The recent protests that have shaken college campuses are an indicator that there is much that is troubling about higher education today:
My senior year (way back when), Margaret Mead, the world’s most famous anthropologist, was a guest lecturer at my university. At the end of the semester, she announced that everyone could grade themselves. It was no surprise that virtually every one of us awarded ourselves an A grade. That might have been a signal of what was to come.
You might want to sit down before you consider the following data:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the median GPA for college students is 3.28. That’s a B+. The Best Colleges website says that the average GPA ten years ago was 2.9.
Independent researcher Stuart Rojstaczer studies grade inflation from news, campus publications and internal university documents. He finds that grade inflation has been a nearly universal trend across institutions. However, it is more extreme in private colleges than in public institutions. And its most egregious manifestation occurs at the elite level—the Ivy League universities. Nearly 80 percent of the grades awarded by Yale professors during the last academic year were A’s or A minuses (New York Times). The mean GPA was 3.7 out of 4.0. The other seven Ivy League schools were just as dishonest. A large number of students who received B grades complained to their professors.
Doling out A grades for just showing up or having a pulse cheapens degrees for the thousands of alumni who preceded the current generation of students. Fifty years ago, around 8 percent of Yale students graduated with honors. Today that figure approaches 80 percent. This is ridiculous.
Grade inflation is hardly exclusive to the Ivies.
Can it be that today’s students are that much smarter than their predecessors? I don’t think so.
The problem with grade inflation is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the escalation without doing considerable harm to those students who then must operate under an honest grading system. They will be at a disadvantage in pursuing graduate and professional school admissions and for jobs when competing against students (and alumni) from schools where grade inflation continues. It also demeans and disrespects the degrees of graduates who attended these schools when grades were awarded on merit.
Grade inflation is higher education’s equivalent of participation trophies demanded by soccer moms and dads so that, unlike real life, every kid must feel s/he is a winner.
I don’t know if employers understand what has happened as a result of grade inflation. If they do, I hope they discount the weight they might otherwise accord a candidate’s grades.
All in all, grade inflation has opened a Pandora’s Box that will be difficult to close and seal.
Dick Hermann
May 13, 2024
- Anti-Semitism is widespread on campuses across the country (per 63 percent of students).
- The mass movement away from standardized testing with respect to college admissions, which made it close to impossible to judge applicants by comparing their high school grades. After all, there is zero equivalency between an A grade from the Bronx High School of Science and a similar grade earned at many other schools. Fortunately here, a number of schools have revived the SAT and/or ACT as core components of their admissions process.
- Scandalous amounts of money spent on college administrators. Example: Cornell and Vanderbilt have 1 administrator for every 2 students. This, of course, contributes to runaway tuition increases (3 times the inflation rate for the past 35 years).
- Grade inflation—the subject of the rest of this Rant.
My senior year (way back when), Margaret Mead, the world’s most famous anthropologist, was a guest lecturer at my university. At the end of the semester, she announced that everyone could grade themselves. It was no surprise that virtually every one of us awarded ourselves an A grade. That might have been a signal of what was to come.
You might want to sit down before you consider the following data:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the median GPA for college students is 3.28. That’s a B+. The Best Colleges website says that the average GPA ten years ago was 2.9.
Independent researcher Stuart Rojstaczer studies grade inflation from news, campus publications and internal university documents. He finds that grade inflation has been a nearly universal trend across institutions. However, it is more extreme in private colleges than in public institutions. And its most egregious manifestation occurs at the elite level—the Ivy League universities. Nearly 80 percent of the grades awarded by Yale professors during the last academic year were A’s or A minuses (New York Times). The mean GPA was 3.7 out of 4.0. The other seven Ivy League schools were just as dishonest. A large number of students who received B grades complained to their professors.
Doling out A grades for just showing up or having a pulse cheapens degrees for the thousands of alumni who preceded the current generation of students. Fifty years ago, around 8 percent of Yale students graduated with honors. Today that figure approaches 80 percent. This is ridiculous.
Grade inflation is hardly exclusive to the Ivies.
Can it be that today’s students are that much smarter than their predecessors? I don’t think so.
The problem with grade inflation is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the escalation without doing considerable harm to those students who then must operate under an honest grading system. They will be at a disadvantage in pursuing graduate and professional school admissions and for jobs when competing against students (and alumni) from schools where grade inflation continues. It also demeans and disrespects the degrees of graduates who attended these schools when grades were awarded on merit.
Grade inflation is higher education’s equivalent of participation trophies demanded by soccer moms and dads so that, unlike real life, every kid must feel s/he is a winner.
I don’t know if employers understand what has happened as a result of grade inflation. If they do, I hope they discount the weight they might otherwise accord a candidate’s grades.
All in all, grade inflation has opened a Pandora’s Box that will be difficult to close and seal.
Dick Hermann
May 13, 2024
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