America's premier colleges and universities need to "come out of the closet" about grade inflation, according to Prof. Stuart Rojstaczer of Duke University's School of the Environment. Rojstaczer has made it his mission to help rid academia of inflated grades before it is faced with the day when grades are devalued to such a degree where they are no longer relevant.
Rojstaczer has created a Web site, www.gradeinflation.com, which was recently featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, dedicated to shedding light on what he perceives as a national epidemic of grade inflation in higher education.
Only minor increases in average grades at colleges occurred from the 1930s until the 1960s. During the Vietnam War, however, some professors began to inflate grades of students at risk of failing out of school and potentially being drafted, Rojstaczer said.
Average grades then leveled off until the mid 1980s, when federal and state funding for higher education became more limited and schools were forced to assume a business-like model of operation that has not changed since, he said.
"Once you start treating students like consumers, you want to make them happy, and one way to make them happy is by giving consistently high grades," Rojsctaczer added. "The customer is always right."
College Dean Edward L. Ayers said average grades in the College are only marginally different from 20 years ago.
"We looked into [grade inflation] last semester and there has been almost no change in the number of As and Bs given in the College over the last decade," Ayers said. "Average grades are indeed higher than they were 20 years ago, but I don't believe that it is a growing problem at U.Va."
Ayers said he does not believe that more qualified or intelligent students are the source of higher GPAs.
"I do not think that students today are smarter than before in any absolute sense, though they have been raised to get good grades," Ayers said.
Rojstaczer also said students today do not have higher GPAs because they are smarter than past generations.
"If you wait another four decades, every student would have the IQ of Einstein," he said. "When you try to quantify for what you should see for a grade increase, only 20 to 25 percent [of inflation] can be attributed to better students."
Leaders of academic departments vary widely in their assessment of the prevalence of inflated grades at the University.
Economics Prof. Mary Lee Epps, the department's director of undergraduate studies, said her department is largely immune from widespread grade inflation.
"I think our department is fairly consistent and tries to be moderate with grading," Epps said. "Once in a blue moon, we've had a graduate student or visiting professor grade very leniently, but the chairman has either taken that person aside, or if they're a visitor not asked them back."
In the economics department, the average percentage of As earned last year was 29.9 percent, according to statistics from the Virginian-Pilot.
The department recently looked into establishing a uniform grading distribution for its courses, but decided against doing so because of the tremendous range of ability evident between students in different course sections, Epps said.
In contrast to Epps, English Prof. Paul Cantor, director of undergraduate studies for the department, identified grade inflation problems within his department.
"Either the sun moves around the Earth or the Earth moves around the sun, and you won't get an argument about that in astronomy class," Cantor said. "In English classes, there's almost nothing you won't get an argument about."
The English department handed out 47.1 percent As in its classes last year.
Cantor said he thinks students perceive him as a strict grader when evaluating papers, because he is not afraid to objectively assess them and assign poor grades for poor work.
"I don't press for this, because I know my colleagues aren't going to do anything about it," Cantor said.
One reason Cantor said he thinks his colleagues will not adopt stricter grading methods is because giving students higher grades results in more positive course evaluations, which now affect a professor's chance of receiving a promotion.
"One of the chief forces behind grade inflation has been the adoption of the student evaluation system," he said. "Especially younger faculty members are afraid to give bad grades."
Students tend to be, however, most pleased with faculty members who offer rigorous classroom experiences, Ayers said.
"Ironically, one of the things we've discovered is that students generally hold easy classes, and those who teach them, in contempt," he said. "More often than not, students give the highest marks to their most challenging teachers."
Physics and other natural science departments have less trouble with grade inflation than humanities departments where grading is fuzzier, Physics Prof. Lou Bloomfield said.
Twenty-nine percent of grades in physics courses last year were As.
Although Bloomfield's popular "How Things Work" introductory physics course requires an essay, Bloomfield said there is little ambiguity in grading them, because the grading is ultimately based on their scientific content.
One solution for ameliorating grade inflation would be to publish average course grades on student transcripts, Bloomfield said.
"What I'd love to see is normative data," he said. "People should know a B in this class is great and a B in that class is terrible."
In Bloomfield's fall 2001 "How Things Work" course, 23.5 percent of students received As, according to the University office of institutional and assessment studies statistics.
The average GPA in the Engineering School rose from 2.94 in 1997 to 3.02 in 2001, according to Paxton Marshall, assistant dean for undergraduate programs.
Faculty attitudes toward grading tend to be less hard-nosed than they were at one time in the past, he said.
"There was, in the past, something about the culture of engineering education that's kind of encouraged a sink or swim attitude," Marshall said. "Maybe that is not so prevalent anymore."
Graduate school deans of admission and prospective employers expressed less concern over inflated grades.
At the William and Mary Law School, which draws many U.Va. graduates, inflated grades haven't been something that's problematic, Associate Dean for Admissions Faye Shealy said.
"We're still certainly finding a range in terms of the academic transcripts from individual schools," she said. "It's not a situation where we're finding that everyone is having a 3.75 and above."
University Career Services Director James McBride said most perspective employers, with the exception of those from engineering firms, generally do not care a great deal about a student's GPA, let alone grade inflation at their school.
"I'm not sure that grades have ever had that high a position with respect to assessing candidates on their ability to perform in a job or not," McBride said. "I've never read an article where employers place less value on a GPA because of grade inflation."
Still, Rojstaczer paints an apocalyptic vision of the future of grading at American colleges and universities.
If grade inflation continues at its current rate of an average .15 increase in GPA per decade at most universities, the average GPA will be a 4.0 at private schools in 50 years, and at public flagship schools, like Virginia, in 70, Rojstaczer said.
Ayers said he is significantly less worried.
"Given all the challenges facing the College, grade inflation is not one of my greatest concerns," he said.
However, without explicitly citing the University as an example, Rojstaczer said many schools are in states of denial about grade inflation.
"If you're an alcoholic and you hide your liquor bottle, you're not going to cure your alcoholism," Rojstaczer said. "Similarly, in colleges and universities, if you have a problem with grading and you don't admit that the problem is there, you won't solve it."
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