized tests.

Our friends and supporters have little confidence in the self-generated mechanisms we use to specify the achievement of our students. If the legislature believed that students graduating with a 3.0 GPA were all good performers measured against a rigorous national standard applied to reasonably comparable curricula, they would not worry much about accountability. They would just observe whether our students learned enough to earn a nationally normed 3.0 GPA.

Of course, we have no such mechanism to validate the performance of our students. We do not know whether our graduates leave better or worse prepared than the students from other institutions. We too, in recognition of the abdication of our own academic authority as undergraduate institutions, rely on the GRE, MCAT, LSAT, and GMAT to tell us whether the students who apply (including our own graduates) can meet the challenges of advanced study at our own universities.

Partly this follows from another peculiarity of the competitive nature of the American higher education industry. Those institutions we deem most selective enroll students with high SATs on average (recognizing that a high school record is valuable only when validated in some fashion by a standardized test). Moreover, because selective institutions admit smart students who have the ability to perform well, and because these institutions have gone to such trouble to recruit them, elite colleges often feel compelled to fulfill the prophecy of the students’ potential by ensuring that most graduate with GPA’s in the A range. After all, they may say, average does not apply to our students because they are all, by definition, above average.

When reliable standards of performance weaken in any significant and highly competitive industry, consumers seek alternative external means of validating the quality of the services provided. The reluctance of colleges and universities, especially the best among us, to define what they expect from their students in any rigorous and comparable way, brings accreditation agencies, athletic organizations, standardized test providers, and state accountability commissions into the conversation, measuring the value of the institution’s results against various nationally consistent expectations of performance.

We academics dislike these intrusions into our academic space because they coerce us to teach to the tests or the accountability systems, but the real enemy is our own unwillingness to adopt rigorous national standards of our own.

John V. Lombardi, chancellor and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes Reality Check occasionally.

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Comments

Grade inflation

Please don’t forget that professors’ year-to-year salary increases may be dependent upon student evaluations, especially at a small liberal-arts college. This means that we must cater to the students, and higher grades is one way of doing that. As long as faculty pay increases are based on happy students, grades will continue to be high.

Undergrad Prof, at 7:32 am EDT on June 3, 2005

Grade Inflation

Chancellor Lombardi’s comments, though few want to hear them, are right on target. The academy needs to resist the Lake Wobegone phenomenon in our society ("Where every kid is above average"). I recently left a secure full-time job to do adjunct treaching at UMass and campus culture was one of the major reasons.

At my former school nearly three-quarters of the students graduated with honors when, in truth, most of them could not have survived at UMass and quite a feew wouldn’t have even gained admission! But even at UMass I’ve had students drop my courses when I give them the C or lower grade they deserved on an assignment. Somewhere along the line an A became one’s endowed right, a B became the new D, and a C was transformed into an F.

I heartily endorse Chancellor Lombardi’s remarks overall. The one thing he missed, though, is the reality that many campuses in America lack leaders with his courage. In the “consumer” and “bean-counter” models, professors are called upon to mollify and coddle the mediocre in the name of keeping those tuition checks rolling!

Robert E. Weir, Adjunct Lecturer at UMass/Amherst, at 9:05 am EDT on June 3, 2005

Grade inflation and abdication

John Lombardi is right as far as he goes, but he might have considered taking his argument one step further: require seniors, just before graduation, to take the SAT or ACT tests again. Four to six years, on average, would have passed. The school, the parents, and the students could see what, if anything, had happened with respect to verbal skills, mathematical reasoning, and the like. Before and after, a simple test. It would not tell anything about substantive learning in a particular field, e.g., biology or American history, but that could be discovered were the student to retake the AP tests.

Bill, at 12:39 pm EDT on June 3, 2005

Grade Inflation

Over 30 years, I joined the critics of grading at all levels of schooling. And no convincing refutation of the fatal flaws of assigning grades to learning ever emerged. Some institutions dropped grading and did very well. But nonetheless, grading hung on.

What we must understand is that grades, credits and diplomas are the coin of the academic realm. In addition to makng it easier for the bureaucracy to select and sort students, particularly when thousands apply for admission, academic coin has marketable value in the “outside” world. It can be used to buy jobs, create higher income, acquire status. In an acquisitive society that looks upon schooling (aka: education) as just one more commodity, little wonder that as one more acquisition it should have an easily identifiable marketing value. That’s what the system is about. Take that away, and good grief! schools might have to turn to learning for its own sake. But who in our society today has time for that? Certainly not 12 or 16 or more years!

Tom, Non-hack at writing, at 8:09 pm EDT on June 3, 2005

What are the numbers on grade inflation?

We all talk about grade inflation. Universities keep grades, and they tend to accept and graduate students from a similar demographic over long periods of time. Is grade inflation apparent in the grades given over time? Is it apparent in some fields more than others? I sometimes hear, “Yes there is grade inflation at universities, but not so much in my field/university).” We should be able to get some insights from a serious study of trends in grades of different course types and courses overall.

J. Lund, at 5:26 am EDT on June 5, 2005

There have been numerous studies on grade inflation. It tends to occur most at private schools in liberal arts and humanities subjects. This is probably because such schools are expensive and those subjects are highly...subjective, as opposed to engineering or accounting, lets say.

I agree that evaluations are part of the problem — they are uniformly poorly written. They should not be eliminated, however — there are poor instructors in the academy and students have no other way of protesting them. Of course, student evaluations could be statistically normed based upon class grading distribution...

D. Golding, at 4:23 am EDT on June 6, 2005

Grade Inflation

SOME THOUGHTS ON GRADE INFLATION

Grade Inflation is a serious problem in American schools and universities. Grade inflation can be documented to be a serious problem both in high school and in college. Regarding high schools, a CNN Headline News report dealt with data obtained by the Higher Education Research Institute. The findings showed that while study time is down for high school students, A’s are up. Students are studying less than ever, but making more grades of A than ever before. For college students, a recent study at the University of Alabama is very typical of many colleges. At that university, studying undergraduates only, there were 22.6 percent grades of A awarded from 1972-1974. However, in 2002, the percentage had jumped to 31.1% While some of the improvement could be correlated with improved ACT scores among the students (indicating better students in recent times), at least part of the improvement is feared,by many faculty, to be nothing more than the willingness of faculty to be very lenient in giving a grade of A. I did research which showed that not all disciplines are equally responsible for grade inflation. My data from one university showed, as many suspected, that education professors are especially likely to award A’s relative to faculty in other departments. Some education faculty seem to give out A’s like they were peanuts.

WHY DID GRADE INFLATION OCCUR?

Why did grade inflation occur in the first place? While we do not know for certain, a good speculation is that it was concomitant with students becoming more concerned with their education in the 1960’s. As students became members of committees with professors and as course evaluations became required, the voice of the student became important in deciding the future of a professor. A non-tenured professor who got bad student evaluations might find that he or she would lose their job. Professors got the message and realized that they needed to avoid student complaints, since student evaluations of faculty is often tied to the grade students get. One sad part of this is that education that challenged students by giving them hard tests or forcing them to think would now take a back seat to more entertaining education, and to easy tests where many could make A’s and B’s. It was a job survival issue for many faculty. So, ironically, a mostly good thing-students becoming concerned about their education—ended up having the negative consequences of grade inflation since the student voice could now cause a professor to lose his/her job.

Russell Eisenman, Ph.D. Department of Psychology University of Texas-Pan AmericanEdinburg, TX 78541-2999

Russell Eisenman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Texas-Pan American, at 10:13 pm EDT on June 6, 2005

Consider the down-stream effect: employers

I’ve worked both professionally and academically. From what I’ve seen academically, reinforces what is going on now: pre-employment testing.

That is: test applicants’ knowledge and skillls, in real-time, face-to-face. The outcome can be grim: lack of focus and acceptable manners, much less the ability to recall facts and formulas, and apply them appropriately.

I understand the effect of student evaluations on grading inflation. I would ask: what good is a college degree if it does not prepare students for the world of work? Who has benefited, and who has lost?

Art, at 9:28 am EDT on June 7, 2005

Grade Inflation

One easy corrective measure I’ve seen is to report two grades on each student transcript, the “earned” grade and the average grade. A transcript that says A/B+ (grade/avg) will easily be distinguishable from a transcript that says A/C. This will, correctly, devalue the inflated grades and might empower faculty to fight grade creep.

Mark, Asst. Prof., at 3:40 pm EDT on June 7, 2005

Grade Inflation in Engineering Education at Ohio University

There’s another new article about grade inflation ("Grade Inflation in Engineering Education at Ohio University") posted at:

http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~manhire/grade/grades.html

If you know of others interested in this subject, please forward this information to them. Thanks, BM

**************************************************************** Brian Manhire, Ph.D.; Professor of Electrical Engineering; School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Ohio University; 357 Stocker Center; Athens, Ohio 45701-2979 Tel.: 740-593-1579 Fax: 740-593-0007 E-mail: manhire@ohio.edu http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~manhire...************************************

Brian Manhire, Professor at Ohio University, at 3:27 pm EDT on June 10, 2005

“Of course, student evaluations could be statisticallynormed based upon class grading distribution...”

I think the University of Washington does something like this in at least one department.

David, at 10:43 am EDT on June 12, 2005

Elite Institutions

You claim, without providing evidence, that grade inflation is more of a problem at elite institutions than elsewhere. Is there any chance you can provide evidence to back up that statement? I’d like to see it if it exists; or, if you made the statement without any but anecdotal evidence, I’d like to know that also.

Thank you,James

James, at 10:25 pm EDT on June 16, 2005

Grade inflation

The greater grade inflation in elite universities can be attested to (in the past; this has improved dramatically under the leadership of the President-whose-name-cannot-be-spoken) by the graduation of 90% of Harvard students with Honors, and A grades for more than 90% of students one year in Cornell West’s class (before he left for Princeton.

This is more or less anecdotal, but I think we could find similar data elsewhere.

We could use some AP-like tests of certain individual classes or subject areas to create some standardization. I hope the MCAT and the like will become more prevelant.

One reason, by the way, that few schools have combated grade inflation aggressively is that having a C as the average grade looks bad when your students are applying to grad school and competing against those who have straight As, even if their school is inferior.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 7:11 pm EDT on August 29, 2005

Umass v. Others

I increasingly believe that Umass advances class bias. I have the opportunity to observe students at Umass, Amherst and Mt. Holyoke. The privates award more credits for courses, impose fewer requirements each semester( fewer papers and exams), award more favorable grades, and insist upon more “required ‘ courses” for graduation. Fewer credits and tougher requirements = more jobs-great for union faculty, not students

fran clune, Parent of Umass, at 3:02 pm EST on January 6, 2006

Grade Inflation

I am of the opinion that grade inflation is a significant problem and is undermining higher education in the US. As noted by others, the primary driver of the inflation is a combination of weight given student evaluations and businessThe prevalence does say something about the academic integrity of our institutions and faculty.

I do like the suggestion above that transcripts report two grades. Its simple and understandable and is preferable to an enforced grade distribution. (if accrediting organizations could be made to buy into the idea. . .) And add on, would be that the final graduating GPA calculations should include two numbers, the GPA and the average GPA for majors graduating in that department.

beta, at 11:25 am EST on February 15, 2006

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