Prices can rise indefinitely with normal inflation. Grade inflation, on the other hand, occurs when grades are capped at A or A+, resulting in a higher concentration of pupils at the top of the distribution. Grades lose their validity as indicators of student talents as a result of this compression.
What causes grade inflation?
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 exactly is grade inflation?
Grade inflation is defined as: The assignment of grades higher than previously assigned for specific levels of achievement, resulting in an increase in the average grade assigned to students.
What are your strategies for dealing with grade inflation?
Professors, not students, are the ones who inflate grades. Students have been accused for grade inflation by critics, who claim that they come from a “coddled” age that puts pressure on professors to give out A’s in order to please their classes. Grade inflation, on the other hand, does not benefit students or instructors; rather, it adds to a poor learning environment. Professors must be given the tools they need to grade fairly and accurately in order to counteract grade inflation.
Students all throughout the country have heard that they are spoilt because they are given participation medals and grades that they did not earn. Students, on the other hand, are not to blame for either – they do not select to win participation medals, and they do not have control over their grades. Grade inflation is a systematic issue created by the efforts of professors and administrators who want to send their students to the best graduate programs and employment possible.
Adjusting professor ratings could be one method to reduce grade inflation. Professors who obtain high marks from students in their evaluations are more likely to be given tenure at several universities. Student assessments are also taken into account when determining whether or not a professor earns a wage hike at a university. As a result, educators are enticed to offer students grades they did not totally earn in order to secure high assessment scores. Students may feel good about their excellent grades in the short term, but they suffer more in the long run because they learn less.
Students could complete evaluations earlier in the semester to avoid professors making a last-ditch effort to get positive feedback. Professors would not believe that their grading decisions have a direct impact on their assessments, and the feedback would assist them in adapting their teaching approach during the semester to guarantee that students are learning.
The University should also admit grade-inflation-fighting measures that haven’t worked at other schools. For example, a cap on the amount of As, Bs, and Cs was tested out at Princeton University in 2014, but students were unsatisfied with the adjustment, which administrators discussed in 2010. Proposals to construct a slide grading system, in a similar spirit, may not always allow students to maximize their learning because professors are limited in their grading. Professors must employ practical teaching tactics in order to improve their teaching.
It is simple to assume that student complaints result in grade inflation. Students are hyper-focused on grades in order to stay competitive with their friends and get admittance to prestigious universities, yet it is instructors who enter the final grades into Banweb. The truth is that grade inflation is a strategy used by institutions to stay competitive and claim that they produce top-performing students. Students should consider if grade inflation is in their best interests or the prestige of their university.
Grade inflation, in actuality, does neither benefit students or the colleges that utilize it. There is no single path to ending grade inflation, but it is vital to safeguard the integrity of college as a learning environment rather than a credential factory by deflating marks. Professors and administrators must work together to combat grade inflation, which can be stopped by jointly modifying how they grade. Changing the way instructors are assessed and being upfront about grade distributions are two simple ways for college officials to combat grade inflation.
Why are college grades inflated?
“We find that attending school one year later corresponds to a sizable and statistically significant gain of 0.053 grade points when adjusting for demographics, exam and course fixed effects,” Denning and his co-authors concluded.
“In other words, pupils who received the same grade on the same final exam had better grades in subsequent years.” Given the strong link between GPA and graduation, our finding that grades are improving over time, even when student characteristics and performance on identical comprehensive final exams are taken into account, suggests that earning a degree at the public liberal arts college we studied is becoming easier. We feel that this discovery is likely informative of broader trends, given the similar tendencies we see between this one school and the nationwide data from 1988 to 2002.”
In an interview, one of the writers, Denning, remarked that people typically assume he and his coauthors think this is either a very good or a very negative thing.
He replied, “I think we’re a little more agnostic about it.” “College graduation appears to have increased as a result, and college graduation has been proved to be a good thing and a low-cost way to do it in the sense that there is no monetary cost… On the other hand, if it makes students less likely to invest in collegegrades are frequently used as a motivator to study and work hardthen students may learn less. It could also be detrimental if it undermines the signal that a college diploma sends to employers.”
According to Denning and his co-authors, “it is difficult to tell for sure” why grade point averages have risen since the 1990s. They found that instructors may be motivated to offer greater grades in order to improve their teaching evaluations, and that departments with high grading may attract more students.
“Recent governmental attention on college completion appears to be a plausible factor to rises in average GPAs,” they added. Schools and departments may respond by raising graduation rates as they face more scrutiny and, in some situations, additional funding incentives. Changing the requirements for receiving a degree is a low-cost strategy to boost graduation rates. Graduation rates rose dramatically at public four-year schools and community colleges, which rely on public funds and are subject to state performance-based financing restrictions.”
The study comes at a time when the federal government is paying more attention to the issue of college completion.
The most recent iteration of the White House-backed Build Back Better legislation would provide $500 million in incentives to institutions to boost college retention and completion. Priority for “retention and completion grants” should go to institutions “that propose to use a significant share of grant funds” to improve enrollment, retention, transfer, completion, or labor market outcomes for “students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, students in need of remediation, first-generation college students, student parents, and other underserved student populations,” according to the legislation.
The focus on completion is vital, according to Tamara Hiler, director of education at Third Way, a center-left think group that is promoting the completion grants.
“While I don’t doubt the authors’ findings about grade inflation being linked to some on-the-ground shifts in the late 1990s and early 2000s that may have influenced the behavior of some professors to increase their grades,” Hiler said via email, “I think it’s a big leap to connect those findings to the broader completion efforts we’re seeing policymakers push for today.”
“The reality is that we still have a college completion crisis,” she said, despite minor increases in completion rates. “That is why policymakers and institutions must continue to work on improving the whole postsecondary pipeline, including initiatives to enhance enrollment and completion.” This also emphasizes the importance of implementing accountability systems or outcomes-based performance systems that include multiple measures, such as looking at retention and completion rates alongside other post-enrollment outcomes such as earnings premiums for students with a high school diploma or loan repayment outcomes. As a result, institutions won’t be able to manipulate one metric or turn into diploma mills only to seem nice.”
Zachary Bleemer, a postdoctoral fellow for Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit focused on issues of economic opportunity based at Harvard University, and a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, echoed Denning and his co-authors’ argument that grade inflation has both benefits and costs.
What are the reasons why students and professors should be concerned about grade inflation?
For decades, educators have been researching grade inflation. However, recent news indicates that significant challenges of justice may become a recurring aspect of our educational system. It raises the possibility that some students, presumably from more lenient high schools, have an inflated perception of their academic aptitude, which could lead to a harsh surprise in university.
An inflated feeling of academic performance is problematic, and it will only get worse if the system is not corrected. Starting university is stressful enough without having to deal with anxiety and frustration caused by significant declines in first-year grades.
Even more alarming is the possibility that a kid who had the misfortune of attending a high school with more stringent grading systems lost out on a coveted university program to a peer with slightly higher, inflated grades.
In Ontario, where education is mostly supported by the government, schools should provide equitable learning opportunities with grades that accurately represent student achievement. Growing Success, Ontario’s government assessment and evaluation policy statement from 2010, begins with this “basic idea.”
Almost every province and territory has a similar policy statement. Clearly, the inclusion of adjustment variables indicates that Ontario, and most likely all Canadian provinces, still have work to do in terms of supporting school grading and evaluation.
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.
What does grade inflation look like in practise?
It’s also possible that the average GPA is high due to a school policy. A good example of grade inflation is Stanford University’s declared policy of not giving any of their students a F on an assessment.
What is high school grade inflation?
Unfortunately, grade inflation does not occur when your instructor instead of giving you a report card gives you a balloon with your grade inscribed on it (that would be kind of nice because even if you did badly, hey, a balloon). Grade inflation occurs when average grades are skewed excessively high due to easy class evaluations and/or forgiving teachers.
The average mark for a class will not correctly reflect the quality of the students’ work if grades are inflated because a teacher is an easy grader. A student can receive an A on an assignment that only merited a B. If a teacher assigns easy assignments, the average grade will represent simply the pupils’ ability to execute simple activities, not their knowledge of the material’s intricacies. In the case of classrooms with substantial grade inflation, both of these issues are frequently present at the same time.
Grade inflation occurs for a variety of causes. High schools want to look good in comparison to other schools with lower grade inflation, therefore giving out high grades, even if they are not fully earned, is advantageous. This gives the impression that the students are more intelligent and that the professors are more effective. Some teachers may also avoid assigning bad grades because they fear that their students and parents will complain and cause them more bother than they are worth.
Teachers may also award students who haven’t fully earned higher scores because they don’t want to jeopardize their prospects of getting into college or preventing them from participating in extracurricular activities. It’s understandable that average grades have risen dramatically as a result of a much bigger number of pupils attending college nowadays. If a kid expects to be accepted to college, a good GPA is essential, and professors do not want to jeopardize anyone’s future.
What exactly is grade deflation?
Many students have forced themselves to severe levels of stress in order to answer this issue, have emphasized GPA over physical and mental health, and have frequently linked self-worth to academic accomplishment. One of the most widely used mental health programs in the country, UC Berkeley University Health Services Counseling and Psychological Services, has discovered that 30.6 percent of their sessions are connected to academic stresses. Furthermore, according to UC Berkeley students’ responses to the National College Health Assessment, 62 percent of students said their academics were “traumatic” or “extremely tough” for them to handle. This raises a slew of problems about how UC Berkeley can sustain academic quality while also effectively addressing students’ mental health in the face of a massive funding deficit.
However, grade deflation is a topic that has been tossed about student body talks like a Frisbee for a long time.
Grade deflation is a phenomena in which course grades deteriorate over time as a result of academic policies, student performance, cultural shifts, or even chance. I’ve spent about 50 weeks as the ASUC vice president for academic affairs assessing the situation of UC Berkeley’s academics and grading.
It turns out that professors and lecturers are not required to deliver specific grade distributions. Although departments are allowed to suggest distributions, each campus faculty member has complete control over their grading distributions. Given the long-running debate around grade deflation, the ASUC collaborated with the UC Berkeley provost and Office of Planning and Analysis to create a data collection that includes every major’s average GPA over the last nine years. This information combines every graduating student’s cumulative GPA from each academic year and averages their GPAs by degree. Due to privacy laws, students with double and triple majors had their GPAs averaged within each of their majors, however major departments that graduated less than five students in the preceding academic year were not shown.
2.8 in chemistry, 2.86 in environmental economics and policy, 2.92 in African American studies, 2.96 in marine science, and 2.98 in environmental earth science were the lowest five average GPAs for the 2015-16 school year. The highest five average GPAs that year were 3.6 in the materials science and mechanical engineering joint major, 3.62 in operations research and management science, 3.67 in art, 3.73 in Near Eastern language and literature, and 3.75 in the bioengineering and material science engineering joint major.
When we look at GPAs from 2007 to 2016, we can see that the majority of average GPAs fluctuate with time. In the vast majority of situations, there is no statistical evidence of grade deflation, demonstrating that the all-too-common term “grade deflation” does not exist.
Instead, there is grade suppression. Grade deflation suggests that grades decline over time, whereas suppression simply means that grades are low in comparison to other institutions. GPAs in degrees ranging from STEM to the arts and humanities have a startlingly low average. Who’d have guessed that political economy majors have an average GPA of roughly 3.20? Despite the talk about easy or hard majors, most majors on campus have rarely exceeded a 3.5 GPA average in the last nine years.
However, whether or not our grades are suppressed is dependent on the frame of reference we use. While it is well known that many Ivy League schools have inflated grades, comparing our GPAs to those of similar institutions such as UCLA or the University of Michigan may help to contextualize our GPAs even further. However, just 14 of the 119 GPAs presented in the 2015-16 academic year were above 3.50. None of the 14 GPAs above 3.50 came from biology, molecular and cell biology, or integrative biology, majors in which many students aim to go to medical schools with average GPAs above 3.8. Of course, certain majors will have outliers that will drag down the GPA, but if we believe that majors with a high sample size of students may reflect the normal curve, then many majors will have students that are evenly divided between above and below average.
Historically, public school average GPAs have been lower than private school average GPAs. As of now, Stanford University’s average campuswide GPA is 3.57, according to a 2011 assessment. In a 2017 email to Harvard University professors, the dean of undergraduate education reported that the median grade was an A- and that the most often awarded mark was an A.
UC Berkeley students deserve more transparency on grading policies and more equity when competing with graduates of the nation’s top schools with more inflated grades, regardless of the history of grading, what grades should represent, or whether employers and graduate schools are aware that UC Berkeley GPAs are suppressed. Faculty and administration should perform research on the high and low GPAs reported in this data set in particular.
Academic practices and curriculum appear to have influenced some of these GPAs. For example, the 3.10 average GPA of cognitive science students in 2015-16 could be explained by an inflow of students who did not meet the lower-division course GPA criteria for the computer science major, which was 3.0 at the time and has since risen to 3.3. Academic rules and a comprehensive curriculum appear to be leading to lower GPAs in many majors.
Although GPA should not be linked to self-worth in any way, it is nevertheless a significant factor in a student’s future mobility. Each faculty member should consider the meaning of a grade, and the UC Berkeley administration should continue to work to ensure that all of its students receive an equal education.
ASUC academic affairs vice president Andrew-Iyan Bullitt is a senior mechanical engineering major.