Grade Inflation and Its Potential Solutions

Introduction

In October 2001, Harvard University was embarrassed by Boston Globe’s series. In the series, the then Harvard senior Trevor Cox, who was writing his senior honor thesis and had an average B-plus grade, spoke his true experience and opinions on the academia in Harvard that really embarrassed Harvard and surprised the public. According to Cox,

I've coasted on far higher grades than I deserve. It's scandalous. You can get very good grades, and earn honors, without ever producing quality work. (Quoted in The Boston Globe)

Also according to Boston Globe’s research, in June 2001, 91 percent of Harvard students had graduated with honor degrees, far more than Yale University’s 51 percent and Princeton University’s 44 percent. (The Boston Globe)

Thus, grade inflation is a phenomenon that is happening in the American educational system, from small colleges to elite universities like Harvard, that it has caught people’s attention and been in debate about whether it is bad. In this research paper, I will try to present and share my understanding on both sides of the debate and show what factors have led to grade inflation. (Good work revising this introduction!)

The Debate On Grade Inflation

Is grade inflation a bad thing necessarily? Grade inflation skeptics have strong and firm answer to this question. According to Bradford Wilson, the executive director of National Association Scholar, “Grade inflation is one of the most obvious and objective indicators of the erosion of academic standards.” (Quoted in CQ Press) Grade inflation can be considered as professors acting untruthfully to their students, so it is in essence a corruption to the academic ethos. (Quoted in CQ Press) Matthew Hartley, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, evaluates grade inflation in undergraduates from the perspective of the employers and graduate schools. According to Hartley, the biggest problem of grade inflation is the “compression” of the grades at the top of the scale, because it makes distinguishing elite students more difficult. (Quoted in CQ Press) Graduate schools, employers, and even students themselves use grades as an evaluation of their hard work, and grade inflation compromises the very meaning of viewing grades. (Quoted in CQ Press) Valen Johnson, in his book Grade Inflation, brings up the concept of the traditional view of grading to explain why grade inflation is bad. (Johnson 3) According to Johnson, in the traditional view of grading, grades have two functions: to keep academic standards on an appropriate level and to show students’ their learning progress and performance. (Johnson 3) However, grade inflation goes against both goals of the traditional view of grading. William Cole follows the traditional view of grading and he is an instructor at Harvard University. According to him, faculty members are giving out high grades for average works nowadays. Such an act will discourage the student body as a whole as students who normally work very hard see their peers getting good grades that they don’t actually deserve; these students might also put into less amount of work. (Cole B1)

In other words, grade inflation is not only bad to the one who is receiving inflated grades; it has a multiplying effect on every student on campus. The fact that one student gets a good grade without putting into the required amount of work will let all the peer students realize the vain of their hard work, and they will give up to excellence and follow that one student. This trend does not have an end, even though it might only start with one student who might think his or her inflated grades are very innocent and would not affect others at all.

Harvey Mansfield, a professor at Harvard University, adds on to Hartley’s idea of “compression” by introducing the idea of the “cap”. According to Mansfield, grade inflation makes it difficult to distinguish the best from the good because it compresses all the grades at the top and grades are not spread out evenly anymore. (Mansfield B24)

In other words, because of the compression of the top grades, there are all kinds of students, presumably from very good to slightly above average, getting top grades like A’s. However, these students would all end up getting A’s because there is no differentiation in the letter grade A: A is the highest grade one can get. One solution to this is to “uncap” the grading scale so that students can get A+, A++ or even more.

On the other hand, there are also scholars arguing that the problem of grade inflation is being understated. For example, Clifford Adelman, an analyst from the Department of Education, says that grade inflation comes from only the most elite institutions, and students graduating from there are only about two percent of the whole undergraduate population. Thus, grade inflation is not a big problem at all. (Quoted in CQ Press) Also, Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), says that even though Harvard students are getting higher grades, none of the graduate schools are saying Harvard graduates are incompetent. Thus, grade inflation doesn’t mean a decline in standards. (Quoted in CQ Press) She ascribes the rising grades to the rise of the students’ academic competency. “It's tougher to get in, the average SAT score is higher, the overall GPA is higher,” Humphreys says. (Quoted in CQ Press) Humphreys is not the only one holding this opinion. At Duke University, several faculty members argued that the average SAT scores of Duke students had risen during 1990s when questioned with the fact that the average GPA of Duke students had risen about thirty percent during 1990s. (Johnson 5)

What Factors Lead to Grade Inflation?

One interesting thing I observed about elite institutions is the question of comparison group. To grade their performance, sometimes students are compared with their classmates, sometimes they are compared with students in other classes at the same university, sometimes they are compared with students at other elite universities, and sometimes they are compared with students at all national universities. Then, different comparison groups lead to different grading standards. At Dartmouth, the trend is more like shifting from comparing with Dartmouth students to comparing with national standards, thus rising the GPA. According to Noel Perrin, a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth, they started to compare one Dartmouth student with all of the college students nationwide, all five million of them, instead of with another Dartmouth student. It is like they imagined Dartmouth students