Grade Inflation and Its Potential Solutions

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all enrolled in an imagined Average U, and they give the grades that they would get at Average U. (Perrin A68)

From my point of view, if all institutions apply this view of thinking, grade inflation is inevitable. At elite institutions, professors assume that their students are better than students at other universities, such as Average U. Then, they would all assign higher grades to their students because compared with the average, those students are better. However, in this perspective, should community colleges and state schools not assign any A’s to their students at all because they might not be better than students at Average U.?

Mansfield shares my idea as the following:

At Harvard, we have lost the notion of an average student. By that I mean a Harvard average, not a comparison with the high-school average that enabled our students to be admitted here. When bright students take a step up and find themselves with other bright students, they should face a new, higher standard of excellence…. (Mansfield B24)

Then, Mansfield uses a comparison to perfectly show his point:

Cars are better-made now than they used to be. So when buying a car, would you be satisfied with one that was as good as they used to be? (Mansfield B24)

However, another explanation for grade inflation comes from science itself. According to this idea, science and observing natural phenomena should be considered together with an assessment of the scientist and his or her inherent biases. (Johnson 7) In other words, there is no objective view of reality or one universal reality; truth can have multiple versions and representations.

Because of the loss of objectivity and of the fact that assigning grade itself is very subjective, when faculty members believe in this idea then they are more likely to assign higher grades: they can’t be one hundred percent sure that their students are not correct or they as graders are objective enough. In such a mentality, they are more likely to assign higher grades to students, because if they start the divergent representations of objectivity and reality, what happens next is that they will start thinking their students’ work as one representation of the reality than falsify, and then students will certainly be graded leniently. Diana Bilimoria concludes this point as follows:

Teachers’ increasing awareness of the biases inherent in modern science is likely to affect their evaluations of students’ acquisition of subject matter. Because disciplinary content domains are increasingly open to diverse interpretations and the inclusion of alternative representations, the scope of what is legitimate and appropriate knowledge in the academic enterprise is widened. The global questioning of tenets once held to be singularly true allows a larger number of students to display with greater diversity a legitimate and appropriate grasp of a widened content. Consequently, grade distributions are higher than they were before the advent of postmodern challenges…. (Bilimoria 443)

As postmodern perspectives gain greater legitimacy, teachers’ openness to different conclusions and more diverse methods at arriving at them favor higher grade distributions because evaluation criteria are broadened and there are many, rather than a few, acceptable discourses in which students can engage. Students are empowered to challenge not just the insights but also the methods presented by dominant orthodoxies. Failure to display reason, analysis, objective consideration of evidence, and distance is much less used as an explanation for poor grades, as these keystones of modern science are themselves shown to be biased in favor of certain, but not other, views, and are hence no more valid than any other method of arriving at conclusions. (Bilimoria 443)

The last factor that leads to grade inflation is more practical and palpable. Suppose we start from a university which includes only two kinds of professors: lenient-grading professors and harsh-grading professors. As we know, students would definitely want to take courses in which they can get higher GPA. Thanks to the Internet, nowadays it is very easy for students to get the information to know the grades they can potentially get from a course with a professor. For example, there is a website called Rate My Professor (ratemyprofessors.com), where students post reviews of nearly any professor in colleges. More importantly, students can know how harsh one professor is and the average grades the whole class ended up receiving. With such handy information, students can easily compare different professors teaching the same course and enroll in classes that they feel they can get better grades.

Course evaluations to the instructors can also be an important factor that leads to grade inflation. Suppose students get averagely high grades at one course, it is reasonable to assume that these students will provide more favorable course evaluations to this professor than to the harsh-grading professor.

What I want to point out is that both websites like Rate My Professor and course evaluations are structures that reinforce themselves. The harsh-grading professors will get lower ratings on websites and less favorable course evaluations. Because the reviews are accessible to everyone, there will be less students who will enroll in their classes, which will directly affect professors’ salaries, promotions and tenures. However, lenient-grading professors will receive higher ratings and favorable reviews from students, which will attract more students to enroll to their classes, which will allow them to have more salary increases and promotions. According to Valen Johnson, grade inflation is “exacerbated” when students only choose courses with the lenient-grading professors, because there are often more students who would like to take classes with good grades being assigned. (Johnson 9)

Conclusion

Traditionalists view grade inflation in essence as a corruption to the academic standards. Also, practically grade inflation can leave a hard time for graduate schools and employers distinguishing the best students. On the other hand, there are also scholars arguing that grade inflation is just an indication of students’ growing academic competency, which can as be proved by the increasing average SAT scores. Another factor that can lead to grade inflation are the different comparison groups, which can lead to different standards while assigning grades and happens most at elite institutions. The non-objectivity of science, and the relationship between course evaluations and promotions and tenure can also lead to grade inflation.