Grade inflation doesn't add up

"Let's bring grades down."

That was the headline above an editorial on this page three days ago. As you might have guessed, the editorial condemned "grade inflation" and urged Penn to lower its median grade point average.

Yet the editorial cited only one statistic: 54 percent of College of Arts and Sciences grades last year were A-minuses or higher.

To be sure, 54 percent is a lot of A's and A-minuses. But that figure only applies to the College last year and says nothing by itself about how grades have changed. The most College administrators have told us is that their school's GPA increases by "a hundredth" every year.

That hardly proves grade inflation. So perhaps it's time for us to look more closely at the issue before we call for action.

Let's start by defining terms. Grade inflation is an increase in GPA without an increase in achievement, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society of scholars. So if grades were going up here, that would be an increase, but not necessarily inflation.

And, as it turns out, grades at Penn are increasing. The average undergraduate GPA rose from 3.16 to 3.32 from 1993 to 2001, according to a School of Engineering and Applied Science class study.

Some context: Penn's .16 increase in eight years outpaced the average national increase in GPA, which has been .146 per decade for the last 35 years, according to academia monitor gradeinflation.com.

Why has Penn's GPA been rising relatively rapidly? Let's investigate the possibilities.

Students might know which classes give high grades, taking mostly those classes to fulfill requirements and thus boosting Penn's GPA. This is the theory of Chemistry professor Donald Berry, chairman of the Committee on Undergraduate Education.

If Berry were correct, it would mean we would have an inflation problem. But the numbers from the Penn Course Review don't back him up. For instance, last spring semester, the seven most popular courses that satisfied the seven general sectors, respectively, had an average difficulty of 2.60 on a scale of zero to four, with four being the most difficult. Yet the average difficulty of all 19,788 courses listed in the review is only 2.35.

It would seem, then, that students do not take easy courses to fulfill requirements, but relatively hard ones. And it's unlikely that Penn's harder classes are the ones doling out freebie A's.

College Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman has offered a more plausible answer. He said in an article in The Daily Pennsylvanian that professors don't want to be known as tough graders because such a reputation would lower their enrollment numbers. So professors grade leniently.

The course review suggests Peterman may be on to something.

From my limited research, I found a correlation between high course difficulty and low instructor rankings. In 1999, for instance, the 13 least-liked professors received an average difficulty rating of 2.77, or .42 higher than average.

And, apparently, teachers do look at the ratings.

In 2000, one of those 13 least-liked professors from 1999 made the list of most-liked professors after teaching the same Engineering class. What happened? Well, his difficulty ranking dropped from 3.60 to 2.60.

Maybe professors make classes easier to attract students and to bolster chances for student-tenure recommendations. Consider this: Only four of the lowest-rated professors in 1999 were given the same classes to teach in 2000. But the average difficulty rating for those four magically dropped in 2000, and their average instructor rating doubled.

I haven't studied enough data to prove anything. But intentionally soft instructors could cause grades to rise and thereby spur inflation. I'd suggest Penn look into that before taking action.

Moreover, if the University wants to examine inflation, it needs to study its predictive index. That's a formula Penn used to estimate our future undergraduate GPAs when we applied. Penn should now compare the GPAs it predicted for us with our actual GPAs to judge whether increases are merited or inflated.

Penn won't release its current formula, but an old version indicates our grades should be higher. That formula, used in the 1960s and 1970s, took into account SAT scores, SAT IIs and class ranks.

The new index probably uses most of the same measures -- all of which have gone up in the past few years for Penn students. Indeed, between 1993 and 2001, the largest annual rise in Penn's GPA, .04, was accompanied by two major academic jumps.

In 1998, Penn accepted its first class with an average SAT above 1,400. That was also the first class whose average student had been in the top two percent of his high-school class. The next year, when the new class received its first grades, the GPA jumped from 3.24 to 3.28, as the index might have predicted.

So maybe we students have earned our grades. Or, maybe professors have graded leniently for their own benefit. I'd guess it's a combination of the two, but we certainly don't know yet. And until we do, let's withhold editorializing.

It just seems silly to call for lower grades without already knowing why they're high.

Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

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