THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 8, 2002
The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation
By Alfie Kohn
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, the latest
example being a series of articles in The Boston Globe last
year 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 1860s.)
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
3,000 institutions and reporting his results in 1995. His finding:
"Contrary to the widespread lamentations, grades actually declined
slightly in the last two decades." Moreover, a report released just
this year by the National Center for Education Statistics revealed
that fully 33.5 percent of American undergraduates had a grade-point
average of C or below in 1999-2000, a number that ought to quiet
"all the furor over grade inflation," according to a spokesperson
for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. (A review
of other research suggests a comparable lack of support for claims
of grade inflation at the high-school level.)
[Addendum 2004: A subsequent analysis by Adelman, which reviewed
college transcripts from students who were graduated from high
school in 1972, 1982, and 1992, confirmed that there was no
significant or linear increase in average grades over that period.
The average GPA for those three cohorts was 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74,
respectively. The proportion of A's and B's received by students:
58.5 percent in the '70s, 58.9 percent in the '80s, and 58.0 percent
in the '90s. Even when Adelman looked at "highly selective"
institutions, he again found very little change in average GPA over
the decades.]
However, even where grades are higher now as compared with
then, that does not constitute proof that they are inflated. The
burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades
are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative
explanations. Maybe students are turning in better assignments.
Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and have
become more reasonable. Maybe the concept of assessment itself has
evolved, so that today it is more a means for allowing students to
demonstrate what they know rather than for sorting them or "catching
them out." (The real question, then, is why we spent so many years
trying to make good students look bad.) Maybe students aren't forced
to take as many courses outside their primary areas of interest in
which they didn't fare as well. Maybe struggling students are now
able to withdraw from a course before a poor grade appears on their
transcripts. (Say what you will about that practice, it challenges
the hypothesis that the grades students receive in the courses they
complete are inflated.)
The bottom line: No one has ever demonstrated that students today
get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply
do not have the data to support such a claim.
Consider the most recent, determined effort by a serious source to
prove that grades are inflated: "Evaluation and the Academy: Are We
Doing the Right Thing?" a report released this year by the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its senior author is Henry Rosovsky,
formerly Harvard's dean of the faculty. The first argument offered
in support of the proposition that students couldn't possibly
deserve higher grades is that SAT scores have dropped during the
same period that grades are supposed to have risen. But this is a
patently inapt comparison, if only because the SAT is deeply flawed.
It has never been much good even at predicting grades during the
freshman year in college, to say nothing of more important academic
outcomes. A four-year analysis of almost 78,000 University of
California students, published last year by the UC president's
office, found that the test predicted only 13.3 percent of variation
in freshman grades, a figure roughly consistent with hundreds of
previous studies. (I outlined numerous other problems with the test
in "Two Cheers
for an End to the SAT," The Chronicle, March 9, 2001.)
Even if one believes that the SAT is a valid and valuable exam,
however, the claim that scores are dropping is a poor basis for the
assertion that grades are too high. First, it is difficult to argue
that a standardized test taken in high school and grades for college
course work are measuring the same thing. Second, changes in
aggregate SAT scores mostly reflect the proportion of the eligible
population that has chosen to take the test. The American Academy's
report states that average SAT scores dropped slightly from 1969 to
1993. But over that period, the pool of test takers grew from about
one-third to more than two-fifths of high-school graduates -- an
addition of more than 200,000 students.
Third, a decline in overall SAT scores is hardly the right benchmark
against which to measure the grades earned at Harvard or other elite
institutions. Every bit of evidence I could find -- including a
review of the SAT scores of entering students at Harvard over the
past two decades, at the nation's most selective colleges over three
and even four decades, and at all private colleges since 1985
-- uniformly confirms a virtually linear rise in both verbal and
math scores, even after correcting for the renorming of the test in
the mid-1990s. To cite just one example, the latest edition of
"Trends in College Admissions" reports that the average verbal-SAT
score of students enrolled in all private colleges rose from 543 in
1985 to 558 in 1999. Thus, those who regard SAT results as a basis
for comparison should expect to see higher grades now rather
than assume that they are inflated.
The other two arguments made by the authors of the American
Academy's report rely on a similar sleight of hand. They note that
more college students are now forced to take remedial courses, but
offer no reason to think that this is especially true of the
relevant student population -- namely, those at the most selective
colleges who are now receiving A's instead of B's. [Addendum:
Adelman's newer data challenge the premise that there has been
any increase. In fact, "the proportion of all students who took
at least one remedial course [in college] dropped from 51 percent in
the [high school] class of 1982 to 42 percent in the class of
1992."]
Finally, they report that more states are adding high-school
graduation tests and even standardized exams for admission to public
universities. Yet that trend can be explained by political factors
and offers no evidence of an objective decline in students'
proficiency. For instance, scores on the National Assessment of
Educational Progress, known as "the nation's report card" on
elementary and secondary schooling, have shown very little change
over the past couple of decades, and most of the change that has
occurred has been for the better. As David Berliner and Bruce Biddle
put it in their tellingly titled book The Manufactured Crisis
(Addison-Wesley, 1995), the data demonstrate that "today's students
are at least as well informed as students in previous generations."
The latest round of public-school bashing -- and concomitant
reliance on high-stakes testing -- began with the Reagan
administration's "Nation at Risk" report, featuring claims now
widely viewed by researchers as exaggerated and misleading.
*
Beyond the absence of good evidence, the debate over grade inflation
brings up knotty epistemological problems. To say that grades are
not merely rising but inflated -- and that they are consequently
"less accurate" now, as the American Academy's report puts it -- is
to postulate the existence of an objectively correct evaluation of
what a student (or an essay) deserves, the true grade that ought to
be uncovered and honestly reported. It would be an understatement to
say that this reflects a simplistic and outdated view of knowledge
and of learning.
In fact, what is most remarkable is how rarely learning even figures
into the discussion. The dominant disciplinary sensibility in
commentaries on this topic is not that of education -- an
exploration of pedagogy or assessment -- but rather of economics.
That is clear from the very term "grade inflation," which is, of
course, just a metaphor. Our understanding is necessarily limited if
we confine ourselves to the vocabulary of inputs and outputs,
incentives, resource distribution, and compensation.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, we assumed the very worst
-- not only that students are getting better grades than did their
counterparts of an earlier generation, but that the grades are too
high. What does that mean, and why does it upset some people so?
To understand grade inflation in its proper context, we must
acknowledge a truth that is rarely named: The crusade against it is
led by conservative individuals and organizations who regard it as
analogous -- or even related -- to such favorite whipping boys as
multicultural education, the alleged radicalism of academe,
"political correctness" (a label that permits the denigration of
anything one doesn't like without having to offer a reasoned
objection), and too much concern about students' self-esteem.
Mainstream media outlets and college administrators have allowed
themselves to be put on the defensive by accusations about grade
inflation, as can be witnessed when deans at Harvard plead nolo
contendere and dutifully tighten their grading policies.
What are the critics assuming about the nature of students'
motivation to learn, about the purpose of evaluation and of
education itself? (It is surely revealing when someone reserves time
and energy to complain bitterly about how many students are getting
A's -- as opposed to expressing concern about, say, how many
students have been trained to think that the point of going to
school is to get A's.)
"In a healthy university, it would not be necessary to say what is
wrong with grade inflation," Harvey Mansfield asserted in an opinion
article last year (The Chronicle, April 6, 2001). That, to
put it gently, is a novel view of health. It seems reasonable to
expect those making an argument to be prepared to defend it, and
also valuable to bring their hidden premises to light. Here are the
assumptions that seem to underlie the grave warnings about grade
inflation:
The professor's job is to sort students for employers or graduate
schools. Some are disturbed by grade inflation -- or, more
accurately, grade compression -- because it then becomes harder to
spread out students on a continuum, ranking them against one another
for the benefit of postcollege constituencies. One professor asks,
by way of analogy, "Why would anyone subscribe to Consumers
Digest if every blender were rated a 'best buy'?"
But how appropriate is such a marketplace analogy? Is the
professor's job to rate students like blenders for the convenience
of corporations, or to offer feedback that will help students learn
more skillfully and enthusiastically? (Notice, moreover, that even
consumer magazines don't grade on a curve. They report the happy
news if it turns out that every blender meets a reasonable set of
performance criteria.)
Furthermore, the student-as-appliance approach assumes that grades
provide useful information to those postcollege constituencies. Yet
growing evidence -- most recently in the fields of medicine and law,
as cited in publications like The Journal of the American Medical
Association and the American Educational Research Journal
-- suggests that grades and test scores do not in fact predict
career success, or much of anything beyond subsequent grades and
test scores.
Students should be set against one another in a race for
artificially scarce rewards. "The essence of grading is
exclusiveness," Mansfield said in one interview. Students "should
have to compete with each other," he said in another.
In other words, even when no graduate-school admissions committee
pushes for students to be sorted, they ought to be sorted anyway,
with grades reflecting relative standing rather than absolute
accomplishment. In effect, this means that the game should be rigged
so that no matter how well students do, only a few can get A's. The
question guiding evaluation in such a classroom is not "How well are
they learning?" but "Who's beating whom?" The ultimate purpose of
good colleges, this view holds, is not to maximize success, but to
ensure that there will always be losers.
A bell curve may sometimes -- but only sometimes -- describe the
range of knowledge in a roomful of students at the beginning of a
course. When it's over, though, any responsible educator hopes that
the results would skew drastically to the right, meaning that most
students learned what they hadn't known before. Thus, in their
important study, Making Sense of College Grades (Jossey-Bass,
1986), Ohmer Milton, Howard Pollio, and James Eison write, "It is
not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a 'normal'
distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure -- failure to teach
well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all
on the intellectual lives of students." Making sure that students
are continually re-sorted, with excellence turned into an
artificially scarce commodity, is almost perverse.
What does relative success signal about student performance in any
case? The number of peers that a student has bested tells us little
about how much she knows and is able to do. Moreover, such grading
policies may create a competitive climate that is counterproductive
for winners and losers alike, to the extent that it discourages a
free exchange of ideas and a sense of community that's conducive to
exploration.
Harder is better (or higher grades mean lower standards).
Compounding the tendency to confuse excellence with victory is a
tendency to confuse quality with difficulty -- as evidenced in the
accountability fad that has elementary and secondary education in
its grip just now, with relentless talk of "rigor" and "raising the
bar." The same confusion shows up in higher education when
professors pride themselves not on the intellectual depth and value
of their classes but merely on how much reading they assign, how
hard their tests are, how rarely they award good grades, and so on.
"You're going to have to work in here!" they announce, with
more than a hint of machismo and self-congratulation.
Some people might defend that posture on the grounds that students
will perform better if A's are harder to come by. In fact, the
evidence on this question is decidedly mixed. Stringent grading
sometimes has been shown to boost short-term retention as measured
by multiple-choice exams -- never to improve understanding or
promote interest in learning. The most recent analysis, released in
2000 by Julian R. Betts and Jeff Grogger, professors of economics at
the University of California at San Diego and at Los Angeles,
respectively, found that tougher grading was initially correlated
with higher test scores. But the long-term effects were negligible
-- with the exception of minority students, for whom the effects
were negative.
It appears that something more than an empirical hypothesis is
behind the "harder is better" credo, particularly when it is set up
as a painfully false dichotomy: Those easy-grading professors are
too lazy to care, or too worried about how students will evaluate
them, or overly concerned about their students' self-esteem, whereas
we are the last defenders of what used to matter in the good
old days. High standards! Intellectual honesty! No free lunch!
The American Academy's report laments an absence of "candor" about
this issue. Let us be candid, then. Those who grumble about
undeserved grades sometimes exude a cranky impatience with -- or
even contempt for -- the late adolescents and young adults who sit
in their classrooms. Many people teaching in higher education, after
all, see themselves primarily as researchers and regard teaching as
an occupational hazard, something they're not very good at, were
never trained for, and would rather avoid. It would be interesting
to examine the correlation between one's view of teaching (or of
students) and the intensity of one's feelings about grade inflation.
Someone also might want to examine the personality profiles of those
who become infuriated over the possibility that someone, somewhere,
got an A without having earned it.
Grades motivate. With the exception of orthodox behaviorists,
psychologists have come to realize that people can exhibit
qualitatively different kinds of motivation: intrinsic, in which the
task itself is seen as valuable, and extrinsic, in which the task is
just a means to the end of gaining a reward or escaping a
punishment. The two are not only distinct but often inversely
related. Scores of studies have demonstrated, for example, that the
more people are rewarded, the more they come to lose interest in
whatever had to be done in order to get the reward. (That conclusion
is essentially reaffirmed by the latest major meta-analysis on the
topic: a review of 128 studies, published in 1999 by Edward L. Deci,
Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan.)
Those unfamiliar with that basic distinction, let alone the
supporting research, may be forgiven for pondering how to "motivate"
students, then concluding that grades are often a good way of doing
so, and consequently worrying about the impact of inflated grades.
But the reality is that it doesn't matter how motivated students
are; what matters is how students are motivated. A focus on
grades creates, or at least perpetuates, an extrinsic orientation
that is likely to undermine the love of learning we are presumably
seeking to promote.
Three robust findings emerge from the empirical literature on the
subject: Students who are given grades, or for whom grades are made
particularly salient, tend to display less interest in what they are
doing, fare worse on meaningful measures of learning, and avoid more
challenging tasks when given the opportunity -- as compared with
those in a nongraded comparison group. College instructors cannot
help noticing, and presumably being disturbed by, such consequences,
but they may lapse into blaming students ("grade grubbers") rather
than understanding the systemic sources of the problem. A focus on
whether too many students are getting A's suggests a tacit
endorsement of grades that predictably produces just such a mind-set
in students.
These fundamental questions are almost completely absent from
discussions of grade inflation. The American Academy's report takes
exactly one sentence -- with no citations -- to dismiss the argument
that "lowering the anxiety over grades leads to better learning,"
ignoring the fact that much more is involved than anxiety. It is a
matter of why a student learns, not only how much stress he feels.
Nor is the point just that low grades hurt some students' feelings,
but that grades, per se, hurt all students' engagement with
learning. The meaningful contrast is not between an A and a B or C,
but between an extrinsic and an intrinsic focus.
Precisely because that is true, a reconsideration of grade inflation
leads us to explore alternatives to our (often unreflective) use of
grades. Narrative comments and other ways by which faculty members
can communicate their evaluations can be far more informative than
letter or number grades, and much less destructive. Indeed, some
colleges -- for example, Hampshire, Evergreen State, Alverno, and
New College of Florida -- have eliminated grades entirely, as a
critical step toward raising intellectual standards. Even the
American Academy's report acknowledges that "relatively
undifferentiated course grading has been a traditional practice in
many graduate schools for a very long time." Has that policy
produced lower quality teaching and learning? Quite the contrary:
Many people say they didn't begin to explore ideas deeply and
passionately until graduate school began and the importance of
grades diminished significantly.
If the continued use of grades rests on nothing more than tradition
("We've always done it that way"), a faulty understanding of
motivation, or excessive deference to graduate-school admissions
committees, then it may be time to balance those factors against the
demonstrated harms of getting students to chase A's. Ohmer Milton
and his colleagues discovered -- and others have confirmed -- that a
"grade orientation" and a "learning orientation" on the part of
students tend to be inversely related. That raises the disturbing
possibility that some colleges are institutions of higher learning
in name only, because the paramount question for students is not
"What does this mean?" but "Do we have to know this?"
A grade-oriented student body is an invitation for the
administration and faculty to ask hard questions: What unexamined
assumptions keep traditional grading in place? What forms of
assessment might be less destructive? How can professors minimize
the salience of grades in their classrooms, so long as grades must
still be given? And: If the artificial inducement of grades
disappeared, what sort of teaching strategies might elicit authentic
interest in a course?
To engage in this sort of inquiry, to observe real classrooms, and
to review the relevant research is to arrive at one overriding
conclusion: The real threat to excellence isn't grade inflation at
all; it's grades.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Volume 49, Issue 11, Page B7
Click here for a list of sources
used in this article.
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