In my view, colleges and universities in America face two existential threats. The first is AI, which can destroy the ability of students to do homework, write essays, and learn to write. In many places it’s facilitated cheating, even during in-class assignments. If AI expands, it will destroy one of the main purposes of higher education: to teach students (and also spark a lifelong love of learning).
The second threat is the subject of this new article in The Atlantic: grade inflation. In many elite schools, the average GPA of students is near perfect, which is 4.0 (“straight As”). Here’s Harvard, for example, as portrayed in the article (click it to read an archived version):
During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.
They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.
. . . . The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A–. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.
Grade inflation, in turn, destroys education in three ways: the students don’t know how they stand in relation to their peers, and it makes it harder for those going beyond college—say, to grad school or a job—to evaluate students’ performance. Finally, and counterintuitively, it makes the students more stressed out, for reasons described below.
There are ways around this, like giving the median GPA of a course or an overall class on the grade report. Alternatively, schools could put a cap on the number of As they give out But these fixes haven’t worked very well. For one thing, putting median grades on transcripts or limiting the number of As lets the students know which courses are the easiest, and the harder courses tend to lose students.
Fixing grade inflation, however, is easier said than done. Princeton, for example, experimented with an informal 35 percent cap on the share of A’s that professors were expected to give out. It abandoned the effort after a 2014 faculty report found, among other things, that the policy made it harder to recruit students, particularly student athletes. Beginning in 1998, Cornell began including courses’ median grades on student transcripts. Far from mitigating grade inflation, the practice only made the problem worse by giving students extra insight into which classes were the easiest. Last year, the faculty senate voted to end the policy.
Read more about the issues by clicking below:
Why has this happened. Well, college has, over the years, become not an educational institution but a degree mill: a commercial operation to certify students to get good jobs and make good money. This “consumer culture” puts enormous pressure on students to wheedle good grades however they can, and, more important, on professors to make their courses more popular by making them easier.
Further, as the article notes, competition for access to elite universities has intensified, so the entering class is simply better qualified. Even if grading standards remained the same, the average GPA will go up. (There is of course, a ceiling at 4.0, which argues for a non-numerical way of evaluating students.
And as students’ emotional well being declines due to the therapy culture described by Abigail Shrier, faculty attend to this by raising grades. As the article argues:
At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades.
And the pandemic increased student anxiety even more, leading to–you guessed it–higher grades:
The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them.
The reason higher grades have only increased student stress is because grades don’t matter that much any longer, and students hunger for a way to distinguish themselves from their peers. As the article describes, a “shadow system of distinction” has arisen in elite schools, whereby extramural groups form that deal with stuff like finance and consulting, and the standards for getting into these clubs (which of course count as useful extramural activities after college) are often as rigorous as those for getting into elite schools. This leads the students to further neglect their coursework, which doesn’t matter because you’ll do well no matter what, and put their effort into these “clubs.”
The whole purpose of a liberal-arts education has gone down the tubes:
Claybaugh assured me that Harvard is committed to bringing about a lasting culture change around learning. She thinks of the change as a matter of fairness. Harvard students have access to a trove of intellectual treasures and the chance to commune with many of the greatest living minds. “If we have the world’s biggest university library, then our students should be reading these books,” Claybaugh told me. “And if the students we’re admitting don’t want to read those books, or if we have set up an incentive structure that dissuades them from reading these books, then that is immoral, and we need to reincentivize them to do so.”
So what to do? Individual professors capping the percentage of As in their classes will accomplish nothing, for that will just reduce the enrollment in their classes. If there is to be a solution like this, everyone has to agree to participate (and that might lead to an academic “tragedy of the commons“).
Nevertheless, Harvard is going to try by taking action on several fronts:
Now that they know that making college easier doesn’t reduce stress, Harvard administrators are attempting to rediscover a morsel of lost wisdom from the ancient past: School should be about academics. In March, the faculty amended the student handbook to emphasize the highly novel point that students should prioritize their schoolwork. The university has advised professors to set attendance policies and make clear that students, contrary to their intuition, are expected to come to class. And it formed a new committee to consider how to rein in runaway grade inflation. The committee is considering proposals such as switching from letter grades to a numerical scale (to get rid of students’ frame of reference) or reporting grades as the difference between what a student earned and the course median. In the meantime, Claybaugh has asked each department to standardize and toughen its grading policies. Faculty will need to move collectively so no one gets singled out as a harsh grader.
Attendance policies? How do you enforce that in a class of several hundred students, like the one Pinker teaches? Card-swiping at the door? That could fail for obvious reasons? And it doesn’t help that many professors record their classes so you don’t even have to be there (I think you should in case you have questions.) I’m not sure how to “reign in grade inflation” unless every professor in a university agrees to cap the number of As (or Bs). But nobody is going to sign onto that, and it seems a bit unfair: what if a class is full of high achievers, but not all of them are eligible for As?
I’m not sure that, given the Zeitgeist, there is any solution. Colleges becoming certification factories seems to me an unstoppable process. Luana thinks that this, combined with AI, spells the death of American liberal-arts education. I refuse to believe it, mainly because when I went to college (1967-1971) there was no AI, you had to work for your grades (sometimes there was a set cutoff system, e.g. 90-100 = A, 80-90 = B and so on), and, most of all, the school was not a research school. Teachers were deeply dedicated to teaching, and had the time to do so, as well as to chat with their students. Do such schools even exist any more? I don’t know, but I’m glad of one thing: I’m retired and don’t have to buy into the whole AI/grade-inflation mishigass.
It’s not only in the United States. The percentage of first-class degrees, which are the highest grade of bachelor’s degree awarded in British universities, has increased significantly in recent decades, from less than 10% in the 1990s to more than 25% today. And A-levels, the university entrance exams which students take at the end of their final year of secondary education, have seen such an increase in the percentage of A grades that an additional grade, A* (A-star), had to be created in 2010 to allow the brightest students to be recognised.
A friend of mine who worked for a few years at a university in the UK told me that in UK universities no student is permitted to fail. If a student is doing poorly, the onus is on the prof to do everything possible to prevent the student failing, including helping them do the required work.
One of the reasons I retired recently from a professorship was the changing mission of the universities from educating students to a business model where making profits – especially from full fee-paying foreign students – is the primary purpose and keeps the bloated bureaucracy going. That bureaucracy now rules over the profs, mandating what they do and how they do it in fine detail. The student is king and the days of academic freedom are over.
Students’ mass cheating with AI, of course, is yet another problem. If I was a young man today, I would not pursue an academic career.
This one is very easy to solve, the president need only issue an executive order saying that, as a condition of receiving funding, universities must publish a rank ordering of students, say decile by decile. Easy, cheap, hard to get round.
Would that really work? How would the rank ordering of students be calculated? By GPA? That will encourage students to take more basket weaving and less quantum physics.
To calculate the rank ordering the university would evaluate the students’ work and rank them.
And the rank ordering would be done subject by subject. An employer might think that 4th decile in quantum mechanics was better than 1st decile in gender studies.
Dick Lewontin, in his biostatistics and population genetics graduate classes—which I took in 1978-1979—gave all B’s. When competing for a fellowship later—which I won—my advisor had to explain that those B’s were “Lewontin B’s.” We loved him anyway.
The prevailing lore was that Lewontin originally tried to give everyone A’s in his classes but that people complained. So he decided to give everyone B’s. Jerry can probably set me straight on this story, as he was a lifelong friend of Lewontin.
I graded on an absolute scale. Most of the time, around 20% earned A’s. My colleagues occasionally questioned my grading, saying that I should grade on a curve, which would set grades based on the collection of students in the class. I could have done that, as it would have led to a consistent and predictable grade distribution each year. But, I didn’t do that. Grading on a curve would have put the grade distribution into the hands of the students in the class. But I was the person being paid to be the professor, and I thought that it was my job to determine student competencies in my courses. So, I graded on an absolute scale. Some years students earned quite a few A’s, other years not so many.
I like your philosophy, Norman. I did that when I taught HS math, despite complaints from parents and one principal who pushed for “student success” – i.e. As for everyone. When I was at Stanford in the 60s and 70s, everyone graded on the curve which meant 15% A, 35% B , 35% C, and 15% D and F. Getting an A was not an easy thing.
I look forward to reading the article in the Atlantic.
Yes, I well remember the Lewontin B grades. I also remember him saying “if you’re applying to med school and need an A, talk to me after class”.
I’d love to read a biography of Lewontin.
At my good-but-note-elite university, grade inflation is obvious but not overwhelming, worse in upper-division courses, and reported on our student transcripts as the median grade in each class. I don’t think grade inflation in my own teaching has been bad but I’ve never looked. I’ll report back.
I’m skeptical of the anxiety-inflation causal connection: inflation is not dire at my school, but anxiety has been off the charts for a long time. Some instructors definitely want to comfort students thru grades, and the therapeutic instructional culture has had bad effects (trigger warnings, infantilization, pronouns). But the effect on grades feels pretty weak, I think because my colleagues have affinity both for our struggling anxious students trying to avoid a C and for our high-performing students (we want their As to mean something).
I know–I was his t.a. in statistics. But I remember that if you really WANTED an A, you could go see him and he’d assign you a paper to write; then you cold get an A.
I didn’t know that, but you had already gotten your Ph.D. by the time I arrived. If I remember correctly, Steve Orzack was the TA when I took the course.
Given I work in private higher education after working in public higher education, I would put money as the key culprit. US students have become customers and they obviously want to pay the lowest price for the product. Effort is part of the price.
However the article misses the third actor in this drama: business. In the olden times, business noticed that higher education graduates were likely to possess skills that made them effective employees. Those skills were developed during higher education, but not dependent on the subject. So business ties the higher echelons of jobs to a degree while communicating that the content of the degree wasn’t important. Which was true, since they just used the degree as a proxy for desirable traits and skills. Since it is easier and cheaper to check for a degree than for skills, HR departments came to rely on that proxy.
Thus business shares the responsibility, but won’t be part of the attempts to solve the issue.
When I was doing my PhD, I could spot students getting the degree for the degree from a mile away.
I think one option would be to require the employer to pay the education of an employee. Say the for the last ten years. If that education is work experience, you have to pay the company you poached the worker from. Might need some adjustments, but a such a system could rework the employment market for the better.
A friend suggested that companies simply stop hiring Ivy League grads because their grades are meaningless.
When I taught at a community college, the admin demanded grade inflation. The (horrible) college president told us that the college is a business and that students are paying customers and deserve high grades. He demanded that faculty lower academic standards so more students get As, which meant that they were more likely to enroll the following semester, increasing the college’s revenue from tuition. The president actually ordered us to stop saying “student” and use “customer” instead.
Faculty unanimously refused to dumb-down our courses. The pres then targeted the more vocal faculty for firing. I was denied tenure partly because I “failed to maintain enrollment,” meaning that I upheld academic standards in my chemistry courses.
Grade inflation was so severe at this community college that some four-year unis stopped accepting our transfer students — oops, I mean customers — because too many flunked out. And those four-year unis had their own grade inflation problems.
I’m so glad I’m retired and don’t have to deal with this nonsense anymore.
I think it’s hard for those of us who went to colleges or universities back in the 20th century to wrap our minds around the idea that no, it’s just not possible for higher education to do it that way again, today’s students can’t stand it, we don’t have the capacity anymore, etc. It’s not as if we lack the technological advances of the 70’s and 80’s.
There are probably academic institutions today which follow the old fashioned path towards Truth and Knowledge. Maybe they’ll find themselves in high demand.
I was thinking along the same lines — that we’ll wind up with an unofficial sort of two- tiered system.
The landscape for student anxiety is far different from what I had, and it does look more stressful. Tuition rates have increased well above rates of inflation, and students often have to work a lot at 1 or 2 jobs and I’d bet even then they have to also carry student loans. That and the general feeling of future job insecurity, global warming, and so on, I can see how many are far more stressed than I had been.
Majoring in computer programming, for example, had been a good career track and many students are still in that major. But of course that is being taken over by AI and I keep hearing how companies are just having AI do the work that used to be done by new hires, while having their experienced staff do the rest.
In the UK, graduate entry jobs have fallen by up to 30% with AI getting the blame: https://archive.is/ayFts
Do they have a plan for getting the next cohort of experienced staff? I doubt it — SEP.
Andrei Toom, a Soviet-born mathematician, in 1993 described [*] the reasons for chasing grades in the US this way:
It’s a deep essay, and as a web search for the title shows it is apparently viewed by some as controversial. I got the impression that his views are grounded, perhaps too much, in a society that has only a thin stratum of intellectuals. But economic realities in the US are much different and drove up college attendance levels. Businesses took grades as proxies for candidate abilities, and students became customers of purchasing degrees, see FX Kober’s comment above at #4.
Now AI is taking over everything, eduction and industrial hiring included. … At least until such jobs are not yet replaced.
[*] A. Toom, “A Russian Teacher in America”, J. Math. Behavior, v12 n2 p117-39, Jun 1993; available at the late author’s site: https://andreitoom.com/education/
I got the impression that his views are grounded – sounds like some of those flying students should be, too. Scary!
http://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.jantoo.com/training-education-college-diploma-degree-vending_machine-graduation-58830828_low.jpg
Attendance is easy to enforce. In law school where in NY almost 100% attendance is mandatory the prof hands around a class plan/map and we highlight our names on the plan if we’re there. Absentees names aren’t highlighted.
(Also we’d highlight in another color if we’re “unprepared” – haven’t read the cases. So we’re here, but just don’t call on us today!)
D.A.
NYC
That’s easily defeated: you just ask a friend who’s there to highlight your name when you’re absent.
Attendance is meritorious if you’re there to learn. Taking attendance at the college level is treating students like children. If you don’t show up you’re cheating yourself. You get out of college what you put into it.
College students are more juvenile then they were 50 year ago.
Bingo!
Exactly. I taught at universities in Canada and Australia that are not top-tier institutions. Students generally fell into three groups: those who would do well no matter what; those who could do well if you pushed them; and those who were completely disengaged. The first group generally showed up to class regularly and did the assigned work. The others rarely or never showed up to class unless incentivized through a carrot (participation grade) or a stick (attendance).
Over the years, administrations at the universities I worked at forbade us first to take attendance and then to give participation grades, with predictable results: fewer and fewer students would come to class. This didn’t matter too much for the first group of students but the students in the second group, who benefited from being compelled to attend, fell behind and often moved into the third group.
When teaching one class, I maintained an up-to-date copy of all the OHP slides and handouts on file at the library. I preferred that students who just wanted to skate by had the opportunity to not consume the room’s oxygen. Some students never attended, which bothered me, but not enough to change that policy. They were after all presumed to be adults.
I had students both sign and print their names on an attendance sheet. I would then check the signatures for each name. Of course that is only feasible for relatively small class sizes.
I honestly did not care about my grades all the way to Ph.D. I wouldn’t look to see what they were. Then when I began teaching undergraduates, I sought out those who felt the same way, and they would get my attention.
How long ago was it, and roughly what fraction of your students felt that way? (My experience 25+ years ago was “a very small one”.)
I would like to see a discussion of something related to but distinct from grade inflation: the “therapeutic instructional culture”, as Mike Hart designates it in Comment 3 discussion.
While grade inflation has been occurring for many decades, the therapeutic academic culture seems to have really gained force in the last ~20 years. Where did it come from? What else is
it associated with? What are its consequences?
Pragmatically, as the system’s incentives change to prefer quantity over quality, by necessity more non-traditionally-academic students are admitted. At some tipping point it becomes better business to treat students’ negative feelings about their ignorance rather than the ignorance itself. Everyone must get prizes; anything else is seen as oppressive.
I was an undergrad in the 70s and the dean of our college was trying to limit As to 1 or 2 per class to fight grade inflation. So it has been going on for a long time. The whole evaluation system needs to be completely redesigned, starting in grade school. The way children learning to read are evaluated might be quite different that the way high school students are evaluated, which may only be similar to how college studentsare evaluated if the HS student plans to go to university. Part of developing a successful system of evaluation would be to start by clarifying exactly what the purpose of evaluation is and make a system that does that. Grades do not summarize a student’s learning or accomplishments when everyone who is still breathing at the end of the semester is a 3.8 student.
For what it’s worth, this is what my grad inflation has looked like. Spring-semester third-year biology course in my career-long area of research specialization; lectures & labs & field trips; mostly taken by students doing a major in my department; data from 2009 through 2025 (missing two years when I was on sabbatical). Sorry for the long post, I hope it’s worth the read. It’s easier to look at a data graphic but I can’t post that (will send to Jerry he might be interested).
From 2009 through 2013 class size ranged 44–92 (depending on how many labs we could schedule); in each year there were always more students who earned some kind of C, D, or F grade (13–37%) than some kind of A grade (6–17%); everyone else earned some kind of B. Median grade was a B (3.0 grade point).
In 2015–2019 in response to the student anxiety vibe I made a structural change in the exams so that the weakest students had a shot at a better grade. This worked: For each of those five years there were always more As (10–32%) than CDFs (7–11%). Median grade jumped up to a B+ (3.3). Classes sizes were not different (37–65).
And then of course the pandemic hit. My department cancelled in-person instruction in early March 2020 (we were way ahead of the curve) and students were reassured nobody would fail. That year no one earned a CDF grade, 57% of grades were an A, and median grade was an A- (3.7).
The surprise is what happened next. In the four years 2022–2025 I made no more big changes to the structure or rigour of the course or the assessments, and the class size ranged 59–71 similar to the long-term average. But the median grade fell to a B+ in 2022 and plunged to a B- in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
That drop from B+ pre-pandemic to B- post-pandemic is large and not consistent with the kind of grade inflation that the folks at Harvard were laughing about. My colleagues broadly agree we’re still suffering from a post-pandemic hangover caused by isolation, alienation, phones, social media, anxiety, reduced attention span, loss of agency & delayed maturation.
One interpretation is that elite colleges are creaming off elite student applicants who didn’t suffer the worst of the pandemic. I suspect faculty at those schools may not know how bad things really are out here in flyover country where we admit lots of non-elite students who seem to have suffered long-lasting effects of the pandemic that overwhelmed whatever grade inflation might also be happening. Maybe Horowitch will write about that next?
You make a really fair point about the realities facing students in “flyover country” as opposed to the majority of those at the ivy leagues.
If you caved into the “student anxiety vibe,” you’re part of the problem.
This is not twitter. Please try harder. Using your real name would be a good start.
If a university is degrading the value of grades, I imagine employers will notice the difficulty of distinguishing who the strong students are from those they interview for jobs (who come from that university). That, in turn, should surely have those employers begin preferring students from universities that grade according to merit, which should also put pressure on all universities to have their grades really mean something (who’s going to enrol in a university with a poor reputation in the workplace?). Maybe it’ll take time for these forces to bite, but it seems to me that they must be like the wheels of justice – slow, but grinding fine.
Is there a hole in my logic somewhere?
Since you asked, yes.
Except for academic jobs, most employers do not much care about student grades, except to provide a convenient (if arbitrary) blameless filter. The important thing is that the applicant finished the degree, which actually demonstrates some valuable employee attributes (basic literacy, showing up, following instructions, persistence, tolerance for incompetent or abusive management, etc. etc.)
In McGill’s first-year biology classes, grade inflation occurs for the laboratory component which gets balanced by the midterms. Most people don’t do as well in the midterms as they would like. In my undergrad at Vancouver Island University, a teaching based Uni., the lab component was tough, given by the professors rather than TAs.
I’m not sure if others have mentioned it, but universities seem to have evolved different administrative dynamics over the years. Early on (I’m almost 80), students stuck with a class and hoped for a pass if they weren’t doing well. That’s why I have an F for first-year calculus on my transcript. Now it seems more common and easier to withdraw from courses and not have it appear on your transcript or contribute to your gpa. Given later withdrawal dates (very late in some cases?), students wanting to avoid an F or get a grade more than a D or even a C could withdraw at the last minute. This would also affect median grade. To interpret grades in a course would require percent withdrawals as well as ending average.
This is true in my teaching experience.as well.
When I was an undergrad, we could withdraw after about four weeks at the latest. So if we didn’t do well on our first exam, we could drop. Now students can withdraw at three weeks left in the semester.
You mention the problem of easier classes giving more As and implying that nobody would take the difficult classes. In my old university (not in the US) there was a simple norm-referenced rule: the top 10% got As, the next 15% Bs, and so on. This ensured no grade inflation and over time it improved standards as students had to try hard to get an A. The only problem was small classes when maybe say 3 out of 20 deserved an A. But overall it worked pretty well.
My wife is a professor in a nonselective, public institution. Her grading approach and attitude are much like Norman’s: it is her job to assess mastery and not to be pressured by supposed student expectations. She will work intensively with students who want to stretch themselves and excel, recognizing that for some students a “C” might be the current height they can reach. For those courses she teaches regularly, recommendations from former students attract higher-caliber students into her classroom. The best students lament the easy A’s they normally encounter; they welcome the challenge her courses offer; and a fair number have said in their evaluations that they were glad to take a class in which they felt pride in their grade and learned that they were capable of a level of achievement and effort beyond their earlier expectations. Others, of course, whine about how this is the only class in which they didn’t get an A, with the insinuation that this must surely be the professor’s fault.
I say this not so much to brag on my wife, but to suggest that there is still a demand among a significant minority of students for rigorous and engaging education even in a nonselective population where regional school loyalty is strong. That demand is not satisfied by a faculty member who conveniently suggests that “These kids aren’t like we are. We simply need to get them the credential so they can get ahead in life.” This ostensibly caring attitude will have consequences. Jerry didn’t use the excerpt in which Pinker says that not only does he give two to three times as many A’s today as he used to, but that student performance on his exams has dropped by 10 percentage points over 20 years. Now imagine the effect of such grade inflation and lowered rigor among students—future professionals—who are nowhere near the quality of Harvard’s entering class. There is an approaching confidence crisis in the professions, signs of which we already see, when it becomes obvious that doctors, lawyers, construction managers, engineers, and all manner of people whom we count on to know what they are doing are not as a group as gifted or hard-working as the generations before. Far from being a “kids these days” gripe from an aging man, the systemic pressures are well known, with data to mark the decline.
Kudos to your wife and her students astute enough to appreciate what she is doing for them.
I was puzzled about Pinker’s remarks. Surely he’s in a position where he doesn’t have to play along with this nonsense?
Tenure does not insulate one from charges of insubordination.
“Others, of course, whine about how this is the only class in which they didn’t get an A, with the insinuation that this must surely be the professor’s fault.”
I could tell you stories about this attitude. It was most prevalent at a highly selective field school that taught graduate-level content with high instructor:student ratios and intense one-on-one mentoring. In one instance, my co-instructor and I got caught on the last day of the course in a struggle session with dissatisfied students who harangued us for ~4 hours about why the course was too hard and all the ways in which they were all “A” students.
+++1
This is what worries me the most — incompetent professionals.
A few years ago I read a comment on another blog in which the commenter refused to see any physicians, attorneys, etc., who are younger than 40 because possibly incompetent.
This should not be difficult. Grades, as much as possible, should reflect a student’s objective mastery of the material. When I was a PhD student, I taught an undergraduate engineering course. Before grading any homework or exam, I decided in advance how much each question was worth and how I would assign partial credit, with the goal of measuring how well the students understood the material. At the beginning of the course, I explained that an average of 90 or above would guarantee an A, 80 or above a B, and so on, but I reserved the right to curve downward. If everyone in the class earned an A, then so be it, although that would prompt me to reconsider the rigor of the assignments and exams the following semester.
I understand that liberal arts courses involve more subjectivity than engineering, but the principle should be the same: grade students against an objective standard relative to the material. Cheating with LLMs of course is a separate issue.
My dad taught Engineering Mechanics and that’s how he graded. He knew what the students needed to have mastery of in their next round of classes and saw to it that their grades reflected where they stood in that regard. He was kind of a hard-ass on partial credit. He thought you either got it right or you didn’t. Remember when the walkway at the Kansas City hotel collapsed in 1980? He was fond of saying that the guy who passed on the design change that led to its failure got through college on partial credit.
My policies exactly. Have an explicit marking rubric; construct assignments and tests that can be objectively marked; where feasible then divide a single item into a sequence of smaller pieces of increasing difficulty (thus allowing objective “partial credit”); thoroughly explain the marking system at the very beginning, and again as needed, including the policy on cheating. Then stick to it, being prepared to receive some pushback from the Head of Department.
For many (most?) students the marking system is the significant motivator. So it deserves as much planning as the actual teaching.
I went to a UK university (Bristol) in the 1980s, and we were graded on an absolute scale. I was in a small department (music) of about 20 students per year, and in most graduating classes only one 1st-class degree was usually awarded, half a dozen upper-2nds, ten or so lower-2nds, and a short tail of 3rds and passes. In an exceptional year there were two 1sts; in my own year none at all. Absolutely no one was allowed to feel that they were owed a better grade than they got.
This was possible partly because money was not part of the equation: no one paid fees (university education was free to anyone with the necessary qualifications), so the university had not yet become financially reliant on students, paying ever-larger fees, that it then had to court by making courses seem easier to do well in. As soon as fees were introduced in the UK in the 1990s the upward spiral of grade inflation (and downward spiral of quality of outcome) began.
The top rank of US universities seem to have such large endowments that it’s hard to feel that scarcity of income can be a concern — effectively, money could, if they wished, be taken out of the equation as it was in my own university experience, and they could apply properly benchmarked standards again. The problem of unpopularity with athletic students is a specifically US problem, but again it’s hard to imagine that the Ivy League can’t afford to risk unpopularity with jocks. The fact that in most states the state university head football coach is also the state’s most highly paid public-sector salary is an index of shame, not something to emulate.
In the 1990s, I worked as a lab manager at a uni at which the highest-paid employee was the basketball coach, then the dean of the medical school, then the uni president. Faculty salaries were absurdly low.
This reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the protagonist refused to grade his students’ work – they were outraged. How things have changed.
My wife and I had a deep discussion this morning on the decline of American society. The bottom line is she blamed technology. I blamed the education system which has led to the erosion of standards of competence and behavior.
The discussion in this post proves my point. Mr. Gilinsky (comment 3) has it right. Grade on a scale. Distribution is irrelevant. I have no idea why educators have rejected the value of teaching and seek to become social workers.
I was told I had to make lecture classes “fun” and use games etc. Not easy to do in a neuroscience class, and not what I had been trained to do. More like kindergarten than what I had experienced myself as a student long ago.
Yes, at the university I last taught at we were dissuaded from assigning students reading or problem sets – instead, prerecorded lectures (or segments of lectures, no more than 10 minutes long, or – better yet! – YouTube videos) and “fun” online activities. I included a quiz at the end of each unit to test for knowledge but was told this wasn’t “engaging” enough … I don’t know how much of this was based on what students actually asked for and how much it was driven by administrators trying to save money.
I was told it was all about money – the logic being that if students have fun in class, and are thus happy with the uni, they will tell their friends, who will then sign up and pay the admission fees. In a time when unis are competing for fee-paying students to keep the unis going, such a strategy is mandated from on high. Thus recent online ads for unis here boast that “the days of lectures are over!” and other such messaging. Not good for those of us who were trained to be university lecturers rather than kindergarten teachers.
Unfortunately, this is true. I was a trustee at a small private university, and out of financial necessity, it was butts in seats. The university added athletic programs knowing parents would pay to extend their child’s athletic career.
Today the AP ran a story about how the administration’s clamp down on visa was resulting in fewer higher paying international students.thus hurting the bottom line.
CICO?
(Clueless In, Clueless Out)
(Maybe pronounced “psycho”, as a comment about the system)
Grades are inflated and expectations are miserably low. I am dredging up a very old memory here and I hope it’s someplace close to accurate. Back in (I think) the mid-80s, somebody made a short documentary which I read about but never saw. This was well before the internet, though I have searched for it in the hope that it made it’s way there, to no avail. I believe the title was A Universe of Their Own. In this film, the maker attends graduation day at Harvard. Lots of happy grads and proud parents. He does shirt interviews, asking the grads what they majored in, what their future plans are, etc. Then he asks the following question: “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” Of the 23 grads he asks, only 2 can give the correct answer. After 4 years of a Harvard education. What can you say? Has anyone else seen or heard about this film? I would love to see it.
I don’t know if this is the whole film or just part of it, but I think this is what you’re talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXb7Oq13pjQ
That’s it. Thank you.
Brooke’s link is actually just to a two-minute excerpt. The whole film (about 20 minutes) is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BwWDWi9zp4. Well worth a watch. The film was made in 1985; it would be interesting to see if the situation today were any different.
In my Department we do not have serious grade inflation (though I think courses have become easier over the last 40 years. We have excess demand for our courses, so faculty do not have to compete to get students (Pinker’s explanation). Our lower division courses are taught by teaching faculty and if they have too high a grade distribution they may not get renewed. We also observe this when considering promotion.
Of course a situation of chronic excess demand brings other problems, but it does deal with grade inflation.
In semi-defense of the situation at Harvard: Grades are only useful information in the real world if there is some sort of calibration across universities, so that an A from Ohio State doesn’t mean something wildly different than an A from Harvard, in terms of evaluating the student’s quality of work. I think it’s plausible that, taking into consideration the entire college student cohort in the US, a very large proportion of Harvard students are doing work in the top tenth percentile or so, in which case they would deserve an A.
If a high school decided to create a gifted class in grade 12, consisting only of students who had an A average in their previous years, it would not be at all surprising, or a cause for dismay, if most of the students in that class got an A. But that’s essentially what Harvard is. The 25th percentile of high school GPA for people admitted to Harvard is 3.8. I think the default assumption should be that most of them will continue to produce a similar level of work when at college, so it’s not ludicrous to me that the average GPA of the graduating class was 3.8.
It seems weird to mostly admit ultra-high-performing students and then worry about the fact that their grades in college seem to suggest that most of them are ultra-high-performing.
Hmmm. I was a maths wiz in high school, and then burnt out halfway through a “real” mathematics¹ degree at university. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. University is not (or at least was not) the same as high school.
. . . .
¹ Which does include “real mathematics”, the mathematics of the continuum.
Sure, past performance is not a literal guarantee of future results, but there is a positive correlation between past performance and future results. And there are studies bearing this out specifically in the case of college GPAs. High school GPA is a strong predictor of college GPA, stronger than, say, performance on standardized tests.
Fair point.
Also, I’d like a cite or two for the HS GPAs being a better overall predictor than SATs etc. I expect that there are differing plausible interpretations of the data; I could be wrong about that.
When I was a student, my transcripts showed not only my letter grade but also the average grade in the course. This system was useful later when I was looking at applications for graduate programs – an A in a class where the average was C was much more impressive than an A in a class where the average was A.