What’s the value of receiving an A grade?
High marks may not mean as much as they once did thanks to an ambiguous concept known as grade inflation – an unexplainable increase in GPAs. But unfortunately, as members of a new University committee commissioned to study this proposed phenomenon are discovering, grade inflation is an elusive idea that is often speculated about but rarely evidenced.
It’s no secret that grades are generally higher today at the university level than they were decades ago; just ask any student who has procrastinated a term paper until the night before, stayed up all night working on it, turned in a sloppy final project and received an A- for the work. The average University GPA rose 5.2 percent between 1992 and 1994 during a period when the SAT scores of admitted students did not similarly improve. Further, 369 students currently have better-than-perfect GPAs.
What is responsible for grade inflation?
Foremost, C grades just do not suffice in today’s society. While a C might have represented average work during the 1950s, it is a stain on the transcript of the modern student. Students with C averages even have a hard time getting into colleges.
As associate psychology professor Holly Arrow aptly points out, grades are a self-esteem issue for many students; they will whine about hard exams, plead for extra credit and pull other highschool-esque stunts to get better grades. Further, students view college as a commodity that they are paying for and thus expect to receive good grades. Some instructors cave to this societal and student pressure.
Giving out more high grades may not sound like a problem. But it eliminates students’ motivation to do work that is more than mediocre. When all students who complete the minimum requirements for an assignment receive an A, there is little reward for people who go the extra mile.
In addition, some might argue that undergraduate-level grades are only important to potential employers and graduate schools, and that these entities understand the new connotations of grades. Many employers may now value work or extracurricular experience more than grades, but grades should continue to be an indicator of students’ abilities to learn and to apply material; this is only possible when high grades are not given indiscriminately.
It is probably too late to change societal conceptions of grades. But colleges can uniformly enforce higher standards by requiring professors to give only a certain number of each letter grade or by requiring that average GPAs fall within a certain range. The Lundquist College of Business uses such a system today.
Another tactic would be to toughen academic standards, but that would be too difficult to implement on a University-wide level.
It is wise of the Undergraduate Council to study grade inflation before making any recommendations about how to address it; the primary step toward fixing this problem is gathering sufficient data about offending instructors. But action should be taken soon on the college or institutional level to preserve the meaning of grades. Current efforts vary between schools and departments, and little appears to be happening to reverse the trend. That gets an F in our book.