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Grinnell's Grade Inflation

what does your hard earned "A" really mean if everyone else in the class got one too?

by Lauren Standifer

Everyone likes an A.

Thus, many Grinnellians may be reluctant to call grade inflation a problem. At a highly-ranked and challenging liberal arts institution, many members of the campus community think that high grades are the natural product of a quality student body.

Yet of the 9868 grades given for four- or five-credit classes in the 2003-2004 school-year, 89 percent were between A and B-. The average Grinnellian has a GPA of 3.26.

Jim Swartz, dean of Academic Affairs, agrees that the grades at Grinnell seem to be on the high end, but said this is not unusual. "If you look at the grade distribution of Grinnell and these other institutions [in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest], we're kind of in the middle of the pack," he said.

Statistics on campus-wide grade distribution have been publicly available since 1997, and since then the number of A's and A-?s has increased from 38.4 percent of the total to 46.7 percent.

These rising numbers are consistent with a national trend that has garnered attention largely because of Ivy League statistics. In 2001, the New York Times ran a controversial story about grade inflation at Harvard, describing inflation as giving higher grades for assignments than the same work would have merited in the past. According to the Times, about 50 percent of the grades given out at Harvard are in the A range-over twice as many percentage-wise as in 1986.

Is there really a problem?

Grade inflation as a nationwide phenomenon is a widely accepted fact, but at Grinnell, there is debate over whether or not there is a problem.

"This is a private college," Gregory Schneider '06 said. "We get to select whoever we want to come here, so almost no one comes here as a low-achieving student." He also credits professors for the high grades because they "take the time to make sure that everyone is following along."

While many Grinnellians think that Grinnell's grade curve is acceptable, some faculty members disagree.

"In the long run," said Chris French, Math, "if everything becomes all A's, then there's nothing to distinguish one student from another, and that could have a tangible impact on students [because] the student who's doing really well wouldn't look any different from the student who's just getting by."

Victoria Brown, History, sees grades that are too uniformly high as an injustice to students. "I think that a lot of students would say ?I would rather have a grade that means something,'" she said.

Brown also doesn't believe that just because Grinnellians are more intelligent than students at other institutions, professors should give an inordinate number of high grades. "If you guys come in smart," she said, "we should be making you jump through some pretty high hoops."

Why all the high grades?

One reason for the higher grades could be, of course, that students have just gotten smarter. But according to the Grinnell admissions webpage, students at Grinnell today have only marginally higher standardized test scores and high school class rankings than they did in 1997?. Faculty members therefore speculate that other factors may be at work.

French believes junior faculty in particular are under pressure to give out good grades because "if we give lower grades, our student evaluations might suffer, and we get a little nervous about that." He also thinks that "departments are under pressure to give higher grades because they want to attract majors."

Brown sees a wider problem with the perception of grades themselves. "What might help both students and faculty is to think about the fact that a grade is not a payment," she said. "It's an assessment of the quality of the work. And for students that's sometimes painful because they'll think ?I worked so hard.'" She also worries that students will be so focused on what they perceive to be a poor grade that they will not take constructive criticism to heart.

Mark Schneider, Physics, doesn't perceive grade inflation itself as a major problem, but he believes that changes in student and faculty perceptions of what constitutes a bad grade may be contributing to a higher curve. "The C seems to have becomes a stigmatized grade, and students are certainly upset when they get a C, and faculty become reluctant to give a C, that a C is seen as an unsatisfactory grade, when in fact, according to the definition of a C, it is a satisfactory grade. "

Why the data is unavailable

For those who see grade inflation as a problem, stopping it is tricky business. It is difficult to pinpoint which departments and courses may be giving out disproportionately high grades because, while the campus-wide grade distribution is publicly available, only a department can ask for its own grade distribution. The History department exercised this right in Spring 2004, and found that the department gives out fewer A's than the campus overall by almost 10 percent and significantly more B's in a pattern that has been more or less stable since 1997.

No other departments have requested their distribution statistics, though a few professors, including French and John Rommereim, Music, expressed interest in getting the data in the future. Religious Studies department head Ed Gilday said the department plans to request its grade distribution this semester.

More detailed statistics for all departments being publicized seems unlikely. According to the nonprofit group Student Press Law Center, private institutions like Grinnell are not required to disclose them, and Swartz said that the college would not release data without faculty consent.

Past faculty committees have not requested more information, and Swartz does not believe they are likely to change their minds. He also said that the administration would support departments if they wished to do more research on their own grade distribution.

Administrators and faculty seem to agree that releasing such information against a department's will could damage the campus community. Brown fears that "in a small community ... that can devolve to the level of gossip."

Jean Ketter, Education, thinks that disparities between departments' grade distributions could be misleading. "I think it would be invalid to assume that departments that have a lower average grade have ?harder' courses,'" she said in an e-mail to the S&B.

Ketter believes that some departments and professors may give out higher grades because they allow people to revise work or are clearer about grading criteria, not because their standards are lower. "In my discipline, we are encouraged to see students' poor performance on assessments (as reflected in low grades) as a possible indication that we have not done a very good job of teaching, not necessarily as evidence of rigor or high standards," she said.

French also thinks releasing such data could actually make grade inflation worse because departments might start competing to inflate their grades to attract majors.

Is there a solution?

Stopping grade inflation won't be an easy task-it seems any proposed solution comes with serious drawbacks.

While Mark Schneider and Gregory Schneider both said that, ideally, Grinnell should eliminate the grading system altogether, Brown said this has failed at other institutions because of the large amount of work involved in handing out written evaluations for every student. French is also concerned that students planning on attending graduate school could be adversely affected because universities may not consider students who can't put a GPA on their application.

Similarly, Swartz pointed out that if Grinnell drastically changed its grade distribution and similar institutions did not, Grinnellians with lower GPAs would be at a disadvantage.

French has considered the same problem with his own grading. "I suspect that there are a lot of [graduate] schools out there who wouldn't look at a student if I gave them a B but then [I] said, ?This is an extraordinary student. Look at my grading scale.'"

Princeton's proposal to limit the number of A's that can be handed out comes with its own set of troubles. According to The Washington Post, Princeton professor Erica Slep thinks the new policy will damage student community by making students compete for a limited number of A's.

Gregory Schneider is against instituting a uniform grading policy at Grinnell. "To say that some grades have to fall along certain lines, even among the cream of the crop that Grinnell selects, is sort of ridiculous," he said.

Other colleges have tried to clarify for both students and faculty what the school's performance standards are, in the hope that clearly defining what an A means and what a C means will reduce grade inflation without having to impose a grade quota like Princeton's.

At Carleton College, for example, faculty panels assess students' writing and submit a portfolio for each student at the end of their sophomore year, which is used to assess and improve the students' performance without the assessment reflecting in their GPA.

French proposed instead a solution that relies on the conscientiousness of individual professors, explaining that he tries to make sure his grades are slightly below the campus average. "I think that if we were all to do this, we could get things back to a place where there is the possibility of rewarding students who are doing very, very well."

Should this solution fail, French has a slightly more radical scheme up his sleeve. Since the biggest problem is "you can't go higher than an A," he suggests "supplementing our grades with new grades, like alpha and alpha-minus and alpha-plus, which would be above an A." Of course, if the trend continues, students would eventually become dissatisfied with alpha. "And then we'd add aleph. Then we'd look at the first Sanskrit letter and keep going."

"I'm being tongue-in-cheek," he added. "I'm just frustrated."

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