Along with the 369 other University students with better-than-perfect grades, senior Drew Shipley said he works hard to keep his grade point average above 4.0.
“I try not to focus on (the grades)” he said. “I’ve found that I have better luck when I try to engage the material.”
But whether students are focusing on learning or the final grade, more A’s are being given out now at the University than ever before; they are 41.6 percent of all grades issued, according to a new study released by the Undergraduate Council.
The council, which has been compiling data on grade trends since last spring, found that between the fall of 1992 and 2004 the average grade point average has risen 5.2 percent from 2.95 to 3.1, according to the study, although there has been only a marginal increase in SAT math scores and a decrease in verbal scores during the same period.
Also from 1992 to 2004, faculty and instructors gave 10.3 percent more A’s, according to the council’s research. The data, which comes from a sample of more than 300 classes that have existed at the University since at least 1992, has raised the spectre of grade inflation – the practice of giving higher grades, deserved or not.
Comparatively, the University’s average GPA in fall of 1959 stood at 2.68, 0.27 points lower than in fall of 1992. In nearly one-third the amount of time, between 1992 and 2004, the average GPA jumped 0.15 points.
Its findings show that the University is not too far off from national or high school grade trends. The average high school GPA has also increased by 5.2 percent from 3.30 to 3.47 in the same period, according to the council’s research.
Stuart Rojstaczer, a former professor at Duke University, spearheaded national research on grade inflation early in the decade. Rojstaczer, now retired, wrote in a 2003 Washington Post column that he hadn’t given a C since 2000.
“The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript,” he wrote. “Not only is C an endangered species but that a B, once the most popular grade at universities and colleges, has been supplanted by the former symbol of perfection, the A.”
Rojstaczer’s data show that between 1992 and 2002, the average GPA at 22 schools sampled nationwide increased by 5.1 percent from 2.94 to 3.09. Since the 1960s, the average national GPA has risen roughly 0.5 points, according to his work published on www.gradeinflation.com.
Armed with Rojstaczer’s national study and its own data, the council has been presenting its findings to anyone who will listen to try to gauge whether the University community sees the grade trends as a problem.
The campus community’s response has been mixed.
Council member and University professor Karen Sprague said the council isn’t taking an official stance yet, but is trying to assess all opinions.
“What we wanted people to do is not spend a whole lot of time moaning and groaning and saying ‘Oh this is terrible,’ or whatever their emotional reaction was, but to think about it and decide whether or not this is a problem,” Sprague said.
Addressing the causes
When the council presented the study at a May 3 Student Senate meeting, the response was uniformly inquisitive.
Senator and graduate student Mathew Foust’s immediate response was to try to get to the heart of the higher grade trend, something the report does not directly address.
“There is a cause, or several causes, and some of the solutions proposed serve as a Band-Aid of sorts and might function temporarily,” he said. “But I think that if you want a more successful solution in the long run you really have to identify what’s at the root of the problem.”
What Foust said he found more disturbing than rising grades was an anecdote from the report:
A professor from the University of North Carolina recounted that a student described taking his course as “the worst experience of my life” because of a B-plus grade.
“I enjoyed the course and I learned a lot, but it just about destroyed my GPA,” the student said.
Foust said that this points to what he sees as the primary problem.
“Initially I think we’re shocked at this anecdote because we think, ‘B plus, isn’t that a good grade?’” he said. “But what I really think we should be paying attention to is what comes before it: ‘I enjoyed the course and I learned a lot but it just about destroyed my GPA.’”
“It’s this emphasis on the importance of the GPA,” he said. “We live in a culture in which we want our children to excel to the highest.”
Associate professor of psychology Holly Arrow said that for students, grades have become a self-esteem issue that pushes them to pressure their teachers for higher grades.
“Part of the reason they exert this pressure is probably that their grades are connected to self-esteem and self-worth,” she wrote in an e-mail. “As soon as a person starts to see themselves as ‘an A student,’ rather than ‘a person who studies hard’ the grade becomes connected to the self, and people will vigorously resist anything they perceive as an attack on their self-image.”
Arrow said that often when students come from the top of their high school class to the new “‘pool’ in which half of them are now in the bottom half of incoming college students,” they still try to believe that they are exceptional.
Research shows that Americans typically view themselves as ‘above average’ on a wide variety of attractive characteristics, Arrow said.
“This self-image inflation may be one of the processes that ultimately contributes to grade inflation through the process of social pressure,” she said.
Because of this pressure students push their professors to raise their grades.
“Conversations with students complaining about their grades are neither particularly educational nor pleasant,” she said, “and if teachers give higher grades, the pressure of students complaining about their grades is somewhat diminished.”
Arrow said that if teachers cave from this pressure, the behavior is rewarded and thus becomes more common.
Students who don’t complain start to feel like “suckers,” she said.
University undergraduate student Mike Filippelli said that most professors are responsible enough not to bow from pressure to students.
“People are like ‘Oh, well, there’s this pressure on professors to give good grades,’” he said. “And I don’t believe that at all. I believe faculty make the decision based on their syllabus, and what they set up in the class.”
Most professors contacted for this article said their individual grading practices show no signs of bending to student pressure, though many said they considered grade inflation a problem at the University.
Physics professor James Schombert said he makes a rational choice to curve grades in order to keep his students interested in the content.
“I teach about eighth-grade-science level. So I hand out a fair number of A’s, B’s and C’s,” he said.
He recently received an e-mail from a confused student after he earned C’s on his tests but was awarded an A in the class.
Schombert said he grades his students on a curve that put students into ranks based on their scores. Grades are only based on the number of students ahead or behind other students in his lower division general education science classes.
“If they were going off to start careers in science, then I would feel morally obligated to give them a grade that
reflects their performance,” he said. “But they’re not scientists. So what am I doing with this class? I’m training future voters. … I don’t want to punish them. I want them to engage the material as much as possible.”
He said the only way to get students to engage the material is by watering down the content so it is easy enough for students to grasp who haven’t taken a science course in several years.
“If I kept (the content) at the level that I think it should be, I would have enough withdrawals with
in the first two weeks that that would be the end of that class,” he said.
Schombert said making the content easier causes the scores on exams rise.
“How do I get you to learn more? Well, I dangle an A in front of you,” he said. “(Students can’t) pressure me. I can just point to the absolutely crude mathematics and say, ‘There ya’ go.’”
Filippelli said there’s more pressure on students to excel, rather than for professors to soften their standards.
“Certainly the (grades) are going up,” Schombert said. “Does that mean that grades are going up or are the standards are going down? And that is not obvious.”
Some students and professors cite that today’s students may be more focused on success or may be simply working harder to earn better grades. Steve
Simpson, a 1978 University graduate whose son is currently enrolled at the University, said he sees a difference between the achievements of present students compared with his experience more than two decades before.
“I do find that the best and the brightest of the students today do overshadow the best and the brightest of my day,” said Simpson. “There’s just so much more information and knowledge out there now.”
But Simpson, who graduated with approximately a 3.0 grade point average as a married man while working one or two jobs through most of his college career, said smarter doesn’t necessarily mean harder-working.
Simpson said he’s not sure if college in his day was more rigorous, but regardless of brighter students, he probably worked harder than his son does.
“My perception is that maybe I worked a little bit harder, but it’s hard to say because he’s doing his studying in his classes that are much more pinned to having papers to be written. My classes were more focused on midterms and the finals,” he said.
Schombert said that students are working harder these days, but not necessarily on school.
“When you’re looking into the reasons why (students) are not coming to class or falling asleep, they’re just not working hard at your class. They’re working hard on the other things that make up college,” he said.
Do higher grades mean grade inflation?
Most who have seen the report believe that the higher grades cited are the result of grade inflation, but English professor Lisa Freinkel said she’s not completely convinced grade inflation is actually occurring.
“I think it’s hard to argue with the numbers, but I’m not fully convinced that the problem is professors and instructors are handing out higher grades than they used to,” she said.
“It’s hard for me to say. I’ve heard some arguments that make me wonder about the extent to higher grades,” she said.
Freinkel, who has been a professor since 1989, said that if grade inflation is actually occurring it’s most likely because of larger classes.
She said that although she has been impressed with the work of many students at the University, she has noticed a disconnection between students, professors and their respective classes. She said that because the government has disinvested in higher education it has led to fewer professors and larger
classes, which disengages professors from their grading.
“If it turns out to be the case that grades are rising, then I would say that it’s because we have larger classes. It’s easier to grade more generously,” she said. “Nobody wants to err on the side of hurting a student by grading them harshly.”
Freinkel said she thinks professors are often weighed down by having to grade too many papers.
“The more attention we pay to grading because we have the time and the energy to do it, I think we tend to grade more rigorously. But if you have 100 papers to grade by tomorrow, you’re going to be grading more generously because to do anything else would be irresponsible.”
She said the only way to fight it is to hire more professors.
Grades losing their meaning?
The council is also concerned that grades as a measuring rod are becoming corrupt.
“We’re worried that grades don’t mean as much as they used to,” said Ron Severson, chairman of the Undergraduate Council.
Associate economics professor Mark Thoma, who compiled the statistics for the report, agreed, but said that not everyone does.
“An economist would say … that as long as people understand that the measuring rod is changing, then there’s no real harm to it,” he said. “So as long as we’re not giving more A pluses than everyone else is then there’s really no big harm to awarding the students at the top.”
Shipley, who has applied for both a Fulbright and a Rhodes scholarship, said his grades weren’t as much of a factor as his interview and résumé, which he said filled the Rhodes Scholar’s application four-page limit.
Shipley said GPAs are becoming less of a factor when applying to top scholarships, and there is more emphasis on your community service and other activities.
“It’s actually quite intimidating, what is expected of high-performing students,” Shipley said.
“I’ve gone through a couple of interview processes for elite national scholarships,” he said. “The people that I’ve met from the Northwest and from Harvard and Yale and all these other places have résumés that go on and on.”
Shipley said most of the people he competed against for the scholarships had GPAs that hovered around the 4.0 mark, but those students from more elite schools were given more leniency in their grades.
“It’s frustrating that people have to have an A plus every term to maintain a GPA,” Shipley said.
Responses
The Undergraduate Council isn’t the first body within the University to tackle the grade inflation issue.
In 2002, the College of Business employed a strategy to curb grade inflation, and so far it has been successful, said Raymond King, accounting professor and senior associate dean.
Their strategy groups classes by level and sets a grade point average for that type of class. For example, the class average for undergraduate pre-business classes should fall between a 2.3 and 2.8, and the class average for undergraduate honors classes should fall between 3.2 and 3.5.
At the end of each term, the grade averages from each course are published and shown to all faculty in the College of Business. King said that falling outside the GPA range hasn’t been a problem for professors.
“I think it’s been very effective,” he said. “I review the distributions every term and if there are things that seem to me to need attention I draw that to the attention of the department heads. We’ve never really had issues where we said something hadn’t been resolved.”
The policy has lowered the amount of A’s awarded. In 2001, the year before the college began using the system, roughly 26 percent of grades awarded were A’s, whereas in fall of 2005, 19.7 percent of grades awarded were A’s, according to data compiled with the registrar.
“I think it mostly just gives people guidance about what expectations are, and if they believe that students in their classes are performing such that their grades would be higher than those guidelines then they ask maybe my class isn’t sufficiently rigorous,” King said.
The philosophy behind the guidelines is to distinguish between passing and failing, and to distinguish between excellence and mediocrity, according to the college’s guidelines.
“If we fail to make these useful and important distinctions, our contribution and value will be debased,” according to the document.
The Undergraduate Council listed a series of examples of methods to curb inflating grades.
The first suggestion is to “articulate the meaning of grade levels,” and create departmental guidelines similar to those in the College of Business, which give grades context.
The University could establish a grading philosophy and train new faculty to grade using that standard, as well as notify students of the standards before they begin school. This would ensure uniform standards across departments and throughout the Universi
ty.
Some universities across the nation have already implemented some strategies to stop grade inflation. Princeton University, for example, has put a cap on the number of A’s that can be awarded in each department while Indiana University has instituted a ranking system that accompanies transcripts.
Severson said the council will continue to take feedback into next year, and it will eventually formulate suggestions on how the University should stop inflating grades.
“If the University decides to take on the issue of grade inflation and does anything to reverse that, we would need to make sure to communicate that to employers to be fair to our students,” he said. “We’re not trying to disadvantage students.”
Peter Mills, a professor of management in the school of business, said that any method to make grades as fair and accurate as possible would be beneficial.
“If you earned a B then you’ve got a B,” he said. “If you earned an A, you’ve got the A.”