HISTORY
That college students have been earning increasingly better grades has been a topic of concern in and out of the academy since at least the late 1960s. Particularly well-known are Rojstaczer and Healy, who maintain that: (1) grades began rising in the 1960s; (2) by 2012, A’s were 43% of all grades; and (3) private institutions award more A’s and B’s than public institutions of similar selectivity. Others claim that national studies and media accounts exaggerate the problem of grade inflation. Aggregated data, they argue, masks a variety of demographic, policy, and pedagogical shifts.
CAUSES
Scholars mention a set of interrelated causes for the inflation that some studies find. For example, students may think differently about their role in college. They are more likely to view their enrollment from the perspective of a consumer paying for a service. Faculty may think differently about their role in assigning grades. They are increasingly reluctant to play gatekeeper to students’ educational and professional opportunities and engage in the sorting of students. Finally, increased reliance on student evaluations of teaching to inform personnel decisions may encourage some faculty to trade inflated grades for job security.
CONSEQUENCES
Many argue that grade inflation, and the grade compression it causes, has consequences that we should not ignore. We mislead students about their skills, limiting their ability to learn and mismatching them to intellectual and professional opportunities. We mislead departments about students’ readiness to take higher-level courses after completing lower-level ones. We mislead employers and graduate schools, who then find other ways to differentiate candidates. Finally, we give members of the public reason one more reason to distrust us, since they may view the grade inflation they often hear about in the media as misaligned with rising tuition costs.
POLICY INTERVENTIONS
Some institutions have implemented policies intended to curb grade inflation. One method is to put grades in context for both students and faculty by publicizing course grade distributions. For example, at Indiana University, the Expanded Context Record is an addendum to students’ transcripts that includes, among other items, how many students in a course section earned the same grade or better as the student in question. More controversial is the practice of rationing grades, in other words, prescribing specific grade distributions for courses of certain levels or sizes. In 2005, Princeton mandated that departments limit the proportion of A-range work awarded to 35% of students (50% for tutorials and other independent work). The policy ended in 2014. In 2004, Wellesley legislated that the average grade in large 100- and 200-level classes cannot be above a B+. In departments most affected by the policy–those in the social sciences and humanities–students were 18% less likely to earn an A or A-.
This is a compressed version of a report written and distributed to the faculty in October 2018, which you can find below.
2018.10.10-Grade-Inflation-Compression-and-Inequality