The term inflation generally refers to economic inflation, or what moneychimp.com refers to as “the tendency for prices and wages to become more expensive.” Grade inflation, however, is based on a different set of principles. The average grades at many U.S. universities tend to rise each year; this according a collection of data from Washington Post writer Stuart Rojstaczer, who also says that since the mid-’80s the GPA of the average student has risen .25.
So why do grades inflate? Is the work getting easier? The students smarter? Or perhaps the teachers more lenient? Because the SAT score of an average student has not risen at a concurrent rate to the average GPA, many researchers and university administrators have concluded that students are not getting smarter, but rather grading schemes are getting easier.
In order to encourage teachers to prevent grade inflation, schools such as Princeton have decided to forcibly address grade inflation by limiting the number of As that teachers are allowed to give. Under a Princeton plan that went into effect a little more than one year ago, in any undergraduate class, only 35 percent of those students may earn an A. Before the grade inflation crackdown, Princeton students were receiving As at a rate of 46 percent.
Students of the University of Oregon may be interested to know that we too are considering a policy aimed at ending grade inflation. A February 2006 study issued by the University Undergraduate Council states that average University undergrad grades have risen from 2.95 in 1992, to 3.10 in 2004. The report goes on to give a number of ways in which the University can decrease the practice of grade inflation; for instance, better defining the meaning of individual grades, and asking departments to create set percentages of how many As and Bs can be issued.
The University inflation study also gives examples of how other schools have dealt with grade inflation. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, established the principal that the meaning of letter grades would be widely published, in order to encourage professors and students to recognize that an A should not be considered an average grade. When the Undergraduate Council at the University recommends that grades be better defined, they may be intending to use definitions similar to those at Chapel Hill.
But why assign artificial percentages that determine who can and cannot receive an A? Why define, a priori, that an A is an above-average grade, or for that matter that a C is an average grade? Educational institutions ought to spend less time worrying about the transcripts of their students, and more time addressing whether students are challenged as well as intellectually nurtured by their teachers. And teachers should never base a student’s grade on predetermined percentages.
I am curious as to how the Princeton grading rule functions in, say, a math class. With math problems there are clear right and wrong answers; therefore, if 50 percent of the class answers near to all of the equations on a final correctly, and if that final is the determining factor in a term grade, will only 35 percent of the class be granted As? What happens to the other 15 percent who deserve As, but are restricted from earning them?
Further troubling about the practice of individual schools working to end inflation is that without across-the-board national standards, two students completing the same caliber of work, but attending different institutions, may receive completely different grades.
Graduate schools unaware of a university’s grade inflation policy won’t comprehend the fact that a transcript full of Bs equates to an above-average student.
When a university doesn’t have inflation standards, and individual teachers take it upon themselves to stop grade inflation, the effects are further harmful to students. Again, graduate schools can’t get a back story for a C on a student’s transcript; there’s no subhead where the student can explain, “I know I got a C, but that’s only because my teacher wanted to single-handedly fight the power of grade inflation by actually sticking to the standard of C as the grade given to most of his students.”
What can I say? In the end, I just don’t think grade inflation is a problem needing to be fixed. Perhaps inflation researchers ought to look on the positive side: Maybe, just maybe, the modern college student is intelligent, dedicated and a hard enough worker that our generation’s abundance of As are not arbitrarily given, but rightly earned.