Hilal Nakiboglu: In the era of higher grades

Parents, famously, like to begin stories with the phrase "When I was your age." Often, these stories involve walking for miles and miles in the cold mud (of course) to attend school. Sometimes, they will include a quip that doing well academically back then was no easy task. They'll tell you that professors in "those days" took strange pride in liberally flunking their students. Never them personally, mind you, but others in their classes, certainly. Are they accurate in so saying? Well, yes and no. Grade inflation, according to resident expert Matt Hartley, a Penn School of Education professor, can trace its roots back to the '60s. With Vietnam-era draft boards breathing down the necks of the college-aged, liberal grading practices quickly became something of a moral imperative, a silent opposition to war and a successful attempt to keep students from going to battle. Faculty felt giving out poor grades might force male students especially to drop out, subsequently becoming subject to the draft. The book Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing?, recently published by Hartley and former Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky, explains that while initially something of a protective, political movement on the part of faculty, the practice of grade inflation continued through the '80s because of something quite different. Universities began adopting business models of operation. With students being seen increasingly as paying consumers, emphasis was now placed on keeping them content. What better way to do this than to reward them with high grades? Work done by Indiana University professors George Kuh and Shouping Hu shows that through the '80s and '90s, the average GPA rose from 3.07 to 3.34 nationally. Only between 10 and 20 percent of all students during that time received final grades that fell below the B- range. This gradual shift upward has been the most marked in the Ivy League. While in 1946, only 35 percent of graduates were given honors distinctions at Harvard, today that number has seen a remarkable increase. The Boston Globe recently featured grade inflation at Harvard, reporting in 2001 that a whopping 91 percent of those graduating from the school left with the "honors" mark stamped on their diplomas. Although certainly an issue at the national level, Harvard seems particularly guilty of rampant grade inflation. This has prompted Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at the university, to write, "The grades that faculty members give deserve to be a scandal." Mansfield received much public attention when he decided to give students in his political philosophy course two grades each. One, the official grade, was submitted to the registrar's office. The second Mansfield gave to the student in private. Wrote Mansfield of this exercise, "The official grades will conform with Harvard's inflated distribution.... The private grades will be less flattering." These confidential grades were to provide students with what Mansfield called a "realistic" perspective on how well they did, without actually penalizing them for taking his course. With this two-grade system, Mansfield managed to spark a charged national conversation about the nature of grade inflation. While he argues that faculty engage in practices of grade inflation because it makes them feel "popular" with students, there are certainly other factors at play here. The nature of grade inflation is systemic. If one's faculty compadres are generously awarding A's, being a more stringent, selective grader is tough and maybe even unwise. The pressure to raise grades is a subtle one. In an academic world where junior faculty are well-advised to "publish or perish," emphasis is placed strongly on doing research. As such, the hours spent on teaching undergraduate courses especially are seen as a waste: a detractor from the lab or library. Consequently, some faculty members become experts at cutting corners when it comes to teaching. They recycle old exam questions and skim through papers, often offering little by way of constructive commentary. In large lecture courses, professors don't read the exams themselves -- relying on scantrons or human processors, TAs, instead. Even in smaller classes, professors usually offer a circled letter grade on a project or paper and not much else. Elite institutions have talked informally about joining forces to deflate grades. My sense is, while a noble attempt, it is unlikely that much can be done. Increasingly under stressful research demands, fearful of poor student evaluations and even litigation itself, faculty are placed in a delicate position. It is too easy to blame them for continuing trends of grade inflation. But what real, comfortable and, importantly, enforceable alternative do they have? The call is out there to remedy this: a feat requiring determination, resolve and creativity on the part of administrators in particular. It remains to be seen what sort of initiative could halt the truly sweeping force that grade inflation has become. Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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