

Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities - aycangulez
http://www.gradeinflation.com

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sp332
I went to Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. It's a liberal arts college
with about 2,000 students. They explain to all the incoming freshmen (and
their parents!) that they don't do grade inflation. An average student is a
"C" student. The bookstore sells t-shirts with "C+ Better than Average!"

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notyourwork
This is the way it should be everywhere. Grade inflation is nothing more than
a way to beef up a resume. GPA is a number like a credit score which I feel
has quite a bit of bias behind it and does not tell one much about a person's
character or student abilities.

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yummyfajitas
I believe the cause of this may be the use of student evaluations. Students
don't like hard professors, and give them bad evaluations. To some extent,
professor's continued employment is dependent on having good evaluations.
Hence, grade inflation.

In my personal experience, you can lose 20-30% of your evaluation based on
hard grading. My reason for believing this? When I was a TA (i.e., "I don't
write the tests, but I'll help you pass them"), I got typical evals of about
4.5. When I became a postdoc and started writing my own tests, my evals
dropped to about 3. I don't think I became a worse teacher over the course of
a single year, so I'm guessing my low evals resulted from not giving out easy
tests.

(Not to mention several comments on the evals claimed that tests were too
hard. I.e., "bad professor, highest grade on midterm was 75 out of 110!")

This is an agency problem which is fairly easy to solve: standardize exams and
evaluate professor quality based on VAM instead of student opinion.

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jseliger
_I believe the cause of this may be the use of student evaluations_

I would posit that evaluations aren't the problem, per se. The real problem is
one of incentives: professors are hired and fired (otherwise called "denied
tenure") based almost entirely on publication at most big public universities.
Teaching plays a nominal role in hiring and promotion decisions. This gives
professors an enormous incentive to optimize what they're going to be judged
on -- research.

Evals are a problem because they only look at what students think of the prof.
A more useful measure than just what students think would be a graph of what
students think versus the class's average/median grade, plotted against others
teaching similar courses. Then you could correct for "easy graders" and "hard
graders."

 _standardize exams and evaluate professor quality based on VAM instead of
student opinion._

A lot of disciplines don't have standardized content, especially in the
humanities and social sciences. A lot of profs emphasize different topics and
ways of doing things, even in science and math. This might create problems
worse than the problem it's trying to solve without solving the incentive
issue.

Those of you waiting for a proposed solution from me are going to be
disappointed: the only solution I can see is "incorporate teaching into hiring
and tenure decisions," but I don't see a way to get universities to do that.

The New York Times Magazine wrote a very good article about prof evals:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-
evaluation...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-
evaluations-t.html) .

I'm a grad student, and I'd like to say that I grade as fairly as I would if I
didn't know that evals correlate to grades. But...

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yummyfajitas
I agree with you that teaching matters little at Research I universities, at
least for full profs. It does, however, matter to the army of adjuncts working
there, as well as to profs anyplace besides Research I schools.

At Research I schools, the incentives for inflation are mainly about avoiding
non-research work. An actual conversation I was involved in:

Student: "But how can you fail me? I'm graduating, and I won't get my _math
minor_!"

Me: "A math minor is a signal to future employers that you can multiply two
matrices by hand when asked, and perhaps even write a proof. You haven't
demonstrated any ability to do those things."

Student's father: "How can you fail my daughter? She worked so hard for this!"

The dean's office: "Some student's father is complaining about you! Give her a
retest!"

Student's father, about a month after she failed the retest: "When are you
going to give my daughter a retest and a passing grade?"

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hga
Not all Research I universities: at MIT, a _lot_ of full professors take
teaching very seriously (in my admittedly limited experience, the ones not
interested in undergraduates were the exception rather than the rule, although
of course not all were able to turn that into _great_ teaching). And there are
no adjuncts to speak of, all are tenure track or tenured and all classes are
taught by them (I know of one grad student exception in the '80s who proved
the rule).

However your point about research is spot on WRT the incentives: at MIT the
undergraduates are potentially in the graduate student ecological niche and
there's a formal Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) that
allows professors to hire them for credit or a "UROP Minimum Wage" ... that
doesn't have overhead levied upon it (that's used mostly for January and
summer).

Also, a professor who's truly bad or impossible at teaching will not get
tenure. And I've watched or rather overhead (sort of an open office setup) a
department head force a tenured professor you've probably heard of read every
evaluation form submitted for a particular required foundational class, all
but one of which (which was a special case) were highly negative, and then
tell the professor he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course
again.

As for the general topic, MIT's big grade inflation period seems to track
pretty well with the Vietnam War and the draft:
<http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html>.

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aycangulez
Although there is clearly a grade inflation, the correlation between student
selectivity and average GPA should also be noted:

"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated
by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool:

GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)

Non-selective public schools (typically with 15 percent rejection rates or
less) with GPAs in the 2.8 range or less tend to have only modest grade
inflation. Some have none."

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mcknz
Grade inflation is problematic, but is GPA of any use outside of academia
(except for entry-level jobs perhaps)?

Perhaps the inflation is a sign that the currency is worthless.

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nkassis
I guess, the main issue is that if half the colleges increase grades, the
other half looks bad. Maybe a new measure should exist, like your GPA relative
to the school average.

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grhino
For some schools, average GPA can vary widely with major as well.

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nkassis
Yep, maybe it should just be within your major, last 5 years or something
similar.

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vital101
I went to one of the public schools where this data was gathered from. My
experience with grade inflation is that it's mostly about money. If a class is
deemed hard, students don't want to take it. If students don't take the class,
the department can't make any money, and therefore can't pay the bills.

That, and a lot of professors just don't care anymore. They don't want to be
bothered with teaching, so they just pass everyone without a second thought.

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jamesash
The gap between grade inflation at colleges and universities could represent a
gap in the energy, motivation and determination of students to complain about
their grades.

There's asymmetry between the (nearly limitless) time and energy students have
for complaining about their grades versus the (extremely scarce) amount of
time professors have for addressing it. This is anecdotal, but I should note
that the trendline is inversely proportional to the demands on professors'
time over the past few decades.

In the MIT chem department one professor's tactic was to have the student
evaluations right before dropping the hammer with a tough final exam.

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jchonphoenix
Carnegie Mellon's Average GPA is still a 2.8. Hasn't changed in a long time.

One thing I have noticed and could be interesting though - is it possible that
students are getting better at the material over time?

I'm a TA so I have access to exams from past years. It is most definitely the
case the exams just keep getting harder. Exams from 5 years ago are complete
jokes in comparison to exams these days, but students seem to be keeping up.
It may be that they are just exposed to the material before college now. Any
comments?

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rbanffy
I also notice that masters and phds were much harder to find when I graduated
from college, about 20 years ago.

I wonder if those became easier to earn or if this is the result of a
graduation arms race.

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nagrom
In the UK we are getting more PhD candidates than there were 10-20 years ago
because the stipend that a student is paid is actually a living wage. It used
to be that the PhD stipend covered the university fee only, and that to
continue as a PhD student you needed some other income.

It's now seen as a reasonable career move - boost your skills, do something
interesting, travel the world and get paid at a rate that most undergraduate
students consider luxurious.

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rbanffy
Makes sense. 10 years ago I hired a PhD. I was ashamed to make the offer
because of the limitations of my budget at the time. Yet, it was still three
times more than she was able to get in academia.

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balding_n_tired
There is an interesting chapter in _Excellence Without a Soul_ by Harry Lewis,
suggesting that garde inflation is less a problem that widely believed. You
could look it up.

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reader5000
Anybody know of any studies correlating GPA with job performance or whatever
GPA is supposed to be useful for?

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aplusbi
[http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/13412205.h...](http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/13412205.html)

"On the other hand, Dye and Reck's meta-analysis (1988) revealed that limited
variations of undergraduate GPA (e.g., GPA for the last two years, or for
courses in the major field) can be more valid predictors of performance than
overall GPA. In addition, Colarelli, Dean, and Konstans (1987); Wise (1975);
Harrell and Harrell (1974); and Weisbrod and Karpoff (1968) all found positive
relationships between grades and performance. "

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reader5000
Eh, do quote fairly though:

"Although GPA has been widely analyzed, the research has produced inconsistent
results. Some meta-analyses suggest that grades have relatively low validity
as a predictor of job success (Bretz, 1989; Hunter and Hunter, 1984).
Individual studies by Ferris (1982) and Schick and Kunnecke (1982) support the
meta-analysis findings; these studies found no relationship between grades and
performance evaluations."

In other words the state of research on this question, back in the early 90s
when this article was written, was "inconsistent".

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aplusbi
I considered included that paragraph but decided against it since your
question was simply "Anybody know of any studies correlating GPA with job
performance." This article quotes five studies that show a positive
relationship.

My point wasn't so much that the article supports the relationship, just that
there are studies that do. Maybe I should have linked to the studies instead.

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symptic
I wonder how much these changes correlate to funding.

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pgbovine
ok i'll bite ... the y axis starts at 2.6, not 0, which visually exaggerates
the differences. regardless of the merits of this analysis, this graph is
disingenuous

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nkassis
not all graph should start at 0. In this case that might be a good idea but if
your data is all above 5000 and moves a couple points, you probably don't want
to show 0 because it will be hard to see what is happening. A one point change
might be very significant.

