What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn

Author:Alfie Kohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807097120
Publisher: Beacon Press

10. The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation

Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002.

Grade inflation got started . . . in the late ’60s and early ’70s . . . The grades that faculty members now give . . . deserve to be a scandal.

—Professor Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University, 2001

Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.

—Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard University, 1894

Complaints about grade inflation have been around for a very long time. Every so often a fresh flurry of publicity pushes the issue to the foreground again, one example being a series of articles in the Boston Globe in 2001 that disclosed—in a tone normally reserved for the discovery of entrenched corruption in state government—that a lot of students at Harvard were receiving A’s and being graduated with honors.

The fact that people were offering the same complaints more than a century ago puts the latest bout of harrumphing in perspective, not unlike those quotations about the disgraceful values of the younger generation that turn out to be hundreds of years old. The long history of indignation also pretty well derails any attempts to place the blame for higher grades on a residue of bleeding-heart liberal professors hired in the ’60s. (Unless, of course, there was a similar countercultural phenomenon in the 18 60s.)

Yet on campuses across America today, academe’s usual requirements for supporting data and reasoned analysis have been suspended for some reason where this issue is concerned. It is largely accepted on faith that grade inflation—an upward shift in students’ grade-point averages without a similar rise in achievement—exists, and that it is a bad thing. Meanwhile, the truly substantive issues surrounding grades and motivation have been obscured or ignored.

The fact is that it is hard to substantiate even the simple claim that grades have been rising. Depending on the time period we’re talking about, that claim may well be false. In their book When Hope and Fear Collide (Jossey-Bass, 1998), Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton tell us that more undergraduates in 1993 reported receiving A’s (and fewer reported receiving grades of C or below) compared with their counterparts in 1969 and 1976 surveys. Unfortunately, self-reports are notoriously unreliable, and the numbers become even more dubious when only a self-selected, and possibly unrepresentative, segment bothers to return the questionnaires. (One out of three failed to do so in 1993; no information is offered about the return rates in the earlier surveys.)

To get a more accurate picture of whether grades have changed over the years, one needs to look at official student transcripts. Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, did just that, reviewing transcripts from more than three thousand institutions and reporting his results in 1995.

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