Despite the Undergraduate Council’s recent attention to grade inflation, the concept is not new.
From 1975 to 1978, the Emerald published four articles on the issue, three of which followed a 1976 University Academic Standards Committee report that showed roughly 33 percent of all grades awarded were A’s. Even in the mid-1970s, professors lamented a previous era when a C meant average work.
“A few years ago, a C would put you in the middle,” former UCLA professor Douglas Hobbes was quoted saying in a 1975 Emerald article. “Today it puts you in the bottom third of the class.”
Grades in the late 1960s and early 1970s potentially meant more than just a future career; they could sometimes mean the difference between life and death.
During the Vietnam war, when the draft was in place to enlist men into the military, being a college student was a legitimate deferment from fighting. If a student failed out of school, he became eligible for the draft.
“(Grade inflation) was for students who were facing a draft,” said associate professor of history Ellen Herman. From 1960 to 1974, the average grade point averages at 180 colleges nationwide increased nearly half a grade point, according to a 1980 study conducted by Arvo Juola of Michigan State University.
“If they flunked out of college – or for that matter, if they graduated and didn’t go on to further schooling, it could have been a life or death situation,” Herman said.
Despite overwhelming agreement from grade inflation investigators that grade inflation began in the 1960s, not everyone is convinced that the draft was the reason for grade inflation.
Fred Mohr, a former professor and administrator who worked at the University from 1961 to 1996, doesn’t give much credit to Vietnam for starting grade inflation trends.
“I would not make a very strong argument for that issue,” he said. “Grade inflation was simply to break the pattern for rigid academic requirements.”
Mohr said that around the late 1960s there was a shift in academia: Students were suddenly studying a breadth of topics rather than just the courses designated by their majors.
“It was a new curriculum standard to set a new way of learning,” he said. “The traditional academic curriculum was rigid … it was not preparing people for the real world.”
Mohr said that during that time there were new academic seminar classes taught in McArthur Court to roughly 1,500 students – all of whom received A’s just for registering.
“(Administrators) thought it was fraudulent,” he said. “But it was one of those times when people were sitting in on Johnson Hall and ROTC buildings and blockading the streets … The right of a faculty member to give a course called a seminar was very hard to challenge. And if 1,500 people signed up for it, so much the better.”
During the Vietnam War era, students’ attitudes toward studying were slackening, Mohr said.
“There was a shift away from academic rigor. Going to class, class attendance was not followed,” he said. “It was not considered a high value type of deal. There were things to organize, people to feed, helping the homeless, that kind of thing.”
University professor emeritus Frank Stahl, who has worked as a professor at the University since 1959, said he didn’t concede to giving students higher grades to avoid the draft, but he said he thought that there were professors who did. There wasn’t any official discussion about intentional grade inflating, but it was on the minds of some professors.
“I heard what was happening, and I was not surprised,” he said. “I would think that almost anything to save the lives of young people was appropriate, so I’m sympathetic with what they did.”
Herman also attributed sympathy for students’ lives as a factor for giving grades to students that were higher than deserved.
“I think it’s fair to say that many faculty were sympathetic,” she said. “All they had to do was have a basic empathy for their students to want to keep them alive.”
Herman said professors’ potential sympathy for students didn’t mean professors never gave C’s or D’s.
“I think what’s a fact is that whoever was in charge of handing out grades were just as aware as their students were about the politics of the draft,” she said.