Thoughts on Grades and Grade Inflation

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Then, from a professor’s perspective, grading and grade inflation are not as simple as it seems. Despite the costs of grade inflation, instructors face strong pressure to give out inflated grades. Firstly, there are too types of professors: untenured and tenured professors. It’s obvious that untenured professors would often worry that giving out low grades will harm their student evaluation results. Also, even tenured professors might be concerned that giving out low grades would harm their ratings on ratemyprofessors.com and put their students at a disadvantage relative to their peers. Another possibility is that professors give out inflated grades just to save time on grading, avoid time arguing about re-grading with students, or save time on their research or advising graduate students.

The issue could be only more complicated when we think from the perspective of an institution. Universities definitely face pressure to give their graduates an advantage in the job market. Great grade inflation could give the institutions a bad reputation in the job market, and their students will be in great disadvantages. On the other hand, if the universities are too harsh on grading, letting students graduate with low GPAs, the graduates would still be in great disadvantage. Thus, it is really hard for universities to find the right balance; either way would not lead to good consequence.

Interestingly, some universities have experimented a new strategy: they publish information about the grade distribution for each course on student transcripts so that if employers are aware of the inflated grades, they actually have the leverage to not be impressed with the students who earned those grades, instead of not knowing if the grades are inflated or deflated at all. Also, this strategy motivates students to take harder courses because they know they would impress their potential bosses with the fact that they took some of the toughest courses in college and got good grades. On the other hand, professors would also be motivated; they would offer more and more challenging but interesting courses in response. Thus, in my opinion, this strategy is a definitely win-win. But, of course this will also allow students to identity and take classes that are with lenient grading (par.3).

There are also universities experimenting with another strategy. The administration issued a guideline that, on average, no more than 35 percent of grades given in the courses should be in the A range. But it is not rigid, so professors still can give As more than 35 percent of the class if they think the class deserve that. Even though it is not clear how the policy was enforced, I do believe that comparing to the other strategy, this one is more promising and likely to be successful in dealing with grade inflation, because I, being a student myself, think that in the first strategy, students are more likely to identify with and take lenient grading courses instead of motivating themselves to take more challenging courses.

Another interesting strategy I read is by economist Tim Harford. He has proposed to make grade inflation more like price inflation by uncapping the highest grade. In other words, grade inflation would be less of a problem if the entire scale could shift upward. For example, today’s B will be A+ tomorrow, and today’s A+ will be the day after tomorrow’s A+++, and so on. (par. 2) More interestingly, employers and graduate schools could deflate grades the same way that people deflate prices in order to compare them over time, like a Discounted Cash Flow. Personally, I think this strategy is interesting indeed because it surprisingly involves much math, but I doubt if the employers or graduate schools would really spend that time deflating all the grades.

The main focus of this essay is to present some scholarly opinions and some students’ opinions on the the issue of grade inflation. One key insight I gained from the reading is that on grade inflation, scholars and students can have totally different perspective, because of the different experiences they have had, which explains why not all the students will find the solutions presented by the scholars mentioned above satisfying. However, given that this is a complicated issue, in the future we can definitely apply those solutions in real college environment and test them out. Before that, any conclusion is too early. But I do think the “guideline” strategy seems very promising.