In Monday's Cavalier Daily a story highlighted recent research by a retired Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer on the widespread grade inflation on college campuses around the country (“Research cites grade inflation as cause for national increase in GPA,” 3/16/2009). Recently, the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese here at the University shifted its grading policy to remove the A+ from its grading scale and making it more difficult to get an A in its language courses. In general, complaints about grade inflation are founded in statistical truths: multiple studies have shown average GPAs have risen over time; Rojstaczer’s website, gradeinflation.com, highlights the steady increase for all schools, from 2.93 to 3.11 between 1991 and 2007. While critics believe this has made schooling easier than in the past, this trend is better analyzed as a realization that previous grading was overly harsh; moreover, that current grading scale better represents the ever-increasing number of college students and is tempered by changed expectations.
Grade inflation started to become an issue in the Vietnam War-era and has continued all the way to today. There are a number of theories on why grade inflation became more and more prevalent from the 1960s on. One is that college professors were interested in keeping students in good academic standing to maintain their places in college to avoid the draft. Another suggests that professors did this to gain favor with their students whose course evaluations featured as an important part of tenure decisions at universities then and now. A more controversial theory claims the beginning of grade inflation during this period had to do with the influx of minority students and professors loosening their grading systems to aid a group of people who were not as well prepared for college work. There are other theories, such as blaming parental expectations for the high costs of education to result in good grades.
According to studies of grade inflation at Harvard by former dean Harry Lewis, twenty percent of students made the dean’s list in 1920. With only one-fifth of the student body making it at that time, that indicates that the average GPA must have been very low compared to today. Considering that only three percent of the college-age population was enrolled in college in 1900, the fact that today over a third of eighteen to twenty-one year olds are college-enrolled, the average student body has changed significantly. If anything, prior to World War II, most of the people attending college were wealthy and affluent, which means professors might have had higher expectations of students; at the same time, it seems unlikely that such low GPAs accurately reflected how well students were doing in school because of the segment of the population going to school. Therefore, grading systems were too harsh prior to the 1960s — the completion of an assignment that might earn someone a B today may have gotten only a C then even though a student correctly completed the assignment.
To have such a grading scale in today’s college setting would be misguided. With the expanded variety of students, the odds of having only hard-working or intelligent students is not a given, thus making it more reasonable for a school like the University to have a higher average GPA because many students here fit that stereotype. This can be seen by Virginia’s Institutional Assessment and Studies’ statistics which in an e-mail reported a slow uptick in the number of students to make the Dean’s List over time from the College of Arts and Sciences, with 44 percent achieving it in the Fall 2007 semester. Consider Harvard and its very high average GPA; its students are generally regarded as the best in the country. Is it inaccurate, then, to give out such high grades? Probably not. Moreover, the National Center for Education Statistics found that in the 1999-2000 school year 33.5 percent of students had a GPA of a C or lower, thus indicating that grade inflation may be over-hyped. Beyond the modern make-up of students, there has been a major shift in expectations. A 3.0 now is not considered particularly great unlike in 1950. Today, a 3.4 or 3.5 is the dividing line between levels of academic success, and employers and graduate schools recognize it.
Concerns about grade inflation are relatively unfounded — the fact that many look back on the pre-Vietnam era as a good place for GPAs is foolish because the grading scale at that time was too burdensome, penalizing students with low marks for work that was likely above-average considering the make-up of the student body (I’m not equating wealth to success; rather I’m saying the homogeneously affluent student bodies at that time means an average GPA in the low 2s was way too low). Now granted, grades may be getting slightly out of hand when we consider that Harvard had over ninety percent of its 2002 class make the Dean’s List before abolishing it that year. But if people are so bothered by this, the qualifications for the Dean’s List can be altered, just like businesses and graduate schools have altered their expectations for academic performance. In sum, grade inflation is not something that academics should get too hot and bothered about — professors will continue giving grades that fit the product in their eyes. Only if there is a sudden recognition of robustly inferior work should there be any reason to overtly address this issue.
Geoff Skelley’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.skelley@cavalierdaily.com.
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