Grade Inflation

When every course is a gut

Grade inflation has made academia like Lake Woebegone

In Garrison Keillor's fictional world of Lake Woebegone, all children are said to be above average. Grade inflation has made the groves of American academia a real-life equivalent. Despite the fact that college entrance examination scores have been slumping for many years, a study by Columbia Teachers College president Arthur Levine in the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that undergrad grade point averages have been increasing steadily. The proportion of students with gpa's of A- or higher almost quadrupled in recent years, from 7 percent to 26 percent.  Meanwhile, the number of students with gpa's of C or lower dropped from 25 percent to 9 percent. Today at elite institutions like Princeton and Stanford, grades below a B are rarely given.

Experts see several reasons for the upward trend in grades. Defenders suggest that colleges have ceased to issue failing grades in the hopes of encouraging grade-conscious students to experiment with a broader range of course offerings than they might otherwise dare. But some schools, feeling rising financial pressures, may be shying away from issuing flunking marks as a safeguard against losing tuition, critics charge. Until recently, even a school as rich as Stanford University allowed students to withdraw from a course all the way up until the eve of the final exam, and permitted students to repeat a course an unlimited number of times before requiring a permanent recording of the final grade on a transcript. Both of these options enabled students to create picture-perfect transcripts and boost their graduate school acceptance records accordingly.

Grade Inflation. Photo by Elena.

Grading study author Arthur Levine attributes the inflationary bias to a confusion of undergraduate and graduate grading systems. Graduate students, by definition, are assumed to be good students, and that assumption has always been reflected in the high grades they are awarded. On campuses with extensive graduate programs, professors who teach both graduate and undergraduate courses carry over their more lenient graduate grading criteria to undergraduates.

There are signs that the inflationary psychology may finally have peaked, however. In a move hailed by editorial writers from coast to coast, Stanford recently announced that it was officially bringing back a flunking grade, though it chose to call it an NP (for No Pass) rather than an F. Stanford had banished F's from its grading system back in 1970. To further encourage truth-in-transcripts, the university also decided that a student having difficulty in a course could no longer drop out just before the final exam without having it recorded on his transcript. What's more, it is only possible to repeat a course once, and the fact that the course is being retaken must be entered on the student's transcript as an RP (For Repeat).