Anytime a student submits work for evaluation, that student relies on the objectivity of the grader to receive a fair grade. With hundreds of instructors across dozens of departments, this objectivity seems difficult to guarantee. Multiple choice tests might seem a more fair alternative; but why should students in chemistry receive curves on these tests while psychology students receive a flat percentage? Finding a uniform way to measure student success should be a priority, but student grades should not be altered for the purpose of meeting statistical norms or artificial benchmarks of fair grading. Academic departments at the University should seriously reconsider any artificial changes to grading standards to address rising national averages in GPA. These policies would fail to take into account the changing characteristics of the student population and ignore differences between classes within departments and differences among departments.
Last Monday, The Cavalier Daily reported on rising GPAs nationally in recent years (“Research cites grade inflation as cause for national increase in GPA,” 3/16/2009), citing a study by former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer, in which Rojstaczer suspects informal grade inflation as a primary cause. From 1991 to 2007, national GPA averages for public universities rose from 2.85 to 3.01. While the article stated that several departments did not feel that rising grades were a significant concern at the University, some departments, including the department of Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese and other foreign language departments, have implemented alterations to the grading scale to cement student grades to a certain achievement level. In an ideal situation, grades should match to certain degrees of achievement among students, and these levels of achievement should be relatively similar from year to year. But this is simply not the case.
It’s important that grades change to reflect the changing characteristics of the student population. Departments alter grading scales in an attempt to stabilize the relationship between grades and student achievement under the assumption that each class of students entering the University is identical. Certainly, with an entering class of over 3,000 students, significant change from year to year is fairly unlikely. But there are definitely gradual changes in the student population over time. The GPA statistics listed above display about a 5.6% increase in GPA over the 16-year period. In addition to this GPA increase over time, however, there has been an increase in the mean SAT score of students entering universities. For instance, Harvard College’s mean admitted student SAT verbal score in 1985 was 659, compared to 738 in 2004, displaying a 12.0% increase. The years may not match up perfectly, but there has definitely been a rise in student achievement over time. The grade increase some departments are seeking to control may actually be derived from increases in student performance, and Rojstaczer’s article addresses this concern in his study. Until the specific cause of grade increases can be identified, arbitrary policies to prevent these increases should be avoided.
Discrepancies among classes and departments should also be taken into account before inflicting policies. It is always possible that specific classes could happen to have higher achievement rates among students than other classes, so professors should not be pressured to achieve a balance of letter grades in each of their classes. In larger lectures, there is likely to be a relative normalization of scores, so professors initiating a curve system or changing standards to meet the class average seems somewhat reasonable. But in smaller classes, it could be that one class coincidentally has higher-achieving students than another. Instructors in these smaller classes should be the most careful to achieve objectivity, even if the nature of assignments in these smaller classes makes complete objectivity even more difficult to achieve. If departments deem that a change in academic policy is absolutely necessary to adjust to changing national standards, a University-wide policy should be initiated first to avoid making some departments more difficult in grading than others. It is not fair to penalize a student’s GPA for interest in one major while a merely average student may get higher grades in another.
Instead of inflicting uninformed policies to standardize student grades, University departments should emphasize changes in instructional policy to meet the changing needs of the student population over time. Psychology Department Associate Professor Shigehiro Oishi teaches Introduction to Social Psychology, a large lecture course. He taught at the University of Minnesota for several years before moving to the University, and acknowledges changes in the preparedness of the student population at each University. Although he taught different courses, Oishi stated that he did little to alter evaluation techniques between the schools. Here, he just has a different method of instruction: he is not forced to dumb-down information when giving lectures, but still has the same expectations for students when being tested. It is important that the University community recognize changes in student GPA over time, but specific departments should not initiate policies to combat these changes until their causes can be assessed.
Anthony Nobles’ column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.nobles@cavalierdaily.com.
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