Grades are a controversial topic on many campuses these days. Not so much the gloomy topic of bad grades, an old, contentious problem, but the relatively new issue of too many good grades.
Few would seriously deny that the inflation of grades has become pervasive in American higher education over the past couple of decades. It is said that the Gentleman’s C — long considered an acceptable grade by students of both sexes, faculty and tuition-paying parents — has turned into the Gentleman’s B, or even the Gentleman’s A.
Grade inflation in its various guises can be seen at nearly all campuses. In grading, as in so many areas, student-consumers are getting more of what they demand, rather then what they need, or deserve. Attempts to deal with the problem by enforcing institution-wide standards tend to run up against faculty members’ characteristic insistence on establishing and policing the academic substance of their own courses.
There isn’t too much that lone faculty members can do about the overall trend, but some continue trying. One is Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. He has long held a reputation as a tough (but not unfair) grader. In any case, he has instituted a two-tier grading system for students in his political philosophy classes: One grade, the modern-type inflated one, will go on their official transcripts; the second grade, representing what he thinks they really deserve, will be disclosed to them individually and privately.
Under this system, his students will presumably be able to avoid being harmed (in graduate school applications, etc.) for having significantly lower grades than their peers, at Harvard or elsewhere. But, for their own consideration, they will also have the professor’s unvarnished assessment of their work.
This approach is not universally applicable. For example, it may not affect students who are far more interested in how graduate school admissions committees view their applications than in how Professor Mansfield views their work in class. Nevertheless, the problem is real and it’s not going away by itself. During the 1999-2000 school year, more than 87 percent of Harvard undergraduates received grades of B or better in their courses. That strains credulity.