Massive grade inflation at US universities:
Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy have updated
their long-term study of grade inflation at American universities with fresh data -
“During this era,
which has yet to end, student course evaluations of classes became mandatory,
students became increasingly career focused, and tuition rises dramatically
outpaced increases in family income. When you treat a student as a customer,
the customer is, of course, always right.
If a student and parent of that student want a high grade, you give it
to them. Professors faced a new and more
personal exigency with respect to grading: to keep their leadership happy (and
to help ensure their tenure and promotion) they had to focus on keeping
students happy. It’s not surprising that
grades have gone up during this era. I
call this period of grade inflation the “student as consumer era” or the
“consumer era” for short…
In the Vietnam era,
grades rose partly to keep male students from flunking out (and ending up being
drafted into war). But the consumer era
is different. It’s about helping students
look good on paper, helping them to “succeed.”
It’s about creating more and more A students. As the chart below (updated from our 2012
paper) indicates, B replaced C as the most common grade and Ds and Fs became
less common in the Vietnam era. The
consumer era, in contrast, isn’t lifting all boats. Ds and Fs have not declined significantly on
average, but A has replaced B as the most common grade. As of 2013, A was the most common grade by
far and was close to becoming the majority grade at private schools. America’s professors and college administrators
have been promoting a fiction that college students routinely study long and
hard, participate actively in class, write impressive papers, and ace their
tests. The truth is that, for a variety
of reasons, professors today commonly make no distinctions between mediocre and
excellent student performance and are doing so from Harvard to CSU-San
Bernardino.”
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