Grades Are Too High in the Academy, But Are Adjuncts To Blame?

by Chris Cumo

Part-time faculty should think twice before marking up a stack of essays. An adjunct lecturer at Southern Connecticut State University, who spoke on condition of anonymity, suspects she lost a part-time stint at another college because she wouldn’t hand out As and Bs to students who hadn’t earned them. But she can’t be certain. The department Chair simply didn’t renew her contract after two semesters, leaving her to connect the dots on her own. She now curves grades so no one fails and, just as important, no one complains.

“I can no longer do absolute grading on the basis of how well they do on exams,” she said, “but how people do in relation to their classmates, which is ridiculous at times.”

She isn’t alone in recalibrating her standards. With embarrassing candor, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences admits that grades cluster ever nearer to A, while SAT scores of freshmen have fallen, and nearly one-third of all students require remedial courses. It doesn’t matter that students aren’t excelling in any objective sense. They have come to define themselves as consumers and education as a product. Grades are in peril of devolving into a commodity that students buy from instructors, who fear negative evaluations as reprisal for anything less than stellar marks.

This system taints many in academe. Harvard awards 50 percent of all students the grade of A, says government professor Harvey Mansfield. Tenured professors at the University of Michigan are soft touches when grades are at issue, said an adjunct on condition of anonymity. Junior faculty fear giving low grades might jeopardize their chances for tenure.

More than tenure-line and tenured faculty, adjuncts may feel pressure to inflate grades because re-employment often hinges on student evaluations, writes AAUP associate secretary Richard Moser in “The New Academic System, Corporatiztion and the Renewal of Academic Citizenship.”

The result is a system in which some part-time faculty give half their students As said an adjunct at a small college in Arizona. The adjunct also admits taking “a lot of heat” for failing students.

But Ross Peterson-Veatch questions the link between grades and evaluations. Instructional consultant at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, he counsels part-time faculty that they can maintain standards and earn high evaluations. Peterson-Veatch is himself a lecturer of 16 years in the department of folklore and ethnomusicology. He walks the walk, telling students on day one of the term that he has high expectations and will work with students to meet them. And he does work, giving students a detailed rubric for every paper and exam, asking them to evaluate him every two weeks, and conferring with them outside class far in excess of the perfunctory office hours many professors keep.

In fall 2001 70 percent of students “strongly agreed” that his instruction was “outstanding” and the other 30 percent “agreed.” Yet his course GPAs hover around a C+. Were he easier on students, Peterson-Veatch believes they wouldn’t respect him and would award him lower ratings.

Even if he is right, adjuncts may feel other pressures to inflate grades, said an officer at the American Anthropological Association. Adjuncts are concentrated in the humanities and social sciences, departments that aren’t able to attract students with the promise of lucrative careers. Instead these departments must cultivate reputations for keeping students happy in order to sustain enrollment. The easiest way to please students is, of course, to grade generously.

The ruthlessness of the numbers game drives up grades in a wave that adjuncts are powerless to stop, caught up as they are in the current. But Amy Cummins, a teaching assistant in the English department at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, thinks grade inflation is more myth than substance. She feels no pressure to inflate grades. Rather the pressure is in having to teach better than full-time faculty to earn her keep. Cummins returns papers more promptly and with more comments than do regular faculty. Outside class she helps students polish drafts.

“I am willing to go the extra mile to help motivated students write better,” she said.

The fact that students do well in her courses isn’t evidence of grade inflation, but of the effort she pours into teaching, effort that in 2001 won her a university-wide Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

Many of those interviewed for this story agree with Cummins. Northern Arizona University adjunct Scott Antes calls grade inflation a “non-issue.” Melissa Panger, who teaches anthropology part-time at George Washington University has never thought of inflating grades and believes students evaluate her solely on the quality of her teaching. Paula Garner, president of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the Maricopa Community College System has never gone easy on students.

“I have made it clear that I will not inflate students’ grades no matter how they complain,” she said. “I have told them I would rather not teach for them than inflate grades.”

This tenacity has institutional support in some quarters. The College of William and Mary Marshall Wythe School of Law enforces a “strict curve” on all instructors, says Judi Conti, director of Legal Services and administration at the D.C. Employment Justice Center. Like other law schools, William and Mary uncouples grades from evaluations. Students evaluate instructors before taking the final, the sole component of their grade. Mesa Community College in Arizona structures its health-care courses as pass or fail, leaving no room for grade inflation. The University of Missouri at Columbia divides an instructor’s ranking by the course GPA. Because high grades lower an instructor’s total no matter how glowing the evaluations, the incentive is to grade rigorously as a hedge against poor evaluations.

“Only a teacher who gives relatively low grades and nonetheless gets relatively high evaluations stands out,” says Doug Hunt, Acting Director of Composition.

To ensure rigor, the Composition office requires adjuncts to submit duplicate copies of two essays per semester, one copy of each the adjunct grades, the other left ungraded. An anonymous authority then grades the ungraded essay.

An adjunct at the college tells the story of the semester that a sample paper which she’d given a grade of C earned an F from the “anonymous authority” and her A paper a C-. Other adjuncts at the College get the message.

“The Comp. Office seems to consider it a compliment if students say you grade too hard,” said Laura Uthe.

Martha Patton agrees: “My perception is that, if anything, the DOC [Director of Composition] rewards adjuncts who are tough graders.”

Others feel caught in the middle, not wanting to inflate grades but nonetheless drifting in that direction. An adjunct at the University of Michigan admits going easier on students than he thought wise because he felt obliged to grade in line with tenured faculty.

Jim Washburne, assistant adjunct professor in the University of Arizona’s Department of Hydrology and Water Resources knows most of his students are non-science majors trying to fulfill their science requirement. He accepts late assignments and grades leniently though students still think his grades are too low.
Cathy Tate-Johnson teaches English at Mesa Community College, where she curves grades to compensate for the fact that, as a harried adjunct, she can’t give students the individual attention they deserve.

Former Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky, co-author of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences study on grade inflation, may be right: academics talk about grade inflation in the visceral way that is possible only in the absence of evidence.

What does seem clear, though, is the vulnerability of adjuncts. They are ghettoized in departments that need to compete keenly for students. Those who don’t inflate grades risk student complaints and low evaluations, though at some universities high grades may cause department Chairs to dismiss part-time faculty as lightweights. Some adjunct faculty refuse to fixate on grades, stoically doing their duty without pandering to anyone. Others tinker at the edges, giving make-up work and accepting late papers, actions that may be calculated to give an implicit, if not explicit, boost to grades.

One thing is clear, the temptation to inflate grades is real. Given this reality, universities should protect adjuncts, perhaps be weighing both student evaluations and class GPA, as does the University of Missouri. A more sweeping reform might be to rethink evaluations.

“When we are able to devise a viable alternative to survey-type student evaluations as a way to measure teaching merit, we may begin to see a reversal of the phenomenon of grade inflation,” said Maricopa Community College adjunct JoRita DeFrancesco.

Until then, we may have to content ourselves with the gentleman’s A-.