No, they shouldn’t. GPA is an extremely important metric for grad school applications; why should any elite school want to penalize their students? Podunk U has 5 outstanding students, 30 good students, and 25 average students. Elite U has 50 outstanding students and 10 average students. Why should a student at Elite U be penalized for being in the bottom half of its outstanding students by receiving a C (or even a B) when his work is almost certainly superior to most students at Podunk U?

As for math instruction declining over the years, that’s almost certainly not true. All the college admissions tests reflect increasing math scores over the years, and verbal scores are consistently behind. English Comp AP classes have a far lower reputation than AP Calculus and AP Stats (although both of these courses are criticized for other reasons).

While everyone focuses on college grade inflation, I see a real problem with grade deflation in the top level high schools. These schools want good test scores and AP tests, have great teachers that they can pay for, and the best way to attract parents is to tout the great scores AND the tough grading.

As a result, the elite rank of juniors and seniors are working at courses that are often harder than they’ll ever see in college, and getting Bs for work of a difficulty and quality that 80-90% of high school students will never approach. While colleges give some weight to harder courses, they usually limit the weight. They also use AP grades but not AP scores in admissions. As a result, students who receive a B+ in an AP course and a 5 on the test (a very common situation) could very conceivably lose out to students who get an A in an AP course and a 1 on the test (or who didn’t bother to take it at all).

The best way to address this for highschool students would be to use SAT Subject and AP test scores as a proxy for grades—or at least as a balancing mechanism, adding and subtracting from the GPA based on scores. And the only reasonable way to address college grade inflation would likewise include some standardized solution.

Barring that, there’s no real solution. Given that the best schools are turning out high quality students, I’m not sure there’s a real need for a college solution.

I have also been teaching at Miami Dade Community College in Miami for the past 7 years, and I can say that many of the students in the remedial writing classes (college prep) pass not because they have been successful, but because passing them will guarantee they will be back to pay for another class the following semester.

I have no evidence of grade inflation. All I can do as a teacher is challenge my students and use grades as an accurate measure of their performance. If you’d like to read my philosophy of grading, please visit SouthFloridaEdu.Blogspot.com.

So perhaps some of the observed changes in grade distribution can be explained by the fact that students these days are much more concerned (conniving?) about their grades and have quite a few more tools they can use to make sure that they get good grades. And none of this requires any major changes in grading policies. (Even if these are real factors, I can’t imagine they could come close to explaining historical differences in the grades students have received, I just want to point out that the typical inference from “higher average grades” to “oh no the professors have ruined everything” is far too hasty).

Before anyone gets offended about their discipline, or their motivations for studying it, being called into question, remember that no one’s impugning either. The issue at hand is not whether all people (students or faculty) in a discipline are “slackers,” but whether said discipline tends to attract more lazy or unprepared students because of a perception that it’s easy.

Although I agree, the perception—or the reality—that many of one’s students are below average can be frustrating.

And of course, don’t forget that there are different kinds of “slackers”: for example, the ones who may be drawn to the humanities because they think all they have to do is bullshit on papers, and the ones drawn to test-heavy disciplines, because they think all they have to do is memorize. Either way, they might get out without actually being required to produce independent thought.

By the by, while a number of people have discussed the relative rise in grades of humanities vs. sciences, I don’t remember seeing any speculation about reasons that centers on grading methods and class sizes. Humanities classes tend to be smaller, with an emphasis on discussion, which fosters a more personal bond between professor and student. As a large proportion of grading centers on fairly subjective measures (papers), it can be hard to be, well, a hard-ass. Introductory science classes, in contrast, tend to be large, and graded by tests (and often by TAs or scantrons). Combine this with the general societal expectation (in the US, at least) that most people are supposed to do poorly in science, and a bad grade becomes much less personal.

Of course, as I look at what I just wrote, I see that I’m not making an argument for change over time—merely one for the sciences producing lower grades on average. But if you combine this with a lot of what we’ve seen change over the past 3 decades—not only the rise in student-as-consumer expectations, and the sense that everyone’s ideas and abilities need to be validated, but also changes in the role of prof/teacher as authority figure—I think you could see reasons for why grade inflation would hit particularly hard in the humanistic disciplines.

In the ‘70s I was a B/B+ student. Now I’m a straight-A student (A+ isn’t given) in the undergraduate courses. I get much the same score on exams as I did as an undergraduate, maybe a little higher. I certainly get much better grades on writing assignments, but I’m also a much better writer after a couple of decades of practice. Based on my own evaluation of my work, in 1980 at HRBS I would have been a B+/A- student.

So, is Highly Regarded Big State that much better than my current school? Or is it grade inflation? Perhaps a little of both.

I have to take issue with that one, I think. That certainly wasn’t my experience. As someone who always did much better in humanities than natural sciences, I found high school to be incredibly frustrating. For those who had an aptitude in math or science, there was a great deal of room for advancement and a challenging curriculum. If your aptitude lay in the humanities, there was really nowhere for you to go. Even at the AP level, I found the humanities courses to be completely unchallenging. The school just didn’t seem interested in developing that program, though they were excellent at turning out math and science whizzes.
There’s no way to extrapolate from one high school’s curricula, of course, but I found my experience borne out at college. I worked in the school’s writing center as an undergraduate and was absolutely amazed but what I saw. Students would come in for help for help with papers (particularly humanities papers) with no idea about even the most basic principles. Keep in mind these were people in bioengineering, materials science and pre-med programs (in which our university consistently ranks in the top ten, often top five). But they had no idea where to start when assigned a paper about a novel. It seemed odd that they had never been taught how to argue a point in writing or how to structure a paper. Similarly, basic familiarity with literary criticism, the history of literature, etc. was completely lacking, despite an amazing aptitude in the natural sciences. In most cases, I don’t believe it was any fault on their part; they were quite frustrated by the experience but had simply not been exposed to this stuff before. And it wasn’t just people in math and the hard sciences: humanities, econ and psych majors had the same difficulties. Admittedly, the experience one would have working in a university writing center is biased towards any student with this problem, but it also seemed to be the case in all of the lower-level humanities courses I took.

The argument is that even if the ideal is grading against an absolute standard, you can approximate this by grading relative to a large enough sample.

I definitely didn’t get the sense that they were any easier now than they were 20 years ago—although it was the case that the subject matter looked to have changed a little. The later papers had rather less strictly historical material and rather more broad ‘conceptual’ questions (not necessarily a bad thing, either).

The fact that exam papers are broadly comparable doesn’t necessarily mean that grade inflation isn’t going on, as the mark required to achieve an A on the exam may be lower, but the papers themselves certainly didn’t seem to be dumbed down.

the classes I have taken where i feel the grades were easiest were two philsophy classes (200 level which is the lowest because there is only one 100 level) but on the other hand alot of people in those classes seemed very confused so they wern’t all that skewed.

In my intro physics classes they intentionaly set the mean about a half grade to a grade higher because they were the honors sequence and did not want to deter people from taking the honors classes for the reasons of grades (there was a complicated process which involved control questions which were on both the honors and normal exams and such)

the math classes here do not have much inflation

the social sciences and the business people (particualry the hotel school) are thought of as much easier by the hard science people and engineers.

In chiense there wasn’t really inflation in terms of shifting the middle forward but they did pull the bottom up to the middle (i think this was to let you give up gracefully, they take it rather seriously, not designed for the casually interested student at all)(I also think this was inpart to make the course fairer for people who did not gorw up around chinese or already spoke one dialect (i took mandrian, alot of the class already spoke canto))

My father is also a physist and he says the stuff I am doing now is similar to what he did towards the end his undergrad (i have finised 4 semesters) and when i graduate i will be about where he was when they gave him his masters in terms of course work.

There is also a question of how to compare grades between institutions. Our TA this semster commented that he didn’t see anything on the level of what we were doing as sophmores until he got to grad school. (he went to UC school, i think, he wasn’t very clear on that), so does that mean a c here is better than an a someplace else? If you let the schools decide them selves then you get grade inflation at top tier schools, or do they grade harshly and hope that employers and grad schools will take in to account where they are from.

how do you deal with brown where you can take every course pass/fail?

as for the claims that high school level math/science is going down, it depends on where you look. If you look at math/science magnet schools there is no way you can say it is going down. even in my normal public school i took math up through calc and college level chem.
Not that i think that even matters past freshmen year because you are doing material you didn’t even really know existed in high school. maybe this effect could be seen in courses for non-majors, but not in major. show me a time when it was common to cover anything past algebraic newtonain physics (it doesn’t get any easier), maybe some calc (i would be really nice if they brought back the draconian trig and geometry classes though, one of our profs was picking on us for not knowing them and they would have been useful to know before i needed them) or the amount of chemistry that is covered in a semester of college chem?

watching SAT scores is a silly thing to do. They track nothing but your ability to memorize words and lean questioning patterns. now this may be a useful skill in some fields i would not conflate it with demonstrating intelegence, critical thinking ability, or better work over all. this might be constant with an increase in grades due to an increase in people who are good at identifying what the profesors want and giving that answer to them and are willing to do absurd things (like just memorize 600 words) for grades.

i’m going to stop typing now because i am ranting, and most likly starting to offend people