Higher grades may build some students’ confidence and urge them into demanding subjects where they might succeed, but they may also diminish some students’ incentive to study and frustrate institutions’ ability to identify well-prepared applicants.
What is grade inflation, exactly? Why should we be concerned about it?
Grade inflation, or a school’s tendency to offer more A and B grades while giving fewer Cs, Ds, and Fs, can harm children in a variety of ways. Grade inflation, according to critics, can: Make the reward for exceptional performance less appealing.
Are colleges aware of grade inflation?
The Final Word. So, while choosing whether or not to accept an applicant, do college admissions committees consider grade inflation and deflation? Yes, to put it succinctly. Colleges evaluate applicants in comparison to their peers in high school.
Is it illegal to inflate grades?
In many cases, grade inflation appears to be a minor transgression with few victims. Evidence, on the other hand, demonstrates that the practice harms students, erodes institutions, and perpetuates privilege. Amy and Mike invited Seth Gershenson, Ph.D., a researcher and professor, to discuss the various reasons why grade inflation is problematic.
What are the three types of grade inflation and how do they present themselves?
MEET OUR GUEST
Seth Gershenson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at American University’s School of Public Affairs (SPA). He’s also a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), a Senior Technical Advisor at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy, and the Coordinator of the SPA’s Analytics and Management Institute. Professor Gershenson’s research focuses on teacher labor markets, summer learning loss, student absences, community-wide shocks, teacher expectations and implicit prejudice, and the causes and implications of minority teacher underrepresentation.
Seth’s research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, the W.E. Upjohn Institute, the Association for Institutional Research, and Google, and has been featured in USA Today, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Vox, NBC News, and The Atlantic, among others. Professor Gershenson graduated from Michigan State University with a Ph.D. in Economics in 2011.
Is grade inflation a problem at Harvard?
Yale University and Harvard College Harvard had a similar issue with grade inflation, with Jay M. Harris, the former Dean of Undergraduate Education, disclosing that the median mark at Harvard was an A-, with an A being the most often issued grade.
Why do teachers inflate their students’ grades?
Grade inflation can be caused by a drop in academic standards, a rise in student achievement, or a combination of the two. Parents, students, and institutions can all put pressure on teachers to lower their standards. This is especially true because any school or teacher who takes a “hold out” position will put its students at a disadvantage if other schools or teachers are inflating grades. Some professors may feel compelled to give higher grades in order to avoid students complaining and earning poor course ratings, which could damage their reputation and lead to decreasing class enrollment. Professor Harvey Mansfield, for example, assigns two marks to Harvard students: an official inflated grade and an unofficial grade that he believes the student merits. Teachers’ course evaluations are frequently used by committees in making judgments concerning promotion and tenure. A teacher’s subpar reviews can be improved by enhancing their teaching, but the most obvious way to enhance evaluations is to provide higher grades on assignments and tests. According to Valen Johnson’s research, there is a statistical link between good grades and high course assessments. In a second study of grades at Penn State, grade inflation began in the 1980s, coinciding with the introduction of mandated course assessments.
During a 2003 introductory philosophy seminar at Swarthmore College, Professor Hans Oberdiek explained that grade inflation began in earnest during the Vietnam War draft. Students who have high enough marks may be excused from the draft; therefore, giving a student a C may result in his being sent to Vietnam. Professors, understandably, offered higher scores more freely in order to avoid having this disastrous outcome hanging over their heads. Professor Oberdiek recalled that before the war, “I used to give out Cs like candy.”
While there are pressures to lower standards, part of grade inflation at some schools and universities is due to gains in student performance. The quality of incoming students at some schools has improved over the last few decades, as assessed by SAT scores and high school class rank. However, SAT scores have remained stable at many colleges with growing grades. Even at colleges where SAT scores have improved, the extent of the GPA gain cannot be explained only by student SAT scores. Other factors are to blame for the rise in grades.
Increases in grades have been observed in several schools, which may or may not be related to a drop in academic standards.
There are different explanations for the rise in student grades through time, such as:
Today’s students are more concerned with career preparation, which means they are more likely to enroll in classes that match their skills.
Students have become more productive as a result of the use of computers.
Cooperative learning methods allow for feedback on assignments, which helps students improve their work.
Pass/fail choices are only used by a tiny percentage of students, which is insufficient to explain for reported increases in GPA.
Students must still complete distribution requirements, which means they must take coursework outside of their primary areas of interest.
Throughout the 1990s, when personal computers had already saturated higher education, grade inflation remained.
Cooperative learning methods aren’t widely used enough to account for reported GPA increases.
According to surveys of high school and college students, they are working less and are less involved in their studies.
A related point is that intelligence appears to be increasing over time (at least as assessed by the IQ scale), a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Students’ SAT results, on the other hand, have not been improving across the country.
In California, what is the highest high school GPA?
On a scale of 4.00, a high school GPA is calculated to two decimal places (between 0.00 and 4.00). A weighted scale should not be used. Before computing the GPA, convert any grades with extra weighting for honors and advanced placement classes to a 4.00 scale.
Why do universities lavish A’s on their students?
When people voted emphatically with their dollars, great products thrived while shoddy ones faded out, according to economist Milton Friedman. But, as most of higher education has demonstrated, shoddy products may perform just fine if they maintain a faade of quality while falling downward. Faced with tough competition and demanding customers, institutions have simply handed more A’s, fueling grade inflation and devaluing degrees.
At every level, from failing community colleges to Ivy League elites, grade inflation is in full swing. In other situations, campuswide averages have risen from a C to a B-plus in the last ten years.
Some departments award A’s to students in order to cover courses that might otherwise be canceled due to low enrollment. Individual instructors manipulate grades as a result of consumer-focused administrators pressuring them to do so. Professors at all levels embellish to avoid bad student evaluations, which now go into tenure and promotion decisions.
Part-time teachers, who have no job security and currently teach more than half of all college courses, are the most vulnerable. Two part-timers claim in the most recent issue of the journal Academe that students often corner adjuncts, threatening to complain if they do not change Cs into As. Universities would be “free to sell certificates altogether” if tenure was abolished, according to an Ivy League academic.
What are your options for dealing with an inflated grade?
Grade inflation is a significant issue that has mostly gone unnoticed for far too long. Grade inflation can be caused by pressure on teachers as well as “grade grubbing” by parents and students. Reporting both absolute and relative grades on report cards and transcripts is one strategy to combat grade inflation.