While cleaning out rooms, saying goodbye to friends or recovering from adventures at Myrtle Beach, Duke students sign onto ACES to check their grades at each semester's close. Every year, it's common enough to overhear some complaints: "I can't believe I got a B. That's not supposed to happen."
But since when did B stand for bad?
Over the past three or four decades, universities across the country have seen a steady rise in the average grade given to their students. For instance, The Boston Globe published a series of articles last year detailing grade inflation at Harvard University, where the number of students graduating with honors has increased from 49.9 percent in 1961 to 90.8 percent in 2001, and 51 percent of the grades given out are A's or A minuses.
Harvard may be an extreme case, but other universities are still seeing similar increases, albeit on a smaller scale. John Bravman, vice provost for undergraduate education and dean of the freshman-sophomore college at Stanford University, estimates that the average grade at Stanford has risen by half a point over the past 30 years.
"Policy says that a C is an average grade, and of course that's a joke," he says. "And most students upon receiving a C go into serious trauma."
The phenomenon is no less apparent at Duke. In the last decade, the mean grade point average has risen by 0.3 points, from a B to between a B+ and an A-, says Valen Johnson, a statistics professor at Duke and a critic of grade inflation. Meanwhile, 35 percent of the Class of 2002 graduated with honors, reports Harry Nelson, assistant University registrar, compared to 28 percent the year before.
But what causes this trend toward grade inflation? Ultimately, the answer lies with the grader, because professors assign grades in their own manners.
"Every faculty member is totally autonomous in the grading scale," says Victor Strandberg, an English professor at Duke. "Nobody--not the president, not the Board of Trustees, nobody--can interfere."
But at the same time, Strandberg says, the faculty influence each other. "There is a sense of peer pressure," he says. "We tend towards the norm. Over these 20 years, the norm has gradually floated upward. It does represent rising grades, but it may be that our grades were not so reasonable 20 years ago."
Across the nation, the same type of "peer pressure" occurs among elite universities whose students compete for spaces at graduate schools or jobs with prominent employers, so that increases in the average GPA at one school can spark similar rises at other schools seeking to ensure the success of their students.
"It's very difficult for one institution to buck a nation-wide trend at elite universities," says Stuart Rojstaczer, a professor of hydrology at Duke and an outspoken critic of problems in academia, most notably in his book Gone for Good: Tales of University Life After the Golden Age. "There is a de facto national standard that says elite universities have grade point averages of 3.3 to 3.8. Duke is probably already at the lower end of the scale. If Duke knocked down its grade point average, it would create a system that was unfair to the students."
Professors are also influenced by students and parents, because no one wants to play the cold-hearted professor who ruins a student's dreams with an F--or even a C.
"Giving grades is the single toughest part of the job," Strandberg says. "Everything else is a pleasure. We have to do it, so we do the best we can. We each work it out according to our academic conscience." He says he tries to limit the number of A's that he gives out and explains his grading policy to his class at the beginning of each semester.
"At Duke, teachers are afraid of failing students," says Joshua Jean-Baptiste, president of Duke Student Government--although he adds that bad grades haven't quite disappeared. "I think you can still get an F, if you don't show up to class, if you don't do the work."
Another frequently suggested cause for grade inflation is the increased use of student evaluations, which some professors say puts more pressure on them to mete out good grades. In his new book, titled College Grading: A National Crisis in Undergraduate Education, Johnson says he has devoted an entire chapter to the effects of student evaluations on grade inflation. "How students evaluate their instructors is influenced by the grades they receive," the statistics professor says.
Having students shop around for classes may also put pressure on teachers to "sell" their classes by offering high grades. "Students can be shown to choose courses that are more leniently graded," Johnson says. "This puts pressure on the faculty to grade more leniently. Otherwise, their enrollment might suffer, and that class might not be offered."
But William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and vice provost for undergraduate education, says he does not think evaluations have anything to do with grade inflation. "There are two issues," he says. "One is challenging the students to do more creative work and stretching the students. The other is the decision as to whether or not faculty are going to be more disciplined in how they give out grades.
"It's a cultural issue of what professors choose to emphasize in terms of their own standards, and it's also an issue of working across disciplines. You're likely to find more C's in science and math courses, and fewer C's in the humanities. Smaller classes also tend to have higher grades."
Dartmouth College, however, has developed a similar policy to curb grade inflation, by reporting a student's grade in a class next to the average grade in that class.
But Chafe says that while the Achievement Index addressed the problem mathematically, it did not address it holistically. "It provides one level of resolve, but probably doesn't get to the heart of the issue," he says.
Johnson says the purpose of the Achievement Index was to correct for differences among different departments' grading standards. "It basically calculated what proportion of grades each instructor was giving after accounting for the quality of the students in each class and recalculated the grades according to how strictly [the instructors] graded," he says.
But Johnson says the program was not adopted for two reasons. "It was difficult for people to understand [and]... many instructors from the easier grading departments felt that their grades would be devalued." He cited faculty from the art and art history and Romance languages departments as some of the proposal's strongest opponents.
Generally, the reputation seems to be that the humanities departments grade more easily than the social sciences, which grade more easily than the math and science departments. Johnson thinks that's because grading in the humanities is more difficult because it's more subjective compared to the science and math departments, and even the social sciences. "I think there's also a reluctance in [the humanities] departments to judge students' work," he says.
Some students agree. "I guarantee the mechanical engineering mean is lower than the English department's mean," says Jean-Baptiste. That variation in department, to Jean-Baptiste, indicates grade inflation. "Unless all the smart students gravitate to one department," he adds, "but I don't think that's the case."
Still, says Jean-Baptiste, there's no practical solution to that variation. "On a relative basis, true, some courses are easier than others," he says. "But it's not realistic to make all courses similar."
Strandberg says he understands that although some administrators may want to impose grading requirements, having rules would not help. "There was a time 40 years ago when having mandates would have been more effective," he says. "But after 30 years of making up my own mind about grades, it would be very difficult to go back.... I don't know how my colleagues grade, and I don't inquire. I don't think we're qualified to judge each other."
At Stanford, Bravman says there are no policies in place to curb grade inflation, in part because of the variation in grades across departments. "How those get dealt with is a good question because faculty have autonomy in how they manage their grades," Bravman says. "They're not interested in mandating, and I have no interest in that."
Still, the Duke administration is planning to take a closer look at grade inflation. "It's been discussed within administrative units," Chafe says. "It will probably be discussed by the Arts and Sciences Council this year."
And Provost Peter Lange is examining grading practices this summer, including how to measure grade inflation, although he wrote in an e-mail that he would not have a response to what factors contributed to grade inflation at Duke until he completed his analysis and reviewed its results.
But the question of how the University can curb grade inflation rests fundamentally on the answer to the question of whether the University should curb it--whether, in the long run, grade inflation is really a problem.
Rojstaczer's answer is yes; grade inflation is essentially unfair. "In an ideal setting, you want people to work hard, enjoy working hard, and be rewarded for doing good work," he says. "With grade inflation, you have people who aren't working hard and who are getting the same reward. It's not fair to people putting in extra effort."
In addition, the argument goes, grade inflation breaks down the basic purpose of grades, rendering them meaningless for evaluating students' understanding of the material as well as removing the distinctions between the competent and the stellar students.
"Grading has some advantages," Bravman says. "It's meant to be a feedback to the students first and foremost. So if everyone gets an A, students don't know if they're doing better because they worked harder.... I think we lose the opportunity to differentiate students for the benefit of the students and for the benefit of graduate schools and employers," he says. "I'm not really worried about a student with a B average at Stanford competing with a student with an A average from a third-tier school."
But others say grade inflation is not necessarily bad--after all, getting an A never hurt anyone. That's a point of view that Rojstaczer understands, even if he ultimately disputes it.
"Grade inflation [can seem like] the best of both worlds," he says. "Students are happy because they're getting good grades. Faculty are happy because they don't have to do as much work. And parents are happy because their kids are getting into good graduate schools."
Jean-Baptiste says it's all about relativity. "The question is, 'How do other institutions of our caliber evaluate students?'" the DSG president says. "Relative to the Ivy League, I don't think [grade inflation] is that bad at Duke."
Another question that must be answered to understand grading trends is whether students are becoming more qualified. That's one cause Chafe sees for the increases in GPA.
"The phrase grade inflation has a pejorative connotation," Chafe says. "It's not bad for faculty members who have recognized that students have mastered the material.... To some extent, it's a reflection of improved perfection in the student body and reluctance on the part of the faculty to create a bell curve."
Other professors point to rising SAT scores as another indicator of smarter students--although Rojstaczer dismisses such arguments. "I think these are silly excuses for the problem and false correlations that are being used to excuse grade inflation," he says.
And Johnson agrees that students are not getting smarter--just getting louder. "The students are more demanding," he says. "They will also persistently harangue instructors who give them a low grade."
Even if the increases in the average grade cannot be explained by the "smarter students" hypothesis alone, though, not everyone is sure that grade inflation is such a bad thing.
As long as an A in a humanities class represents the same level of performance as an A in a science class, says Chafe, whether that A means what it did 30 years ago is not as important. "The problem is not simply that students are getting better grades for doing the same work," he says. "It's a problem to the degree that students may expect that they will receive better grades in certain classes."
When it comes to stopping or reversing inflation, though, Bravman says he does not foresee anything being done unless "a large fraction of graduate schools and employers make a lot of noise for a sustained period of time."
But Rojstaczer doesn't see that as very likely. "Most faculty are either modestly concerned or not concerned at all," he says. "Locally, the faculty value the incentive. They value having students that are happier, they value the lighter work load, and they value that Duke does well when it comes to getting into grad school."
What does that mean?
"Grade inflation is like rock 'n' roll. It's here to stay."
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