Let’s put this in perspective at the outset: Grade inflation at elite universities made nobody’s year-end list of the biggest news stories of 2001. But a recent report on rising grades and expanding honor rolls at Harvard certainly caught the attention of the nation’s academics. Should anyone else care?
It seems that admission to Harvard is more than a ticket to an honorable institution; it’s a direct pass to the honor roll. Roughly half of all grades given to (one hesitates to say “earned by”) Harvard undergraduates last year were A’s and A-minuses. An astonishing 91 percent of the class of 2001 graduated with honors. (That number was 32 percent in 1946, 50 percent in 1961 and 75 percent in 1971). At Yale, 51 percent of the class of 2001 graduated with honors; 44 percent at Princeton.
The Harvards, Yales and Princetons draw national attention when they air a bit of dirty academic laundry, but grade inflation is hardly limited to the northeastern elite. At the University of Illinois, to cite one familiar midwestern state university, A’s and B’s accounted for 80 percent of grades in 1999, up from 63 percent in 1967. As Bradford Wilson of the conservative National Association of Scholars put it, “While grade inflation is universal, the Ivies have elevated it to an art form.”
Rising grades and grade inflation are not synonymous. In economic terms, inflation refers to a persistent rise in the costs of goods or services, the underlying value of which is otherwise unchanged. Genuine grade inflation, by extension, occurs not merely when average grades rise, but when grades increase despite a consistent level of effort and performance. Harvard dean Harry Lewis thinks that’s not what is happening, claiming that “by far the dominant cause of grade inflation at Harvard is the application of constant grading standards to the work of ever more talented students.”
There are other possible explanations. One is that students work harder than before to cope with greater competition for graduate schools and prestigious jobs. A second, suggested by another Harvard dean, is a trend toward smaller classes leading to better teaching, more learning and more achievement. A third possibility, mentioned by New York Times education writer Richard Rothstein, is that professors are shifting their expectations from rote memorization to critical thinking and reasoning, so higher grades are not so much inflationary as indicative of evolving measurement standards for changing forms of academic performance.
Some academic standards flame keepers are doing what comes naturally in this time of war, recession, tax breaks, arctic drilling and a disposable Bill of Rights: blaming it all on those pesky liberals! Harvard professor (and grade inflation crusader) Harvey Mansfield sketched a three-pronged bill of particulars in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.
First, Mansfield sees liberal curricula giving students more choices and sacrificing traditional requirements to multicultural correctness, with students in turn flocking to easy courses. Second, student evaluations of professors, which Mansfield calls a “liberal policy,” are overemphasized as a measure of good teaching, leading professors to purchase high ratings with good grades. (There is truth in this.) Third, Mansfield cites affirmative action in general and feminism in particular, which make “liberal males feel guilty” and award inflated grades to minority students to massage self-esteem.
Arguments casting grade inflation as an ideological phenomenon of the left have it exactly backward. Student choice in curriculum and student input in teaching evaluations are nothing if not manifestations of free market ideology—students as consumers who get to decide what they want and how much they like it. In the academic marketplace, professors who piss off the customers are lousy employees. As University of Missouri journalism professor Margaret Duffy puts it, “It is for the most capitalistic of reasons that grade inflation is rampant. Universities are now modeled after the corporation, largely because of conservative pressures.”
Grade inflation is ultimately a stubborn collective action problem: Professors are reluctant to disadvantage students in the competition for graduate schools and jobs by acting alone to lower grades. Some schools see a remedy in the inclusion of course grade averages on transcripts to convey...what exactly? How easy the course was? Or the effectiveness of the teacher? This is a bad idea, essentially determining that a course lacks value unless average performance is mediocre—privileging the tyranny of a bell curve over the possibility that great teachers elicit widespread high achievement.
Granted, Harvard probably has gone a bit too far with the honors thing, but graduate schools and employers still seem reasonably able to sort out the intellectual talents of their candidates. There is no justification for allowing campus conservatives to aim an ideological bazooka at a persistent academic mosquito. The Times’ Rothstein points out that Harvard’s grades rose just as much in the 30 years before 1967 as in the 30 years following. What’s more, this is nothing new. He cites a report bemoaning slack grading standards at Harvard—dated 1894.
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