The Politics of Grade Inflation: A Case Study

Those who study the subject generally agree that over the past three decades, undergraduate grade-point averages at American colleges and universities have risen without a corresponding increase in the level of student performance. They also agree that grade inflation has harmful effects, owing to both compression and unevenness of grades. As grades become more concentrated in the upper ranges, less discrimination is possible among the varied levels of student performance, and the inconsistency of the inflation among individual professors, departments, and institutions leads to uneven, and hence unfair, assessment of students’ accomplishments.

Employers and graduate-school admissions officials consequently have become dissatisfied with college transcripts as a source of information. In their 2002 tract Evaluation and the Academy, Henry Rosovsky and Matthew Hartley assert that such officials “have learned to work around present practices: they expect to find high and relatively undifferentiated grades, and therefore rely more heavily on other criteria.” Currently, according to Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, “government and business want to know more specifically what kinds of competencies students have.”

Some observers have responded that professors can always write letters of recommendation. But Rosovsky and Hartley point out that an increased reliance on “information evaluations” can privilege those students who are “in the proper network.” They also assert that grade inflation has been accompanied by a similar inflation in letters of recommendation. Professors who have been writing such letters will have noticed an increased narrowing of the numerical increments on recommendation-form checkboxes, so that the referee must now indicate whether the applicant is in the top 2 percent or the top 5 percent rather than simply the top 10 percent. Some law-school admission forms now ask the writers of recommendations to confine the comparison pool to those students who have gone on to law school. This desire to know how an applicant has performed relative to other applicants is another sign that undergraduate grades have lost much of their usefulness as indicators of performance.

Nevertheless, despite the various tests given by private firms to potential hires and the qualifying exams given applicants to graduate schools, grades continue to matter to employers and graduate-school admissions officials. In September 2004, an investment banker and recent Princeton graduate commented in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that “many institutions have GPA cutoffs below which they will not consider an applicant for a position.”

Grades also remain an essential source of information for students, who need to know at every stage whether their degree of growth and accomplishment is adequate for the postgraduate challenges they will meet. Despite grade inflation, students still trust that the professor’s assessment has at least some basis in reality, even as professionals in other fields are trusted to give true assessments to their clients or patients. 

Faculty too are harmed by grade inflation. While the correlation between high grades and high student evaluations remains controversial, owing in large part to the inexpertly designed evaluation forms in use at a majority of American colleges and universities, there clearly is a correlation between grading patterns and course enrollments. For non-tenure-track faculty, how they grade can affect whether their courses fill and hence whether they keep their jobs. And indeed, adjunct professors grade higher than full-timers, according to recent studies by Brenda Sonner, Boualem Kezin, Susan Pariseau, and Francis Quinn, who also suggest that “less secure faculty reap more benefits from giving high grades.” Even for tenured professors, such popularity can determine whether a course runs or is cancelled. Grading standards can also affect the number of majors in a department and hence whether it receives funding increases and new hiring lines.

What accounts, then, for the reluctance of the great majority of American colleges and universities to address grade inflation? Vested interests are a possibility; too many constituencies benefit, in the short term, from the inflationary status quo, even if the long-term results are harmful. As the environmental movement has shown, however, appeals can successfully be made to long-term collective interests, particularly if the short-term interests also are addressed. 

A Typical University
Fairfield University, where I teach, is a private institution in southern New England. It has approximately 200 full-time faculty and a total of 3,000 full-time undergraduates in a college of arts and sciences and schools of business, nursing, and engineering. It is more typical of the average American college or university than the more selective institutions (Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Dartmouth, Columbia) that have been featured in recent literature on grade inflation. The average SAT score of our 2006 freshman class was 1181, and the high-school rankings of our freshmen generally average from the 80th to the 90th percentile. The majority of our students aim at careers in business and industry—one-third of our undergraduates are enrolled in the business school.

The vast majority of our undergraduate grades range between C- and A. Over the 16-year period between 1986 and 2002, our average undergraduate grade increased from approximately 83 to 86 percent. According to Rosovsky and Hartley, between 1960 and 1997 average collegiate grades increased nationally from a 3.07 grade-point average, or 85.7 percent, to a 3.34, or 88.4 percent. 

While SAT scores arguably are not the best gauge of ability, the fact that our real SAT scores (accounting for the “recentering” that took place in 1995) were lower in 2003 than they had been 14 years earlier, yet our grade-point average was higher, indicates that our grade inflation cannot be attributed to an improvement in our students’ intellectual capacities. Our selectivity ratings bear this out: 49.4 percent of applicants were admitted in 2003 compared to 37 percent in 1988. To address another possible variable, the percentage of our students who spend more than 10 hours per week studying outside of class declined from 49 percent in 1997 to 32 percent in 2001.

As at other universities, at Fairfield there are also consistent discrepancies among the grading patterns of individual professors, departments, and schools—discrepancies that again cannot be explained by differences in students’ ability. Between 1993 and 2002, the average grades awarded by our business-school faculty were higher than those given by arts-and-sciences faculty for every semester session but two, when the grade-point averages were even. This consistently higher pattern for business existed despite the fact that the combined SAT average for entering freshmen in the business school was 15 points lower than that of arts-and-sciences freshmen. Within the arts and sciences, the hard-science departments predictably graded lower, but there were also substantial differences among departments within the humanities and social sciences. Also, grades assigned in summer courses and winter-intersession courses were consistently higher than those assigned in fall- and spring-semester courses.

The First Proposal: Round One
In spring 2002 I presented these data to our faculty’s Educational Planning Committee, which consists of representatives from all of Fairfield’s professional schools and its college of arts and sciences. I proposed that two new items be added to each course listed on our students’ transcripts: the number of students in the course section and the average grade awarded. At the end of the transcript, a cumulative average of all the grades in all of the course sections would be listed alongside the student’s own cumulative average.

Anyone examining the transcript could thus see how well the student had performed relative to the other students in his or her courses. Shopping around for the easier-grading professors would become less profitable, while students who took tough courses and earned lower absolute but higher relative grades would have the fact of their superior performance made known. Measures similar to this proposal have been passed at Columbia, Eastern Kentucky, and Indiana Universities and Dartmouth College and have been discussed at Wellesley College and Boston University.

 Objection #1: All Students Can Excel   
As the Educational Planning Committee discussed this proposal between April and December 2002, a number of objections were voiced. One was that inevitably there will be courses, particularly advanced ones, in which all of the students do well and deserve top grades. An employer or graduate-school admissions official examining such an augmented transcript might unfairly conclude that the student in question is merely average when in fact she or he is excellent by any absolute standard.

I responded that the examiner will be able to note the course level and the number of students in it; moreover, if he or she is looking at the student’s complete record over four years in 40 courses, the likelihood of such an unfair impression becomes insignificant. Nevertheless, this objection resurfaced in our Academic Council when it considered the proposal in December 2003.

An additional counter-argument might have been that the possibility that every student in a class deserves an A should also leave open the reverse possibility: a class in which none of the students meets the requirements and so all receive F’s or D’s. To my knowledge, the only time this happened at my university was when five out of seven students in an advanced chemistry course failed it, with the sixth earning a D. An effort to remediate the performance of the failing students met with very limited success, whereupon the academic vice president attempted to remove that professor from the course without even consulting him. While seven A’s out of seven can occur often and go unremarked, such a response to the failure of five out of seven students suggests a double standard. Some professors and administrators oppose using a curve when it restricts the number of high grades but accept it when it limits the number of low ones.

Objection # 2: Academic Freedom Extends to Grading   
Another objection was that the proposal would compromise academic freedom—that is, the freedom to assign grades without the threat of pecuniary or other punishment. I replied that the proposal did not entail an evaluation of teaching styles or ability but was only a factual statement of average grades for course sections; professors’ names are not included on transcripts. With all grades entered into our computer system, I added, such information is already available to the administration in more-accessible formats than individual student transcripts.

I also argued that university administrations have rarely used such information to punish high graders. When in January 2004 Point Park University in Pittsburgh did cut the pay of six professors for giving too many A’s, Jonathan Knight of the AAUP commented in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette that he was “not familiar with a case where a group of faculty has suffered an economic loss because they allegedly graded too easily. ... I don’t think we’ve seen a situation quite like it.” Nevertheless, this understandably visceral fear continued to provide a motive for rejecting inflation-fighting proposals.

Objection #3: We Must Not Disadvantage Our Students
Faculty colleagues also objected to revealing that some Fairfield GPA’s represented only average or below-average performance, because such information would place those graduates at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs and graduate schools. I responded that the benefit given the above-average students should balance the penalty given those who were at or below the average. I also said that it would do our graduates more good to have an alma mater with a reputation for accurate assessment than it would to keep such information hidden. But again, the desire to avoid disadvantaging any student in the job market was compelling for many of my colleagues.

The First Proposal: Round Two
In December 2002, the Educational Planning Committee passed my proposal 5-2-1, with the representatives from the higher-grading schools (business and nursing) voting against it and the arts and sciences faculty for it. The proposal then went to the Academic Council, the executive body our faculty government, where it was defeated 10-2.
In the Academic Council the most vocal resistance once again came from the higher-grading schools and departments. A representative from the school of nursing pointed out that it does not permit anyone to major in nursing who does not already have a C+ average and that students must make a 77 percent in nursing courses or drop the major. I replied that this had provided a powerful incentive for our nursing students to get through our core requirements by taking easier courses off campus and receiving transfer credit.

Another opponent, from an arts-and-sciences department known for its easy grading, asked whether there was any “hard evidence” that students choose courses on the basis of grading patterns. Such a question could be answered by referring to the campus newspaper. On March 4, 2004, it asserted that the student association’s new professor-rating Web site could help students select courses, whether “you’re looking for an easy teacher, a challenging teacher, or even a ‘hot’ teacher.” In praising RateMyProfessors.com nine months later, an article made note of an “ease rating . in which the harder and more challenging courses receive lower ratings than the courses considered an ‘easy A.’”

The Second Proposal
Following the Academic Council’s rejection of the transcript-notation measure, I introduced a second proposal: that the university registrar make available to all department chairs, at the end of every semester (1) the average grade given in each course taught in the department, and (2) the average grade awarded by each department in the school or college for that semester. Although the proposal passed the Educational Planning Committee unanimously in March 2004, it was subsequently voted down in the Academic Council by a wide margin.

Opposition came from substantially the same representatives who had opposed the first proposal. Their chief objection this time was that this information might be used against a professor in the tenure, promotion, or merit-pay processes, particularly if this information were widely shared and if the department chair perceived the professor to be an outlier in the statistics.

The Campus Fallout
Although students and alumni did not contribute to the debates within the Educational Planning Committee or the Academic Council, they did weigh in following the rejection of my first proposal. I was interviewed by the student newspaper, and I debated with students in letters to the editor in three issues in February 2004. Opposition to my assertion that grade inflation was a problem was based primarily on students’ resentment over what they considered a devaluation of their performance. For example, an offended alumnus of the class of 2001 wrote that my comments “seem to diminish the hard work I and other students put into their academics.”

In response, I pointed out that for hardworking students to end up with the same grade-point average as students who do not work hard is an unfair devaluation of the former’s work. Some students at Columbia had made the same point, following the 1996 implementation of a proposal there to fight grade inflation. As campus reporter Justin Shubow described it, some of the best students were pleased with the measure, knowing “that with grade inflation distinctions between the excellent and the merely good are often lost.”
One Fairfield student editorial claimed that “students have no control over the grades that professors give,” to which I replied that students’ course selection plays a huge role in determining whether standards rise or fall, as departments are forced to bend to market pressure. I also warned that our university could go the way of another eastern university that had churned out so many high-GPA but low-achieving graduates that seven of the then-Big Eight accounting firms stopped recruiting there.

Not all the responses to my remarks in the campus newspaper were negative, however. The same editorial I mentioned above admitted that students “have all received average or good grades for minimal work” and that “we’re not going to complain when we can keep the GPA up without having to sacrifice some relaxation time.”

Lessons Learned
My experience suggests that anyone seeking to curb grade inflation must, early in the process, thoroughly inform the various constituencies of the ways in which they are collectively harmed by the inflation. I mistakenly did not mount a public-information campaign among the student body until after my initial proposal had been rejected. Many students shop around for easy-grading professors in the belief that, in the eyes of the public, a B still means “good” and an A still means “superior.” They need to be shown that this is becoming less true as what the Economist has called “grade illusion” is punctured by public perception.

Such a campaign also might have emphasized the essential role of grades as a means by which professors communicate with students. In 2004, Dean Nancy W. Malkiel, following a successful campaign at Princeton for anti-inflationary grading measures, made this point eloquently: “We know that Princeton students represent the top talent in the nation. But such high and homogeneous grades do not help you to distinguish your best work from your ordinary work, and they do not motivate you to stretch to do the most imaginative work of which you are capable. We think that you are entitled to a fair and reasonable assessment of the work you have done, and that there should be some correlation between intellectual performance and reward. We want grading to help you evaluate what you have learned, how well you have learned it, and where you need to invest additional effort.”

Whereas I had underestimated the potential support to be had from those Fairfield students who appreciated higher grading standards, Dean Malkiel and the other reformers at Princeton had asked for letters and feedback from the student body prior to the faculty vote and could point to some Princeton students’ expressed desire for evenhandedness across the departments. In the Princeton University Parents News, for instance, one student commented that “if I get the same grade for my very best work that I get for work that is not my very best, I’m less motivated to try to stretch as far as I can.” 

Had I made my arguments known to the Fairfield students and alumni before presenting my proposals, I could have made use of the encouraging responses that I later received from alumni who agreed that “grade inflation control is essential for Fairfield to get into a higher academic echelon. ... It’s the responsibility of everyone connected to the school to enhance its image more broadly.” There is clearly an untapped constituency among students and alumni who are concerned for their institutions’ academic reputations.

Grade reformers also should not underestimate potential support from those parents who want to see their children receive clear and objective assessment. As educators we tend to remember an individual parent’s complaint over a low grade more than we heed the general public’s dissatisfaction with grade inflation. Three years ago one irate father told our dean of arts and sciences that he wanted his daughter to get “the B average that he was paying for.” But the bolder colleges and universities that are first to stress revised and rigorous grading standards in their promotional literature might well find themselves attracting more and higher-quality students. Administrators should be reminded that according to The Chronicle of Higher Education and USA Today, academic reputation has for decades been the most important single consideration for high-school seniors in selecting their college or university.

Faculty members can be aroused through early appeals to their self-interest. According to a 1994 study by Keiko Nakao and Judith Treas, the status of college professors between 1964 and 1989 declined relative to that of physicians, teachers, and lawyers. More recent research by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons agrees that “the prestige gap between different kinds of educators may have narrowed.” And when Gross and Simmons asked survey respondents to choose from a list of eight issues which ones they saw as “very serious problems” facing higher education, 48.9 percent of the respondents put low educational standards in this category, ranking behind only tuition costs (80.5 percent) and binge drinking (66.2 percent).

Despite these findings and assertions such as those by Joyce Shoemaker, Mary DeVos, and Thomas Benton that grade inflation is the result of professorial laziness and the “wilting professorial backbone” of faculty turned into “spineless crowd pleasers,” few in the professoriate seem to see the possible connection between lowered public perceptions and the faculty’s decline in status. 

Because it is such a large stumbling block, the concern for graduates’ job and graduate-school prospects also must be confronted early in the process. At Princeton, Dean Malkiel corresponded extensively with employers and admissions officials concerning Princeton’s proposed anti-grade-inflation measures and noted that those representatives “encouraged us to take the steps we are taking.” Based on the responses from those officials, she reported in her 2004 letter to the Princeton undergraduate student body, “we have confidence that if we make plain what the new grading policy entails, as we certainly will, they will recalibrate to take account of changes in our grading practices. They told me, too, that the fact that Princeton grades will be seen as real grades, in contrast to the inflated grades of most of our peer institutions, will be likely to redound to the benefit of Princeton students.”

Dean Malkiel’s statement shows that a two-pronged publicity effort is necessary: first, to contact potential employers and graduate programs to explain in detail the changes made, and second, to inform undergraduates and potential high-school applicants that these contacts are being made. In the Princeton University Parents News, Dean Malkiel promised that the university would write to every graduate-school admissions office it could reach to explain the new policy.

Princeton would also attach an explanation to every transcript and provide copies to students. Dean Malkiel made good on her promise, writing to over 3,000 firms and graduate schools and receiving national coverage of Princeton’s anti-grade-inflation measures in The New York Times and Newsweek.

Combating professors’ concerns about academic freedom entails making clear that their grading independence has already been restricted tremendously—first, by the pressure to inflate grades, as what were once five viable options (A-F) have been reduced to three (A-C), and then by the fact that declining enrollments, course cancellations, merit-pay penalties, and even denial of tenure can await professors who do not conform sufficiently to the inflationary trend.

By accepting measures to reduce grade inflation and its effects, whether such measures simply make grading patterns public or impose actual restrictions, faculty members are freeing themselves from the equally real restrictions imposed by the pressure to inflate. They should be asked, early and often, which set of restrictions is the more unfair—the one imposed by faculty agreement and monitoring or the set now being imposed largely by students and administrators.  

As with environmental legislation, concern for the general good only overcomes special interests when enough people see that they are suffering from the status quo. Yet as the environmental record also shows, cooperation is certainly achievable, via effective dissemination of information and conscientious efforts to address the fears that will inevitably meet any proposed reform.


Resources

Arenson, Karen W. Students Receive Fewer A’s, and Princeton Calls It Progress. The New York Times, September 20, 2005, B4.

Benton, Thomas H. A Tough-Love Manifesto for College Professors. The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9 [Electronic version]. Retrieved August 30, 2006, from http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/06/2006060901c/printable.html, 2006.

Economics Focus: An Eye for an A. The Economist, March 9, 2002, 74.

Gross, Neil, and Solon Simmons. Americans’ View of Political Bias in the Academy and Academic Freedom. Working paper, delivered June 9, 2006, at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)     in Washington, D.C., 1-23, 2006.

Kezim, Boualem, Susan E. Pariseau, and Francis Quinn. Is Grade Inflation Related to Faculty Status? Journal of Education for Business 80 (6): 358-363, 2005.

Nakao, Keiko, and Judith Treas. Updating Occupational Prestige and Socioeconomic Scores: How the New Measures Measure Up. Sociological Methodology 24, 1994.
Romano, Andrew. Bursting the Bubble. Newsweek, February 14, 2005, 8.

Rosovsky, Henry and Matthew Hartley. Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing? Cambridge, MA.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002.

Schackner, Bill. Grade Inflation Costly to Point Park Teachers. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [Electronic version], January 8. Retrieved May 6, 2004, from http://www.post-gazette.com/localnews/20040108pointpark0108p3.asp, 2004.

Shoemaker, Joyce K. and Mary DeVos. Are We a Gift Shop? A Perspective on Grade Inflation. Journal of Nursing Education 38 (9): 394-398, 1999.