July 28, 2004
Grade Inflation Deflates Our Souls
I know it's been discussed in the past on notable sites like the defunct Invisible Adjunct, but Phil at Umbrae Canarum has a detailed post up about the causes of grade inflation in the universities. Maybe we can get all the blogging academics to band together in support of grading objectively. You know, a fight for incremental change leading to all the adjuncts and TAs getting kicked out of the academy for daring to give someone a "C". Still, if and when I get tenure many years hence, I plan to grade mercilessly and fairly as my own small contribution to the battle. If the students don't like it, well, maybe they should have read the texts.
Snide remarks and sadistic fantasies aside, I have a suspicion that grade inflation is not an isolated problem. It seems to mirror the triviality of American culture too well to not be related in some way. Few value a liberal arts education anymore as a necessary component of becoming a well-rounded, literate individual, as an end valuable in itself. Instead, as many, many people have remarked, college has become more or less a trade school. You spend your four or five years studying the field you want to make your career. For those unfortunates who either cannot decide or are actually committed to studying the humanities, they find themselves lost upon graduation unless they've developed some marketable skills.
Unfortunately, this trivialization of the American mind, this undue focus on the mundane and shallow concerns of the every day cannot be easily fixed. It results from decades of poor education from childhood on, the obsession with scientific excellence during the Cold War, the self-marginalization of the humanities through too much post-modern, obscurant theorizing, and a multitude of other factors. In the meantime, people lead impoverished lives. I don't mean to come across as elitist or patronizing though. Every life has value and dignity, etc, but just as society looks after the physical health of individuals by trying to provide good medical care, safer cars, and better medicines, so should it look after the intellectual and emotional health of the population through the study of literature, philosophy, and art. A narrow education opens an equally narrow lens through which to view and understand one's own life.
Somehow I was the last one to get the memo about average being the new excellent. I don't know how many times (particularly in high school) I worked far harder than I needed to to get an A. By the end of college, I had figured out how to coast a bit, but still tended to go balls-to-the-wall in classes that I cared about.
I plan to grade brutally, at least by modern standards - I see myself giving out a lot of Bs, but few Cs, and very, very few Ds or Fs. I worked for every grade I ever earned (in addition to being just plain good), and anyone who doesn't perform up to the standards that I set for myself doesn't deserve to get the grade.
I can see the evaluations thing being an issue, but don't most places do evaluations before final grades come out?
Personally, I didn't experience any grade inflation. I also purposefully took classes from the profs with reputations for being tough, so maybe that had something to do with it. Even so, I tended to make well-deserved As in all the courses in my major, so I wouldn't have noticed if there were inflation going on or not. Given that so many TAs and adjuncts have complained about pressure to give better grades than what people deserve leads me to think it's a real phenomenon, though possibly not quite as widespread as it might seem from the rhetoric.
I don't know. I think this issue gets increasingly complex the more experienced one is as a teacher. Some students are psychologically fickle and will react to bad grades in a reactive, passive-aggressive, "I'm a failure" manner, which doesn't help anything. Obviously one can't tailor grades to individual psychologies, but there are (arguably) cases where it's better in the long run to inflate.
Also, a teacher has to comform, to some extenet, to the overall quality of the institution. If one is giving out worse grades than other teachers, the students could be hostile and potentially avoid you, which makes life more difficult for everyone. The better the institution, the more leverage you have to push the students.
With regard to TAs, there are certain grading procedures they have to follow that are put down my more experienced teachers. Breaking them is cheating and IMO not worth the risk, although TAs obviously stretch them from time to time. Anyway, I was suprised to find a typical grave curve occur in my class. In an ideal world, I would push it so only 2 out of my 5 A students would get As unless they worked harder, but that ain't easy at a relatively average institution.