Academic Bloggers on….Grade Inflation

On the AdjunctNation.com Web site, we asked users to tell us whether they had ever inflated grades to get more positive student evaluations. Almost 20 percent of the 400+ faculty who responded admitted that they had, in fact, inflated grades. This comes as no shock, of course, considering how much has been written about grade inflation during the past few years. From the Boston Globe to the New York Times, college faculty have been flogged in print for doling out As like John D. Rockefeller flipping Mercury head dimes to kids during the Great Depression.

Theories about grade inflation range from those who posit that American culture has become overly concerned with the needs of the “consumer,” to psycho-theories that point to a culture more concerned with instilling a strong sense of self-worth in today’s college-aged adults rather than a strong work ethic. Added to this mix, of course, is research that examines correlations between the increased use of temporary faculty and the rise of the Big Easy A. People whose jobs depend on strong student evals., researchers hypothesize, routinely trade As and Bs for high marks on end-of-semester evaluations.

We went online and checked out what students, faculty and administrators had to say about the subject in their Weblogs (blogs). Want to read more? Better yet, if you want to comment on a blog or respond to the writer, follow the links given and visit the individual blogs.

From Cultivating Minds:

Thoughts on Grade Inflation
Why can’t a classroom of capable students all receive an “A” if they are all sufficiently talented and given the proper tools, resources, and guidelines to succeed. If a grade is not normative, i.e., not referenced against peers but against a set of expectations, as educators should be doing, is it grade inflation if all the students are meeting these expectations?

From Left2Right:

Accountability in Higher Education (II)
One cause of grade inflation is the reliance of administrators on “consumer satisfaction” measures to evaluate teaching.  Courses that get high scores from students on exit surveys are assumed to have been well taught, and faculty are regularly held to the standard that falling below the average or median score counts as a failure: instructors must be above average in order to be considered any good at all.  Faculty cannot help believing that giving their students lower grades during the semester will result in their getting worse evaluations from the students in the end.  And there is some evidence that they are right.

From The Blog Diggity:

Square One
I find it difficult to fill out the “professor’s weaknesses” part of course evaluations ever since I found out that those evaluations affect tenure decisions and stuff. (Unless the professor taught my GOD AWFUL history of childhood class last year, but even then, when it comes down to it, I’m like, “Well, she was a nice person, and I don’t want to hurt her employment chances just because I happened to think she sucked.”) And how do you write that your professors sucked? “She sucks” just makes you sound stupid. They might not be the best discussion leaders or the nicest people, but then I think, “Well, they’re still new at it, and they seem to have potential” or “Well, I don’t like nice people in real life anyway.” So unless they have personally offended me in some way, I really can’t think of valid complaints even if I didn’t particularly love them. I wonder if professors feel this way about me when they inflate my grades. This is not to say I don’t want to howl in protest when I find out that I’m not going to get an A in one of my classes and it will bring down my GPA and ultimately spoil my future and shorten my life expectancy. But that is only because I have been horribly spoiled by grade inflation.

From the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

The Uses and Abuses of Math
Ever since his State of the Union speech, President Bush has been pushing increased government funding to improve science education, with better mathematics preparation as its foundation. While his claims that there is a shortage of workers in those fields and that more government is necessary to fix the problem are hardly convincing, the long line of international comparisons that have found Americans’ mathematics mastery woefully inadequate would seem to establish our general innumeracy as a fact.

However, less clear than our innumeracy is whether we really want to overcome it. The fact that we frequently use mathematics to intentionally fool ourselves and others argues against that conclusion. When we systematically abuse numbers to distort reality, it is no surprise that we handle mathematics poorly.

One of today’s most obvious misleading number games is grade inflation.

Teachers have accommodated student desires for higher grades to the point that the median GPA of graduating seniors has risen about a full grade point since it was about 2.2 in 1965. At some elite schools almost everyone gets As and Bs today, and who is valedictorian has become how many 4.0 students will share that title.

High schools have gone even further, making it possible to get better than a 4.0. Many make advanced placement or community college courses worth an extra grade point. These and other policies (e.g., statewide comparisons crafted to show that, as in Lake Woebegone, all children are above normal) have, however, thrown away much of the useful information grades once contained.

From the College Academic Administrator:

Whose Academic Integrity?

Much has been made about academic integrity among college students. Cheating, plagiarism, copying information straight from a webpage into an essay, or buying an essay on the web are things we hear about all the time, right? But what about the academic integrity of the higher education institutions? Most academic administrators would acknowledge that grade inflation is a universal problem in higher education, and yet I’m not sure I see much being done about a problem we administrators readily admit exists to a large degree. Or what about the efforts, or lack thereof, we put into improving academic integrity at our institutions by trying to improve the quality of teaching? The academy mints Ph.D.s and many of these people become teachers of their discipline. Whereas K-12 attempts to train people to teach, we employ newly-minted Ph.D. types who may have never taught anyone to do anything, ever. And our efforts to assess their teaching abilities and to attach appropriate professional development activities to these people, and to reward those who become the most effective teachers, are sparse, even at so-called “teaching institutions” that do not place much importance on research. And so we employ these people to impart upon others their subject matter expertise, but don’t entirely arm them with the tools to do this well. If you doubt this premise, go find out how much money your institution has earmarked for pedagogical training, of any kind, of your faculty.

From Economics Colony:

Grade Inflation, Academic Standards, and Adjuncts
Undergraduate institutions often worry about grade inflation (I suppose K-12 schools ought to worry about grade inflation but they don’t!)–not that they do much about it. But here’s a thought. Think of maintaining academic standards (no grade inflation) in the context of a prisoner’s dilemma game. Individual faculty members have an incentive to inflate their student evaluations by giving out high grades (cheat on the agreed upon academic standard). In a one shot game everyone will cheat. But in a repeated game there may be some incentive to cooperate and maintain the academic standard. Now, as more adjunct professors are hired the chances that the game is repeated is reduced and therefore the incentive to cheat on the academic standards rise. So how do we ensure that the game is repeated—tenure and the tenure process may be one answer. Are college presidents listening (here’s a safe bet—NOT!)

From Delectatus:

State of the Educated
A lot of people don’t know this, but many college professors are loathe to fail students or give them poor grades. Grade inflation is a well-documented phenomenon. I have a feeling this might explain poor performance among graduates. I know I received some As I didn’t feel I truly earned. My personal standards were higher than most professors.

From Cincinnatis:

Twenty Years a Teacher
But anyone who fails to see that American education is, and has been since the 1960s, in dramatic and dangerous decline remains, to use a favorite term of the education establishment, “in denial.” Grade inflation, eroding standards, manipulated statistics, idealistic dogma, and a celebration of mediocrity have all coalesced over the last four decades. The effects of such portend a disastrous future for America’s role in the world. But perhaps that’s the ultimate aim of America’s anointed and predominantly liberal educational establishment … to jettison the world leadership role assumed by the United States? Perhaps Somalia could take our place?

To save our children, who are the future of this country, courageous changes must immediately be undertaken. Colleges that offer insipid drivel instead of academic substance for future teachers must be dismantled. Labor unions that work to erode quality and enshrine ineptitude must be broken. And parents must assume their responsibilities, allowing schools and teachers to focus on the basics and not the inculcation of ideological agendas.

From eng comp blog:

Worried About Grade Inflation
Even though it would make life easier for me, I would prefer if professors were not so easy with grading. By grading easier, professors will not properly prepare me to enter into a career. I want to be able to be successful in my career and to have the skills and ambition to work hard at my job. I’m sure employers would also like to have that information to help them choose employees.

From the JogAmericaBlog:

Grade Inflation
Well, it’s semi-official. The default grade at the University of Prince Edward Island—at least in one course—is a B-. Not a C. Not a D. Not—Heaven Forbid!—an F. If you fail to show up to David Weale’s History of Christianity course, you get a B-. I am only heartened by the fact that the University actually put their collective foot down and said, “No.” I think the most frustrating thing to me is how open about it he is. He doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. He has totally given in to the myth that the purpose of higher education is certification, not actual learning. “Happens all the time,” he says. “I’m just up front with it.” If I ever get to the point where I’m satisfied that students in my class are getting decent grades without learning anything, somebody just shoot me.

From David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic:

Why Adjuncts Matter
At many universities the hammers brought in to bring grade inflation under control are adjuncts.

Adjuncts are fleeting.
Adjuncts — against their wishes and by design — have no stake in the long term viability of a university.
Adjuncts are expendable.
I have been a university adjunct for a decade.
Adjuncts teach because they enjoy the interaction with students.
Adjuncts are not there for the money.
Many adjuncts make less than $2,000 per course.
Adjuncts generally care more about their students day-to-day than the regular teaching staff who must also worry about service and publication in addition to teaching if they want to stay long term.
Those who already have tenure rarely see a class with undergraduates.

I advise my better students to seek out the contract teachers and adjuncts because they teach for the love of the event and not for the want of money or station and while the classes may be harder and the expectations set higher, the reward, in the end, will be a better long-term ability to retain the information and their grades will be hard-won and have deeper meaning beyond the student loan debt load.

From orangenish:

Grades
Oh, the joy of grades. I’ve just looked mine up on Butler’s website. They’ve actually been up for quite a while, I believe, but I actually forgot about them until tonight, and then I still forgot about them until later this night. I had horrible butterflies in my stomach while I waited for the computer to turn on and the Internet to load and then the webpage wasn’t working correctly and then I had to click on a bunch of links and watch the phrase “processing …” flash on the screen. But I finally got my grades.

Shit.

I should say that I did not do as badly as I could have. I was a bit terrified I’d flunked out of Butler. But surely there would have been a phone call, an e-mail if I had. So I wasn’t completely worried. But still. I was worried about Spanish. My two other BU Spanish professors both gave me bullshit, made-up grades. Complete grade inflation. Maybe not with my first semester prof, but probably most definitely with my second semester prof. A B+ in Spanish? Maybe looking like you’re going to throw up while delivering your oral final in front of the class and actually getting so nervous you cannot speak, much less make a sound, is the ticket to a good grade. So I was both praying for another fake Spanish grade and realzing [sic] that the free ride has to end sometime, and this professor didn’t seem like he’d bullshit around with grades. And yet he still did, at least a little. I think my good fortune has come to me because, while I may not attend every class, I am not disruptive. I am not an asshole. I sit there quietly and take notes, sometimes really great, stupendeous [sic] notes. I don’t talk during class and my cell phone is always turned off, not even on silent or vibrate, because I dread it ringing accidently [sic] during class. I put effort into my projects, or at least know how to throw them together at three a.m. I show up for tests and projects, and (this is part is exclusive to Spanish class) I put a piece of tape marked “bigote” (mustache) on my left index finger, hold it above my lip, flirt with my faux-fiancee, and act in a jewelry store commercial.
So the grade I got in Spanish was actually okay, even if on another level, it’s actually not okay.

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