https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-grade-inflation-conversation-were-not-having
Who wants tougher grading standards? Administrators want high graduation rates. Departments want to attract students to enroll in their courses and major in their subject areas. Faculty who are easier graders are rewarded with higher scores in teaching evaluations. Furthermore, as colleges increase the number of adjuncts they employ, these less-stable faculty members may worry more about the impact of student satisfaction and enrollment on their continued employment, and increase grades accordingly…
Higher-earning majors in engineering, science, business, and economics have not inflated grades as much, and some research suggests this is because the faculty can hold high standards because students want to earn high labor-market returns.
Students' Grade Satisfaction Influences Evaluations of Teaching: Evidence from Individual-level Data and an Experimental Intervention
https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai22-513.pdf
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/3/barton-grade-inflation/
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2022/11/how-to-boost-high-school-graduation.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html
One of the most important factors in Ms. Zurek Small’s success seems almost too obvious to mention but, in fact, deserves far more attention and discussion: a simple willingness to learn. In more than 20 years of college teaching, I have seen that students who are open to new knowledge will learn. Students who aren’t won’t. But this attitude is not fixed. The paradoxical union of intellectual humility and ambition is something that every student can (with help from teachers, counselors and parents) and should cultivate. It’s what makes learning possible.
The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/sunday/colleges-measure-learning-outcomes.html
Molly Worthen notes:
"... more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little.
It’s true that old-fashioned course grades, skewed by grade inflation and inconsistency among schools and disciplines, can’t tell us everything about what students have learned. But the ballooning assessment industry — including the tech companies and consulting firms that profit from assessment — is a symptom of higher education’s crisis, not a solution to it...
Learning assessment has not spurred discussion of the deep structural problems that send so many students to college unprepared to succeed. Instead, it lets politicians and accreditors ignore these problems as long as bureaucratic mechanisms appear to be holding someone — usually a professor — accountable for student performance".
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-bureaucratic-bloat-harvard/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/power-shift