The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: July 25, 1997
Section: Students
Page: A41
Despite much angst, many institutions
appear hesitant or unable to act
By Ben Gose
Perry A. Zirkel, an education professor, felt strongly that easy A's were making a mockery of college standards. He felt so strongly, in fact, that he tried to put up $10,000 of his own money to combat grade inflation.
He offered to endow a contest at his institution, Lehigh University, in which about $400 per year would have been awarded to the professor who scored highest on Dr. Zirkel's homemade index. The index took into account the distribution of final grades, and student evaluations. Professors who won raves from students, even while assigning a decent number of C's, D's, and F's, would have fared best.
No thanks, said his Lehigh colleagues. They roundly voted down his proposal at a faculty meeting two years ago.
"This little experience is a microcosm," says Dr. Zirkel. "Even if you try to correct this problem in a relatively innocuous, positive way, you're met with either total apathy or downright resistance."
Anecdotal evidence appears to prove him right. Academics have fretted about grade inflation for years, but grades continue to climb. In the past few years, a number of attempts to remedy the problem have been rejected or have proved ineffective.
What's more, the few professors who use all five grades with regularity face more heat than ever from students, parents, administrators, and even other faculty members.
Most people who study the phenomenon, like Dr. Zirkel, agree that grade inflation has been most prevalent at highly selective private colleges. At Georgetown University, 42 per cent of the grades awarded in 1994 were A's. The mean grade-point average at Duke University rose from 2.7 in 1969 to 3.3 last fall.
And one student who used a fake transcript to gain admission to Yale University earned a B average there in the two years before he was discovered and expelled in 1995, according to his lawyer. His average at the community college where he'd started: 2.1.
Grades at public universities and at less-selective private institutions have risen as well, if gradually. The average grade at Pacific Lutheran University is 3.2, up from 2.99 in 1974. At Lehigh, the average is 2.9, up from 2.6 in 1972. At the University of California at Berkeley, grades rose to 3.10 in fall 1996 from 2.95 in 1986. At the University of Washington, they climbed to 3.12 last year from 2.31 in 1964.
To be sure, the rising grades are accompanied by growing angst.
A draft of a report from a Georgetown committee, for example, chides professors for dispensing A's for what is "simply good work." The report adds, "We do not set high enough academic standards for our students and as a result, they are not achieving their full academic potential."
Whether the concern will result in lower grades is another question. This spring, Duke considered experimenting with a new grading system, called the "Achievement Index," that would have rewarded students who took classes from professors who assign a wide range of grades. If, for example, a student earned a B in a class in which the average grade was a C, his "indexed" grade would have soared.
But students complained that the index would exacerbate competition, and a faculty council rejected it in a narrow vote.
In 1994, transcripts from Dartmouth College began indicating the median grade for each class next to the student's own grade. The college hoped that this addition would prompt professors to assign a greater distribution of grades, thus giving an A more meaning. But the opposite has been true -- Dartmouth students are getting better grades than ever. The mean grade-point average was 3.23 in 1992-93. Now it's 3.28.
Most other efforts to deal with grade inflation have been modest. Two years ago, when 18 of the 300 seniors at Bryn Mawr College graduated summa cum laude, officials decided to limit the number who could receive that honor thereafter to 10. "It seemed a little unlikely that so many of our students could be so outstanding," says Debra J. Thomas, a college spokeswoman.
Bryn Mawr and several other colleges, including Birmingham-Southern College, Georgetown, and Pacific Lutheran have recently circulated around their campuses the average grades awarded by each department. The idea is to encourage departments that dole out the most A's to follow the model of departments that grade more rigorously -- typically, mathematics and the sciences.
"I don't think a structured attempt to bring grades down works," says Irvin Penfield, provost at Birmingham-Southern, where the mean grade-point average is 3.1. "You pretty much have to talk it down."
Some institutions are relenting to grade inflation rather than fighting it. Until April, for example, the University of Virginia School of Law required the mean grade in every course to be no higher than a B. When students complained that their low grade-point averages were hurting their job searches, though, the school raised the mean-grade ceiling to 3.3, a B- plus.
Gettysburg College has a similar problem. Its mean grade-point average is typically lower than those of the 16 colleges to which it compares itself, including Bowdoin, Lafayette, and Franklin and Marshall. Last semester, the average for Gettysburg undergraduates was 2.76.
This fall, professors will consider a proposal to give all future Gettysburg graduates a letter they can send to employers or graduate schools. It would note that the college's median grade is lower than that of its peer group. "I'm proud to be at a place that has high standards," says Daniel R. DeNicola, Gettysburg's provost, "but I'm not unmindful of the fact that unless we get the word out, this can be a disadvantage for our students."
Many forces push grades up, according to Dr. Zirkel, the Lehigh professor. Some professors have come to view grades as a motivator or a reward for hard work. The old-fashioned measure, performance, is now one among several.
Young professors may give good grades as a sort of quid pro quo, hoping that glowing evaluations from students will help in their own tenure battles. Tenured professors, for their part, may not want to deal with the angry calls from students and parents that C's, D's, and F's elicit -- especially at a time when they're so rare. "If I'm the only one telling the emperor that he's walking around nude and looking like a fool, he's not going to be happy with me," Dr. Zirkel says.
For these and other reasons, professors and teaching assistants who would prefer to use a wide distribution of grades are occasionally pressured not to. James R. Otteson earned a Ph.D. in philosophy this spring from the University of Chicago. As a teaching assistant in four classes, he was responsible for grading tests and papers and recommending final grades. The average grade he recommended in all four classes was a B, he says.
But professors have the final word on grades. "In each instance, the professor systematically raised my grades so that the average grade given out was at least a B-plus," says Dr. Otteson. "The argument that was given to me more than once: If a student is that bad, he wouldn't be at the University of Chicago. The second argument was, 'Hey they're paying $125,000, we ought to give them a good grade.'"
Three of the four professors consulted him before changing grades; Ted Cohen did not. Dr. Cohen, who has taught philosophy at Chicago for 30 years, says he routinely raises by half a letter-grade the final marks suggested by teaching assistants. "How can a 27-year-old graduate student know what an A paper is?" he asks. "How many papers has he seen?"
Dr. Cohen says graduate students mark down students severely for doing things such as calling David Hume a "utilitarian" -- not quite accurate, he notes, but fine for a student trying to distinguish broadly between Hume and say, Immanuel Kant.
Dr. Otteson wrote an article, "Grade Inflation and the John Wayne Professor," last winter in The Montana Professor, in which he recalled that a Chicago professor had once scolded him for holding the antiquated view that a C is average. Such a view would only punish students, the professor said, adding: "Is it the student's fault that he got stuck with John Wayne?"
Grades are also rising because students have more latitude to escape poor marks than they once did. Jim DuBard, a physics professor at Birmingham-Southern, is described by a college spokesman as being "well known on campus for not giving away high grades." Well, perhaps. Dr. Dubard says most of his grades are A's or B's, because the college lets students withdraw from courses as late as the 10th week of a 13-week term.
"You have to question what that does in the way of character building for students," he says. "It's like going into a marriage with the idea that you're probably going to get divorced anyway."
Some colleges allow room for negotiation even after a student has earned a bad grade. Paul J. Korshin, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sits on a faculty committee that hears petitions from aggrieved students. The committee heard about 1,000 cases in the past year, he estimates. Dr. Korshin and his colleagues jokingly refer to themselves as the "rhinoplasty committee," with students seeking "cosmetic surgery to the transcript."
Many present physicians' letters stating that the students' poor performance was a function of mental duress, he says. Some students describe the way leaky dormitory ceilings interrupted their studying.
In more than half of the petitions, Dr. Korshin says, the committee agrees to raise the grade or convert it to a withdrawal.
"If you have three or four D's, that wouldn't look that good," he says. "If you have three or four W's, who cares?"
Lehigh has a stricter policy, and only about four or five grades in its College of Arts and Sciences have been changed in the past five years, according to an associate academic dean. But heads turned in May when Robert C. Phillips, a classics professor, turned in the final grades for his mythology class. Typically, about 40 of the 100 students drop out after the first test, he says. They sign up expecting "funny stories about the gods" but bail out when they realize the class isn't a "gut."
This spring, only 15 per cent dropped out -- and most of those who didn't would soon pay a price. Dr. Phillips says he left his toughest questions off the final exam. He did, however, include questions about Heraclitus, who had been featured in an assigned reading.
"I had a bad feeling when a couple of students came up to me in the middle of the exam and said, 'Isn't this a typo? Don't you mean Hercules?'"
He curved the scores on the final exam, but 55 of the 82 grades in the course were D's or F's. "If there had been no curving, I don't like to think about the results," Dr. Phillips says.
Students complained, and the grades ended up on the desk of Joan Straumanis, who was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the time. She says she asked Dr. Phillips to consider a more lenient distribution of grades, or to let students take a different final exam.
She had no evidence that his grades were unfair, she says, but they were certainly anomalous. The complaints had came from "some very good students," and there "might have been other things going on, such as students' not being able to hear well or see the board," she says.
Dr. Straumanis concedes that she wouldn't have intervened if, for example, a professor had awarded every student in his class an A. "Our students very often perform very well," she says. "It's very unusual when they perform this badly."
Dr. Phillips told her that he'd already made the final exam easier than in previous years, and that he'd curved it. He has taken no other action regarding the grades.
Dr. Straumanis's tenure as dean ended last month, with the final grades in Dr. Phillips's course still pending. The classics professor says he's as troubled as everyone else that so many students performed poorly. "But the problem is," he says, "what do you do about it?"