
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities - Reedx
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
======
alanfranz
I don't live in the US and I didn't go to college in the US, so my experience
is largely irrelevant to the topic.

But in my own country (Italy), even though grade inflation is a thing both in
high schools and universities, I see something here that is in stark contrast
with some statements in the article: italian students definitely study a lot,
far more than in the 60s/70s/80s. In those times the university, although
useful, was seen "just as a school", and very often students had a part-time
job or worked at their parents' small business, learning "to have a real job"
and they weren't chasing the best grades all the time, just a degree. On the
contrary, nowadays you can meet a lot of students who are fully dedicated to
their degrees, and strive for high grades in all classes. The perceived value
of university is far higher, and students commit far more to it.

It may be more uncommon to fail an exam; but an high score won't be
automatically granted.

~~~
rscho
That's because it used to be that <30% of high-school students would step foot
inside a university, _i.e._ just getting a degree meant you were ahead of the
pack and well-employable.

Nowadays, literally anyone can obtain a degree. You've got to have something
more to show if you want to stand out. The "more" part is poorly defined by
design, of course.

To add even more to this already dismal situation, education fees have gone
through the roof to ensure that smart people of low extraction don't get too
much leverage against people who are powerful by right of birth.

Education has become an industry just like any other. This decadence makes me
extremely sad.

~~~
erfgh
What education fees are you talking about? Everywhere in Europe universities
are free with the exception of England.

~~~
rscho
No. University is not free everywhere in Europe. Fees are relatively low but
there is a sustained push to increase them.

Additionally, even low fees are enough to deter the poorest since modern
universities prevent you from having a real part-time job.

~~~
jcelerier
if you are actually the poorest the only fees in France for instance are 15€ a
year (and you get state scholarship every month) - the criterion currently is
your parents making less than 33k€). If not it's 300€ a year for university -
it's more but not unachievable either when compared to the situation in the
US.

~~~
rscho
Agreed. You also have to factor in that scholarships are far less widespread
in Europe, though. The french left wing is quite strong and I doubt the
situation is as good in many countries of the EU.

I freely admit that I am not an expert. Just my 2c.

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supernova87a
There is not a lot of positive incentive for a school to be stringent on its
own kids. Unless that school is private (for example), and has people willing
to keep standards, think about the long term, and resist the relentless
pressure to dumb them down. That's why independent assessment (unpopular as it
may be) is the only way to keep it in check.

Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for
oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That
way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy
pass.

~~~
watwut
Private schools dont have long term interest in giving worst grades. Both
their long term and short term interests are in good grades for graduates.
Giving easy reward or "unfair" good grade is less of risk then giving unfair
bad grade.

~~~
MattGaiser
Private schools sometimes give poor grades internally and then have good
grades externally.

A friend of mine went to a high school where you got a grade which went on all
your interim reports and such.

When it came time for report cards and transcripts, the grade was multiplied
by somewhere between 1.06 and 1.2.

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runawaybottle
I think this reaches down into high school as well.

[https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001](https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001)

So, half the students are A students, but their SAT scores are going down?
This sounds like the great fashion psychology trick of labeling large jeans as
‘small’ or larger shirts as ‘slim fit’.

~~~
thaumasiotes
SAT scores have been inflating recently too, actually.

~~~
acdha
Inflating has an implied value judgement which might not be warranted. Because
the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry
helping students perform better through practice and training. That’s not
inflation in the sense that the gains are legitimate rather than making the
test easier but it’s probably an example of Goodhart’s law where we’re seeing
a focus on maximizing performance on the test itself rather than the broader
skills it’s supposed to be a proxy for.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing
> industry helping students perform better through practice and training.

Practice and training have negligible effect on SAT scores. The industry
exists, but in the same way that fortune tellers exist.

~~~
acdha
This is too broad a rejection. The prep companies don’t appear to have a huge
measured impact, probably on the order of 30-90 points, but it is certainly
the case that experience with the format and time pressure is going to help a
student, with disproportionate impact on the kids who would otherwise score
lower due to those factors.

Remember: this isn’t malicious or cheating. It’s just saying that you get
better at things you practice and every kid in the country has an incentive to
practice these tests.

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searchableguy
Maybe we should not have grades at all.

Kids bullied and built a hierarchy based on grades. They would cry over simple
tests or for a single mark since letter grading. They would ask other kids
about it relentlessly comparing and noticing even a difference of 0.001%.

The teachers relied on those numbers to decide your punishment. The
opportunities to participate in school events or represent it were determined
by an unrelated grade.

The parents relied on grades for parenting. The outsiders taught them how to
raise their kid through one of their reports.

Guess what? Grades aren't fair in any way. Not even in higher standards. I was
in two schools that asked the teachers to modify the student's answer sheet
since they had done nothing to give them passing grades (probably illegal?)
and for higher standards, schools wouldn't handout a mark that could make them
look bad in addition to board exams.

~~~
watwut
I did not seen a kid cry over grades nor my kids are reporting schoolmates
crying over grades, so I think that there was something special about where
you grew up.

~~~
searchableguy
I live in India so yes. It's illegal for schools to punish kids physically but
it happens in practice frequently. If not school, then parents do it. There is
also neighbor and public shaming.

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MengerSponge
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
sheepybloke
I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships. When I was in
college, I had to get a certain grade or I wouldn't be able to afford to go to
my college. I wonder if that knowledge ties into how professors grade? The
other thing is that it would be interesting to see if the current generation
is better test takers. So, even if they don't learn as much or are less
literate, they're able to see through the test and answer the expected answer
or write what the professor wants to see. Personally, I've grown up taking
tons of tests and would argue I'm just a good test taker now. Same with my
wife. She was a lot worse of student than I was, but was an amazing test
taker. She could pass almost any test put in front of her, even if she didn't
study. While I think the article has a lot of good points, I think we also
have to bring some different perspectives into the conversation. The author
seems to have a single focus as to why this is happening, and I think it would
be interesting to see what other people think around this.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships

Absolutely. You add a financial incentive to bad behavior and you're going to
see more bad behavior. Given the cost of college education in the US, a little
bit of grade inflation, class-rank maneuvering, and occasional blatant
cheating could save you $10k a year, or more.

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jasoneckert
I think part of the reason for this inflation involves modern academic faculty
rejecting the traditional antiquated assessment-based educational system. In
other words, they're of the opinion that "marks don't matter" \- what you
learn and what you can demonstrate does.

James Paul Gee from Arizona State University put it best when he said:

We take it as completely natural that you would be in an Algebra class for 12
weeks, and then I would give you a test on Algebra …. to see if you learned
any Algebra. Let’s say a kid plays Halo on Hard …. and finishes Halo. Would
you be tempted to give him a Halo test? No. Not at all. You’d say the game
already tested him. So let’s think - Why is it that we’re not tempted to give
him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as
a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of
Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class.

~~~
d_watt
Seems like a false equivalence. Playing Halo is itself the test. To have
beaten the game is to have passed the test. If anything, that metaphor
suggests students should be continuously tested to prove competence, and only
by "beating" the test can they work on the next lesson. Which may be a good
way to handle asynchronous learning, but doesn't work in a cohort.

------
chmaynard
My father taught a freshman chemistry course at Yale for one semester, back in
the '40s. Apparently he held the students to a high standard and decided not
to grade on a curve. The result was that about half the students failed the
course. The Dept. of Chemistry was not happy. That was the end of his teaching
career at Yale.

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cycomanic
I opened the article had a look at the graphs and closed it again. The y axis
of the graph is deliberately chosen to make the effect look stronger and this
sort of thing gets an immediate no from me. Yes if you want to highlight a
small effect on a large number you can change the yaxis, usually you indicate
this by an interruption in the axis. Bit that's not the case here GPAs go from
1 (or 0) to 4 and any significant effect would show on such a scale (it would
not look as large however).

The other question is, how where the years chosen, is there a lot of
fluctuations year to year?

Bottom line, there might very well be a significant effect, however the
presentation sets of all sort of alarm bells.

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kanobo
Maybe the industry could popularize a 'normalized-grade' in applications where
it simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their
school? Is that a bad idea?

~~~
watwut
If everyone has A, it still leads to A.

~~~
kanobo
If you have a 4.0 but your school's average is a 5.0, your normalized gpa
would be a 0.8 vs a 1.0. I didn't mean to imply that the divisions would use
graded letters.

~~~
watwut
If everyone has 5.0, the average is 5.0. With even more pressure, since even
smallest downgrade to someone has huge impact.

I did not meant to imply you would average letters, they are just the usual
way to express the grade.

~~~
kanobo
I think we have different priors because I definitely didn't have the best
grades compared to my peers as a student. And as a teacher at a University my
students have a huge range in their scores.

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watwut
As long as having good grades provides advantage outside of school and the
school is judged by graduates achievements, there is strong incentive for
school to give better grades.

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082349872349872
During the draft period (1964-1973?) of the Chiến tranh Việt Nam, I've heard a
rationale for grade inflation at the university level was to protect draft
deferments.

~~~
jimhefferon
But that doesn't square with the 50 year trend.

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CincinnatiMan
Not a fan of the graphs not starting at zero. Feels disingenuous.

------
codethief
A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at
$UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics
class for life sciences majors (mostly freshmen), where I was guiding students
through their lab experiments and grading their lab reports. Some memories and
observations, from a European perspective:

\- A third to half of all the lab reports I graded every week sounded as if
they had been written by grade schoolers, both syntactically and rhetorically.
I, as a non-native speaker, frequently had to correct people's English
mistakes.

\- I gave elaborate feedback on every single lab report, announced what things
I'd like to see them do and what my scoring rubric looked like. All these
remarks were largely ignored by at least half of the people time and again.

\- The head of the labs, my boss, always urged us, the TAs, to grade fairly
and to deduct points where students had clearly messed up. "There must be a
difference between the grades of good students and bad students," he said.
Unfortunately, his actions spoke louder than his words: He had already
assigned each of the lab exercises a certain number of points which left us
TAs little room for our own scoring rubric(×). Basically, very easy and low-
level exercises (like copying a definition from class) got them already 30-40%
of the points and recording measurements correctly gave them another 30-40%.
The actual evaluation of the experiments, where the students had to actually
do some thinking, was practically optional.

\- The course material was high school level. I had learned it back in 9th
grade. This is clearly not the students' fault but it speaks volumes about the
US high school system.

\- There were many students who I would have given an F, had we been at a
European university. But I couldn't, due to (×). One of the aforementioned
students actually had the audacity to ask me for an A instead of the already
very generous B she was going to get.

\- I will say that there was a small group of students who were extremely
motivated and interested in the stuff I taught, asked questions all the time,
took each piece of advise by heart and did extremely well overall.

\- Side note: I had previous TA experience and had always gotten very good
grades by my students. Judging by their comments, I know how to present and
explain things well. So I can say with confidence that it wasn't that I was a
bad TA.

\- I supervised the mid-term exam and not only were the exam questions very
easy and multiple-choice (with every question having precisely one correct
answer), students were also allowed to mark multiple answers: Assuming they
managed to at least mark the correct answer, marking two answers would give
them 0.75 points instead of 1 full point, marking three would give them 0.5
points and marking three (out of five) would still give them 0.25 points. On
top of that, towards the end of the two-hour exam when some few students
weren't done yet, the professor extended the deadline multiple times so that
they could all finish. In short: The exam was _designed_ so that students
could pass it and get good grades.

Here's the kicker, though:

Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that practically all other TAs were
simply giving their students full points for everything. After talking to some
of the TAs, I came to learn that that they had realized in previous semesters
that the grades us TAs gave didn't matter at all (as they were going to get
"rescaled" by the professor anyway), so why bother and put in so much work? At
the same time, though, they encouraged me to speak up about it. So I emailed
both my boss (the head of the labs) and the professor multiple times about it.
They never responded. All students ended up getting an A for the class.

~~~
sheepybloke
While I wasn't a TA, we did a lot of peer grading and reading of reports and
papers at my college, and I can confirm, there is a lot of stuff where people
just turn in complete crap. The number of nights I had to stay up to fix
sections on my team's report that someone had written horribly were way more
than I ever thought should happen.

