At a recent meeting of our Faculty Senate, we received another good statistical presentation on grade inflation, updating us on where we stand since last year. The good news was that Seton Hill has actually seen a decrease in the overall GPA awarded compared to last year... this (probably) means that teachers aren't frivolously giving away A grades and crumbling to all the pressures that we've talked about before in this forum (when I recommended the American Academy of Arts and Sciences article called “Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing? Grade Inflation and Letters of Recommendation”).

Or is it all meaningless?

Is grade inflation a myth? An imaginary concept that is used to serve political or administrative ends? An abstract concept that preys upon faculty paranoia about being too easy? We're talking, after all, about numbers that imply a correlation but have no causality; we're talking about speculative trends and hypothetical reasons behind them.

Our Senate meeting concluded with a surprisingly vociferous debate about the "unreality" of grade inflation and some faculty were adamant that such numbers really don't say or mean anything. I've always felt that grade inflation (well, "compression" technically) is a reality of college life today, if only because so many students seem to feel entitled to high grades because they've been getting them over and over again. I believe that this is a nationwide phenomena. But I thought I'd do some web research on this topic, just to see what others have said against the notion.

In The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation, education author Alfie Kohn takes issue with the statistical research about inflation and writes that "The burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative explanations" for what appears to be inflated grades. (This is true: the statistical data suggest trends, but higher GPAs could very well evince what education is supposed to provide: high achievement!) But Kohn is more interested in the epistemological issues at work here: how the truth is obscured by discourse about grade inflation and that learning often drops out of the picture altogether. He suggests that conservative pressures on institutions from outside forces often motivate charges of grade inflation, and outlines the major assumptions about college learning that undergirth the arguments of those who claim grades are inflated:

• The professor's job is to sort students for employers or graduate schools. This assumption is predicated on the notion that teachers are "gatekeepers" into a profession, involved with rating students on the likelihood of their later success, rather than actually educating of individuals.
  
• Students should be set against one another in a race for artificially scarce rewards. This assumption buys into the notion that grades are ways of setting students into a competitive enterprise, competing to be the best of class, rather than developing on their own terms. This assumption usually has that strange statistical assumption of "the bell curve" lurking behind it, which assumes before the fact that in any given group you will have an average set and only a few winners and losers, and that the teacher's job is to sort out who fits where along the spectrum.
  
• Harder is better (or higher grades mean lower standards). Like the assumption that competition between students is good, this assumption sees grades as a carrot that dangles before the horse: a puritanical work ethic lurks behind this assumption, and professors come to see themselves as "bosses" who are making their students "work harder" rather than learners.
  
• Grades motivate. This is a common enough assumption that I think all teachers share: that grades motivate students to learn. But the research that Kohn presents suggests that it doesn't motivate the students as much as other factors and that grading may actually be a disincentive to motivation.
  

Obviously, these assumptions could very well be a reality. But the point Kohn raises is important: that if we are presented with evidence that suggests we need to change our grading habits, perhaps we should question why that is so, and not be bullied by statistics which can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Other articles on the "myth" of grade inflation include Tom Scocca's "The Great Grade Inflation Lie" from the Boston Phoenix in '98 (which challenges the logicality of the very idea of "grade inflation") and Education Week's article, There's No Such Thing as Grade Inflation from '96.

I agree, of course, with the idea that we need to be skeptical and reasonable when it comes to grade inflation -- especially when it comes to institutional controls and any teacher policing that might be motivated by it. Evaluation of student performance should never become monolithic and standardized -- academic freedom encompasses grading criteria, in my opinion. But at the same time I don't think we should write grade inflation off as a complete myth. Talking about grading standards and trends can only benefit teachers. Open dialogue about different practices and standards among colleagues, whether locally or globally, can only enlighten us. Whether we shed light on the assumptions that motivate our grading or on the areas where our grading could be a little more stringent, looking at how we grade allows us to become more conscious of what we're doing when we're grading, and therefore better at it.

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