IT HAS become fashionable to decry "grade inflation" as an evil of our times. Supposedly, this phenomenon represents a softening of our academic standards and a tendency to coddle students in their academic work. But we sometimes forget that the real evil behind grade inflation is not the increase in GPAs as abstract numerical figures, but that students may receive more credit for their work than they should. Arbitrary and short-cited policies of depressing grades just for the sake of depressing grades are unfair to both the students and faculty and should be resisted.
One proposal that has been increasingly in vogue among university administrators is that of eliminating the A+ altogether. Here at U.Va., the A+ is counted as an A for GPA purposes, though Dean Richard Handler could notoffer an explanation: "It is a University-wide rule that has been on the books longer than anyone in my office has been here," he wrote in an e-mail. Syracuse University has ended the practice of giving out A+s altogether, and Princeton recently considered and rejected a similar proposal.
Many critics point to the increase in percentages of students receiving As, as if this were prima facie evidence of a deeper problem. Yet these concerns are certainly overstated. According to a 2002 Department of Education survey, a full 33.5 percent of undergraduates receivedaverage grades of C's and D's, with a mere 14.5 percent receiving mostly A's. Writes Alfie Kohn in The Chronicle of Higher Education: "No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim." It is clear that the A grade has not been devalued.
Nor is it clear what benefits would arise if we were to lower student grades. Students who receive higher grades tend to be more involved in the learning process. Students who receive lower grades tend to disengage and learn less. Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect that students who entered a university under competitive admissions processes and receive grades of A's and B's in high school should now receive lower grades in college. Our concern should be in ensuring that students are succeeding in college, not setting them up to fail. We should expect students at the University to receive high grades.
The whole discussion of grade inflation, however, misses the point at an even deeper level. While in a superficial sense policies that reduce GPAs will "cure" the problem of grade inflation, the reduction of grade point averages is not an end in itself. The evil is the same whenever a student receives more credit for work than that student deserves.
Even if we were to assume that the concerns motivating the critics of grade inflation were real, however, the solutions put forward would still be counterproductive. Some critics have tried to put restraints on faculty grading, such as eliminating the A+, but providing more grading options for faculty will instead tend to make grades more precise and accurate, and giving different grades different numerical values will tend to make GPAs more accurate.
Grading under any conceivable pedagogical system is necessarily a subjective enterprise. Given that, it makes most sense to give professors discretion within a broad range to give the grade that they believe students deserve. Grade inflation will only be substantially mitigated by a larger program of setting clear criteria for the awarding of different grades, not by carving out ad hoc exceptions (like U.Va.'s policy of not giving an A+ a higher value than an A) and provisos for the conferral of certain grades. Faculty should be given clear standards for what quality of work merits a given grade, but should not simply have their grading options arbitrarily limited.
Any grading reform, therefore, must not simply exist to lower grades, and must reflect concern for the students and faculty who will have to labor under its requirements. Quick-fixes shortchange everyone involved and should be abandoned.
Noah Peters is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.
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