
Hyperinflation in America: The End of Grades? - wallflower
http://www.mansharamani.com/articles/hyperinflation-in-america-the-end-of-grades/
======
jernfrost
It is just one other indicator of the flaws of the free market approach to
everything in the US. Whether it is health care or education, treating it as a
product or service sold to consumers creates perverse incentives.

The market has become a religion in the US. It is taken as dogma that it is
always the most efficient way to do things. When it is stunningly inefficient.
I've used health care in the US a number of times, at it is quite grotesque
how they treat it as a sales transaction dishing out as much pills and
treatment as they can, almost like a car salesman trying to get you to buy
add-ons.

My US doctor insisted on giving me anti-biotics despite the fact that I had
the common cold and protested that this does not work for a virus infection.
Whatever you issue is they attempt to give you the most expensive treatment
even if something cheaper would do. And there is in an unhealthy obsession
with unnecessary frills. Anything to get the customer to keep coming back.

I quite liked American university, but it was extremely lax. They gave
students endless opportunities to fix their grades. Again anything to make the
customers happy. Grades was rather pointless as it only seemed like A's
mattered.

~~~
cpursley
Calling the American healthcare system "free-market" is disingenuous at worse
and hilarious at best. It's probably the most regulated and convoluted sector
of the US economy. In contrast, the pet healthcare system in the US is much
less regulated. As a result, getting care for my pets is so much easier to
navigate (you can actually get price quotes!) and much multitudes cheaper than
human healthcare, despite the similar medical procedures and training required
of doctors.

~~~
brianwawok
Okay this is the worst argument for an unregulated healthcare system I have
ever heard.

1) How much money goes into pet medicine research vs human?

2) What happens when a pet is sick and the cost of care exceeds money of
owner?

You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no
research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a
cheap healthcare system...

~~~
refurb
_You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no
research_

What? Animal health is a huge industry. Zoetis was spun off of Pfizer and is
making money hand over fist. Lots of new animal drugs are approved each year.

------
whack
The author is depressingly right. The people this is ironically going to hurt
most: The really smart/hard-working students who attend public universities.

I used to be one such student. I attended a large public university that had a
great deal of "intellectual diversity." The majority of the students were
average, in terms of their drive/motivation/intellect. However, there was also
a numerically large minority that was just as talented and driven, as the
students whom you would find in the Ivy Leagues.

Which is why companies like Google and Facebook still showed up to recruit at
our college, every single year. Which is why elite post-grad programs like
Stanford's recruited a lot of our graduates, every year. They wouldn't be
interested in the average student at our college, but they were certainly
interested in recruiting the top 10-20% of our student base.

With grade inflation though, if everyone's grades are bunched up together in
the 3.8+ range, it becomes extremely hard to distinguish between the top
students and the average students. And one unlucky bad grade is all it takes
for a top student to suddenly seem like an average student. In such a world,
without any reliable way to distinguish between the top students and the
average students, companies like Google would not even bother showing up to
recruit at public universities like ours, and would instead restrict
themselves to selective universities like Stanford.

One of the most important roles of the university system, is to serve as
engines for social mobility. _" Even if you're born into an average family and
attend an average public university, if you work really hard and get good
grades, you can still get a post-graduate degree from an elite university, and
get recruited into elite jobs."_ Grade inflation, or getting rid of grades
entirely, may lead to equality of outcome within a university, but it's also
going to severely weaken one of the most important mechanisms for social
mobility.

~~~
vitobcn
I find this graph outlining the frequency of different grades from 1949-2009
to be enlightening [1]. Around 1940's only 15% of grades were "A", and in the
last few years they went up to close to 45%.

The source data is coming from research compiled by Rojstaczer and Healy [2].

\---

[1]:
[http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/201...](http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/2012/01/Grade-
Distribution-American-Colleges-Evolution-Literacy.jpg)

[2]: [http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-
content/uploads/sites/111/20...](http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-
content/uploads/sites/111/2015/10/Where-A-Is-Ordinary-2012.pdf)

~~~
chestervonwinch
Here is a better version:

[http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure8.png](http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure8.png)

and another interesting one in addition:

[http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure1.png](http://www.gradeinflation.com/figure1.png)

~~~
Sacho
How can you differentiate between grade inflation and knowledge inflation?
Perhaps the increase in grades is because the difficulty of the material
doesn't rise as fast as our ability to teach it and students' ability to
learn?

~~~
chestervonwinch
I'm inclined to agree about knowledge inflation (in the sense explained in the
following paragraphs), but I don't think it has to do with the perceived
difficulty of subjects changing, or necessarily with instructors inability to
teach at a level of rigor that might pull the average down (by increasing
perceived difficulty).

Regarding "knowledge inflation", I'm not sure that we see an inflation in
knowledge per se (at least in a way that affects grade inflation in college
courses), but I think what we do see is an increase in 1) quantitative
methods, and 2) cross-talk between fields. This influences the subject matter
people in a variety of fields are expected to know (e.g., the amount of math,
comp. sci., stats, etc...) , and thus, I suppose, inflates the expected
knowledge in this sense.

Anecdata: I teach calculus 1, and guess how many math majors are enrolled?
Zero. It's mostly bio, and other sciencey fields. This affects how I teach
(and grade!) calculus. I'm willing to bet other courses -- like intro
programming, intro stats, etc... -- experience something similar. Is this an
explanatory factor for grade inflation? I don't know. There's obviously a huge
number of things to consider.

------
heartsucker
At my university (UCSB '12), grades were close to meaningless. I got a BSc in
Math and graduated with a 2.8 (or lower?) because I loaded up on upper
division math courses. I had friends who got 3.9's because they got a BA in
communications or biz. econ. So clearly GPA varies heavily with degree, not to
mention institution.

There were some professors who straight up said they always failed the bottom
X percent of the class. So if you knew the material and "passed," you still
got an F. Or the professor whose final was literally "memorize this two page
proof and regurgitate it verbatim." Or the <ethnic/gender> studies professor
who fail your papers for disagreeing with them.

There should just be Pass / Fail. Enough with this GPA circus.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I couldn't agree more with most of your points but I think that pass/fail
isn't the right approach.

Taking an aggressive schedule in order to get your "I spent four years doing
what I was told" paper and GTFO ASAP hurts your grades

Working a job hurts your grades

Extracurricular hurt your grades.

What I see is a simple duty cyle problem. Students have a finite productive
capacity (not sleeping isn't a semester-term solution). If they take a
schedule that requires more than a certain % duty cyle then they take a GPA
hit. If you could account for the amount of productivity required by a class
you can take duty cycle into account when calculating GPA. For example, 120
credits in 4yr is a lot easier than 120 credits in 3yr. Five 1xx or 2xx gen-
eds in one semester is a ton easier than four 3xx or 4xx classes in a STEM
discipline. Having some way to account for the extra effort required to run
wide open for a semester or run close to wide open for 3yr would go a long
way.

People playing the game (college) on easy mode (BA in business, no job, is a
member of a frat with a really good test bank his major, etc) get the same GPA
as people playing on hard mode (engineering degree with minor in something
else, academic club involvement, works a job on the side, etc) and there's no
way to tell them apart when it's all said and done.

If there was a way to score classes (and professors) based on typical grades
then profs could grade how they want and students could take what they want
and not be punished. You could do something like track the average grade for a
class/prof combination and track average grades for students. You could
eliminate the effect of one prof who teaches one of many sections of one
required class as well as the effect of a bunch or really good/bad students
enrolling in a class on one particular semester. You could also eliminate the
effect of taking a ton of really hard classes or unknowingly enrolling in a
section taught by a really tough prof.

Basically if you applied dynamic curves to classes at the university level
then you can account for easy/hard classes, profs and schedules. There's got
to be some catch but I can't think of one that couldn't be worked around with
effort since it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing. You
don't need to make getting bad grades in four hard classes have an equivalent
GPA to getting good grades in four easy classes, just making some way to
partially account for the difference would help. Obviously this wouldn't be in
the financial interest of colleges but that's a different issue.

~~~
curun1r
Don't knock the pass/fail thing until you've tried it :)

I attended another UC that offered students the option to take classes
pass/fail. I used it for gen-ed requirements so I could focus my attention on
getting good grades in the classes for my major. It was really nice not to
have to stress over a test in a non-core subject knowing that it wouldn't hurt
my GPA. And, in retrospect, I think I actually remember more of the material
from those classes than the classes I took for a grade. My guess is that
stress is counter-productive to actually learning.

~~~
tropo
There is something to be said for pass-drop, with a high standard for passing.

Anything less than a pre-inflation "A" is stricken from your record. Any "B+"
work (or worse) won't affect you. Retake until you succeed.

Only the advanced (mostly final year) classes are required. Take the beginner
ones if you feel you need them, but they never count for anything and there
isn't even a record that you took them.

------
koliber
It depends on what you want grades to express.

If you want grades to express students' strength relative to each other, a
quota of say 35% A's per course might be appropriate.

On the other hand, if grades are meant to show how students do an a more
objective and time-invariant set of criteria, maybe grade inflation is OK.
Maybe it means that student's are getting generally smarter, or more efficient
at learning. IQ has been rising over time as well, as has efficiency in many
workplaces. Perhaps grade inflation, at least partially, reflects this as
well?

I am not saying that this is the case. Rather I would like to throw a
hypothesis out there, as it is one that is not often expressed. I would love
to hear arguments for and against the above ideas.

~~~
Retric
US IQ's have stopped increasing, we are also getting shorter.

~~~
pc86

      [citation needed]

~~~
Retric
Americans shrinking as junk food takes its toll

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa)

America Loses Its Stature as Tallest Country

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/08...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/08/12/AR2007081200809.html)

~~~
whamlastxmas
The article, at a glance, doesn't really seem to give information on the data
that lead to a "shorter" conclusion. Does it account for the fact that the US
receives a ton of immigration from Mexico and South America, whose population
is quite short? Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting
shorter? My guess is no.

------
epicureanideal
Disclaimer: I don't think this explains grade inflation, but it might be a
partial reason. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here.

Percentage of A's given at Yale is increasing? Could be grade inflation. Could
also be that they're picking the top 0.01% and smaller of students from a
larger and larger total population.

Example math:

If 50% of students were worthy of A's when they were able to recruit the top
1000 students out of let's say 100,000 (the top 1%)...

If the population doubles relative to the number of students they admit, they
can recruit the top 1000 students out of 200,000 (the top 0.5%), all of which
would have been more likely to be "A" grade students.

Now everybody is getting closer to 100% A's as long as there's been no change
in grading standards.

~~~
daveFNbuck
That works at Yale, but you'd actually expect this type of effect to deflate
grades overall as higher and higher percentages of the country are going to
college.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
That included a lovely hidden assumption that the population has some static
or perhaps declining intelligence/academic motivation. Given the increase in
student resources, as well as as rising trend in standardized test scores
(SAT, ACT, etc) I'm inclined to dismiss the hypothesis.

------
jacobolus
Grades are both a poor pedagogical tool and a poor measuring stick. They’re
too coarse, too removed from the immediate learning feedback loop, too
inconsistent from course to course, and too ambiguous in meaning (should you
get the best grade for working hardest? for understanding the material best?
for the best writing or mathematical reasoning skills?). At best, they provide
a tremendous distraction for everyone; at worst, they convince some students
who are performing well they can slack off, make students at the bottom give
up hope and stop trying, cause incredible anxiety for students in the middle,
and also create huge headaches and heartbreaks for instructors.
Simultaneously, they give parents the misleading impression they know what is
happening at school, and thereby discourage parents from getting more directly
involved in their children’s education.

The main reason grades were adopted and persist is that they’re relatively
easy to apply, aren’t that complicated to reason about heuristically (even if
this is often misleading), and they scale across an institution / between
institutions.

In my opinion, grades should be entirely abolished for students up through
middle school, and replaced with written reports from the instructor. They
aren’t really appropriate later, either, but high school grades seem to be one
of the only available tools for guiding the college admissions process and I
don’t presently have any better equally scalable idea. Colleges should of
course do whatever they want, after all, the students are adults at that
point.

Then again, I feel rather the same way about institutional schooling in
general.

~~~
spiderfarmer
I went through my higher education basically without grades. Almost all
courses were project based, which were done in teams. If the team decided you
were a non-perfomer, there would be a discussion with a teacher.

This freed up a lot of time for the teachers, so general knowledge was tested
by teachers in personal meetings, where you had to explain to him/her what you
had learned. If your explanation wasn't good enough, the teacher would explain
things again so you would understand. So it's not just a test, but a more
personal way for a teacher to feel if you really understood the subject.

A system like this only works when everyone loves what he or she is learning.
40% of the students didn't finish the first year. After the first year almost
everyone made it.

~~~
rimantas

      > which were done in teams
    

This is fucked up and sucks for introverts. And double sucks for them if they
love that they are learning.

~~~
spiderfarmer
Only if you think you should leave introverted people alone in the corner of
the classroom, forever. Working in teams forces introverted people to learn
ways to cope with their natural attitude and it learns the other team members
how to deal with their introverted counterparts. If you want your team to
deliver the best products you better learn about eachothers strengths and
weaknesses. In the first year you learn a lot about team dynamics.

~~~
no_flags
I actually like the concept of group based work much more in a grade-less
environment. When grades are involved it over-burdens the good students
because they have to pick up the slack for students who don't care, or risk
getting a lower grade.

------
restalis
I met teachers whose grading philosophy was that the results has to form a
normal distribution across the pool of students. If we're adopting that then
we're having grades denoting a relative quality not an absolute one (which
pretty much everyone assumes). The author may be right in her implication of
faulty grading, but the evolution of grade concentrations over the span of
many student generations does not necessarily denote an existing issue. The
education got better over the years, maybe the results are from increased
learning and teaching efficiency. Was there a test taken both now and 60 years
ago and considered their respective grading results in the drawn conclusion?
And finally, I don't want to criticize the author, but the idea of "world
without grades" is just silly. Grades are the result of a measurement and the
measurement in itself is something valuable everywhere, including in
education. The author could have had a more limited claim, by only denouncing
current grading practice performed at the same institutions that do the
teaching.

~~~
Erik816
I can't imagine anyone who has gone through school and thought that grades
were somehow an "absolute" measure of quality. It's quite clear that grades
are relative to both the standard of your fellow students and the current
academic standards for your school. The whole idea of a "grade" is to sort the
relative quality of various things or people, and that is what they are
supposed to do. The problem comes when people start to THINK they are an
absolute measure of worth, and thus believe that they are entitled to an "A"
because they worked hard. Never mind that everyone else worked hard too, and
some of them performed better.

------
Jach
A lot of the "stress" of grades seems to be bucketed into a general claim of
ego-shattering "I'm different and moreover lesser than my better peers!"
effect. I think it would be bad if we got rid of grades based on that
philosophy of coddling. The more significant cause of stress I think is simply
that grades are tied to things beyond the student's particular ranking in a
class. The article mentions that the possible beginning of the inflation trend
was the simple relation of your grades to the likelihood of being shipped off
to Vietnam. Since then it's only gotten worse, and I can think of several
other things grades now tie in to. If your grades are bad enough, you might
lose your funding that allows you to go to school in the first place, and you
need that for the pretty much unrelated problem of tuition being ridiculously
high. (I don't really think the students-as-customers mentality that has
developed also comes along with a I've-paid-now-give-me-an-A mentality.) I
would find the threat of losing a scholarship a lot more stressful than the
fact that some people in my class are smarter and/or work harder than me, and
knowing a few people with such scholarships I was amazed by their apparent
composure come finals season. If your grades are bad enough, certain companies
won't look at you when you apply. This has become less of a deal in tech
(though one place I interviewed at did ask for my GPA) but is still a common
filter. If your grades are bad enough, graduate programs won't have you even
with a strongly worded letter of recommendation from one of your professors.

The article proposes some sort of top-down solution (from the government's
department of education?) is needed. Maybe that can work, I'm skeptical. The
approach is at odds with keeping rankings private to the school and
unconnected to external things.

------
randcraw
Why not use percentile instead? It's fair. It's clearly the best way to
compare students within a class or within a school. (I've heard India has been
doing this for years.)

If you then insist on normalizing the percentiles across schools and eras,
have the students also take a standardized final exam (like GRE, but specific
to each course). You don't have to test every course, just the ones that teach
fundamentals. This should be more than sufficient to make schools (and
percentiles) comparable. This is comparable to the british first/second/third-
class system.

It'd also do wonders for pressuring schools to up their game. It's be mighty
embarrassing if a tony private school scored substantially lower on their
standard tests than a moo U. It could also validate MOOCs and other
alternative forms of instruction.

------
heisenbit
Grad inflation are a serious problem for excellent but poor students and their
social mobility. It used to be that one could distinguish oneself with grades.
Not so anymore. One of the most significant remaining factor: Alma mater brand
name.

------
galfarragem
Grade inflation is known for a long time and really bad for students.
According my teachers, when they graduated (40 years ago) the best student of
my college scored 14/20\. When I graduated, the top student scored 18/20\. The
real problem is that public intitutions hire based on college scores so
younger grads have an unfair advantage.

To solve grade inflation a bell curve would work: best tests would grade A+,
next ones would grade A and sucessively independently of scores itself. You
would have always the same relative amount of each grade scale along the
years.

~~~
MikeNomad
When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what
I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights.

Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same
problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply
accepted it as a pain point.

I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the
semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting
upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were.

I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade
distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve.
I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did
it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently
adopted the method.

Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama
during office hours dropping off to nothing;

Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their
classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor;

My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods;

My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on
creating and delivering content.

~~~
MikeNomad
Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the
semester..." Sorry.

------
dcre
I wonder if this could be related to more classes being taught by adjuncts.
Tenured professors don't have to care what students think of them. I'm
surprised this question was not raised by the article.

------
dukoid
Probably will lead to a more fine-grained scale for the A grades....

~~~
efaref
In the UK we introduced the A* grade as a "solution" to this problem; first at
GCSE level (end of compulsory high school, age 15-16) and then at A level
(pre-university, age 17-18).

Even that just postpones the problem, as grade inflation continues. I expect
we'll see A* * before long, and then eventually grade sheets will look like
eBay reviews, and students will just get a star count.

------
sgarg26
Some of the most elite private high schools in America do not issue grades.
Instead, universities have to rely on standardized test scores and
recommendation letters

------
homicidehack
contact homicidehack at gmail dot com for your hack jobs

------
spiderfarmer
I love the US, but only as a tourist destination. There is no policy in the US
that I can think of that I prefer over the way things are organized in my own
country. I don't care if I pay 60% taxes. I'm well off, as well as my
temporarily unemployed neighbours, there are no beggars in the streets, the
roads are paved nicely and I can visit a doctor without him bankrupting me.

~~~
someguydave
To be fair this the lifestyle most elites in the US also have.

~~~
emp_zealoth
They also live in gated communities with armed guards, have to put up with
theft and batter, carjackings, etc.

I genuinely do not understand how you can tolerate living like that - youtube
channels telling people how to stop their house being robbed ("It works! My
house is the only one that wasn't in the whole neighbourhood! Woo!")

~~~
jjnoakes
You think that sensationalist view reflects reality for a vast majority of
Americans?

I've lived here for decades in 15 different states.

I've been poor. I've been middle class. I've been friends with the "elite".

I've lived in big cities and small towns.

I've never seen a car jacking. I've never seen an armed guard assigned to a
gated community.

I've never seen a mugging. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed a crime beyond
traffic violations.

I'm sure they exist. But to think they are common from watching YouTube?

~~~
spiderfarmer
I've been to the states for three weeks, driving from cheap motel to cheap
motel.

As you say, most of the US is just fine. But even in my three weeks I have
seen lots of homeless people at busstops and intersections. I've heard distant
gunshots in the (very) cheap motel in LA, where the police sirens were so
common that I mistakenly thought that we were really close to a police
station. I saw so many people who were dangerously obese that I can't blame
the people who repeat the "FAT MURICANS" meme.

Some major roads were riddled with potholes and looked nothing like the images
we saw in movies that supposedly play in LA. Let's just say the image I had
beforehand (mostly instilled by Hollywood movies) was exactly the opposite.

~~~
wil421
I was in Italy for 2 weeks and saw more homeless people and beggars than I see
on a regular bases in the US. I also saw huge camps with people living out of
tents on the Tiber in Rome and several camps of gypses living out of cars and
RVs. Its all relative.

There were just as many fat Germans or Brits as fat Americans touring. The
Italians were mostly slim.

The cobblestone streets in Rome and Florence had plenty of holes.

You obviously for some reason don't like Americans. The biggest difference I
saw was there was almost no opportunity in Italy. Young locals with college
degrees bartending or waiting tables for 8-9 euros an hour because they can't
get a job (same thing happens in America but the locals I spoke to had
desirable degrees).

I've been to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico and Panama and heard sirens and gun
violence in most of those places despite guns being illegal.

Been to London and Scotland and heard ambulances at night in the big cities.

It's all realitive but the one thing I've seen in America is more opportunity.

------
Retric
The short answer is no, because the population demographics is not changing
that rapidly.

Also, _More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S. Net Loss of 140,000 from
2009 to 2014; Family Reunification Top Reason for Return_
[http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-
leaving-...](http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-
coming-to-the-u-s/)

PS: But don't let facts get in the way of your preconceived notions.

~~~
pc86
That's Mexico specifically. Immigration in the US across the board increases
the population. I don't know if immigration from Mexico + Central America
increases or decreases. And you seem to have conveniently ignored

> _The article, at a glance, doesn 't really seem to give information on the
> data that lead to a "shorter" conclusion._

and

> _Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting shorter?_

