A recent study released by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sheds light on just what the extent of national grade inflation has been. The study, released earlier this month, chronicles trends in grading over the last 40 years, and says that inflation has been particularly high at Ivy League schools.
Drawing on three large surveys of thousands of undergraduates between the 1960s and the late '90s, the new study suggests that grades may come to be disregarded as a measure of academic achievement.
"If everyone gets good grades, grades become meaningless," said Harvard Professor Emeritus Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and co-author of the study. "Students don't get the information they require for knowing where their talents lie."
Rosovsky continued that people who need information on achievement, like employers and graduate schools, will develop alternative ways of evaluating student performance such as more informal old-girl or old-boy networks.
According to one of the surveys cited in the paper, cumulative grade point averages reported by undergraduates as being A- or higher were 26 percent in 1993, up from seven percent in 1969. GPAs of C or below have fallen from 25 to nine percent in the same time period.
The study says the trend has been even steeper at the Ivies. At Dartmouth in 1994, 44 percent of all grades were in the A range.
Inflation also seems to be more severe in the humanities than in natural science departments, where standards are more easily enforced.
The study says the Vietnam War triggered grade inflation beginning in the '60s. Knowing students would be drafted if they were to leave college or fail to get in to graduate schools, many professors boosted grades.
The review offers a wide range of explanation for why grade inflation has since persisted.
One is that students choose schools or professors that give highgrades, and that administrators allow inflation so that their institutions remain competitive in graduate school admissions.
Another explanation is that courses are less demanding, therefore leading to higher grades.
"Once started, grade inflation has a self-sustaining character: it becomes systemic," the study says. But some argue that grade inflation is not necessarily a bad thing.
Noel Perrin, a Dartmouth professor of environmental systems, believes that grade inflation at Dartmouth reflects the school's increasingly competitive student body.
"The College made a decision to compare students to a national group," he said. "If you think of the roughly four million college students in the nation, and if you think of our admissions requirements, students here are going to do much better than average."
The authors of the study, however, dispute the notion that student achievement has increased proportionately to grades. The study says student SAT scores have not risen and that an increasing number of students are enrolled in remedial classes.
"This would suggest that you're getting the same kind of student in," said Matt Hartley, the other co-author of the study and a University of Pennsylvania professor. "That suggests two possibilities -- one is grade inflation, which we say the literature suggests. The other option is that fundamentally different teaching and learning is happening. This is not what we saw in the literature, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
The study also presents several ways to curb grade inflation.
The authors encourage a dialogue within universities, in addition to written evaluations along with letter grades, distributing information to professors on department grading and using a curve, even if it is not strictly enforced.
