<p>Grading policies are certainly a hot-button issue but the debate seems to be shifting from a discussion of grade deflation to a discussion of the problem of grade inflation and it appears that there is a growing unease at Princetons peers regarding the latter. It has become an issue of faculty concern at Harvard, Columbia and, most recently, Yale.</p>
<p>Here are some particularly interesting articles from the last academic year at Yale followed by links to similar discussions in the national press and some articles focusing on Harvard and Columbia. The professors at Yale and elsewhere are not of a single mind, but there appears to be a faculty majority at many of Princetons peers in favor of dealing with the problem of grade inflation as Princeton has already done.</p>
<p>Yales internal debate over this problem and possible solutions was very public this year.</p>
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<p>Faculty Consider Grading Overhaul (2/11/2013–Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>[Faculty</a> consider grading overhaul | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/02/11/faculty-consider-grading-overhaul/]Faculty”>Faculty consider grading overhaul - Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>Forty years ago, only 10 percent of grades awarded by Yale College were in the A-range. Last spring, that percentage was 62.</p>
<p>Yale College Dean Mary Miller created the Yale College ad hoc committee on grading policy, which released a preliminary report on grading trends last week, as a response to rising grade-point average cutoffs for high honors and soaring grade averages nationwide. . . .</p>
<p>Though the report stated that compression at the top of the grade distribution can be detrimental to students, students and faculty interviewed expressed mixed reactions to the committees proposals.</p>
<p>[The report] looks at the long term trajectory in which the total number of As and A-minuses have risen steadily as a percentage of overall grades across all divisions and departments, and it recommends that the faculty take a number of actions, Miller said. I think this is going to be a major point of discussion this year.</p>
<p>The committees report begins with an examination of the purpose and intent of grades, and then compares grading data from Yale to similar data from peer institutions. The report notes continuous grade compression at the top of the GPA rubric, with As, A-minuses and B-pluses dominating students transcripts. The report also indicates large discrepancies between the grades awarded in different departments.</p>
<p>Based on this data, the committee drafted a number of preliminary proposals, including transitioning Yales grading system to a 100-point system. Fair said percentage grades would eliminate the cliffs that exaggerate the differences between B-plus and A-minus grades while providing professors with a means of curbing potential grade inflation.</p>
<p>If youre going to change the system at Yale from what we now have with respect to the clustering of As and A-minuses, youre probably going to have to change the units of currency, Fair said.</p>
<p>Though the committee did not advocate mandatory grade distributions, the report suggested a set of guidelines that would award 35 percent of grades in the 90 to 100 range, 40 percent in the 80 to 89 range, 20 percent in the 70 to 79 range, 4 to 5 percent in the 60 to 69 range and less than 1 percent at 59. Under these distributions, the mean grade in Yale College would be an 85.5 percent, according to the report. . . . (continued)</p>
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<p>Some Yale students agree that grade inflation is a problem. See, for example, the following musings of one undergraduate:</p>
<p>The Culture of Yale College (2/18/2013–Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>[ZELINSKY:</a> The culture of Yale College | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/02/18/zelinsky-the-culture-of-yale-college/]ZELINSKY:”>ZELINSKY: The culture of Yale College - Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>In a the emperor has no clothes moment, a faculty committee recently concluded that grade inflation plagues Yale. The solution? Replace letter grades with numbers on a zero-to-one-hundred scale.</p>
<p>While certainly deserving of consideration, this proposed policy misses a broader issue: Grade inflation is the symptom of our undergraduate culture. We cannot discuss why students gravitate toward easier courses with guaranteed A-minuses, without discussing the social and academic pressures that drive Yale College.</p>
<p>In many ways, our culture is defined by whom we let into Yale and what happens when newly minted freshmen come onto campus. Elite institutions of higher education select for a particular type of applicant: someone who avoids risks, works both hard and consistently, and dominates a small range of extracurricular activities think model UN, a varsity team or student councils.</p>
<p>When they graduate high school, goal-oriented freshmen find themselves without a clear definition of success. Once at Yale, you no longer need to get into college. For students, the result is ambiguity and a bit of anxiety. We wonder, How do I succeed here?</p>
<p>As we seek benchmarks for what it means to win Yale, we look to what older students have done. We too often pick some socially approved extracurriculars, and make advancement in them our goal. (Right now, founding a start-up is a particularly hip way to succeed.) As we become sophomores and juniors, the goals shift: getting into the right sorority or secret society, to give two typical examples.</p>
<p>How does this environment affect our academics? We hear that being a section ***hole is bad, and so we strive for a kind of bland academic conformity. Our goal becomes getting As, in a way that makes it look like we dont do all our reading and we party every weekend night. And so, we frequently gravitate toward classes that protect our GPA, without much work after all, we also need to devote so much of our time to extracurricular advancement. In the free market of shopping period and course evaluations, professors respond in kind, watering down syllabi and standards to meet our new goals.</p>
<p>What is particularly pernicious about Yales culture of conformity, both academic and social, is that we dont notice it. We often cloak our conventionality in shrouds of uniqueness we find sexy buzzwords to describe what we study or find some niche, within a larger extracurricular category, in which to specialize. But, at our core, Yalies remain risk averse, afraid of working too hard while simultaneously loathing Bs a measure of failure, of falling short of our goal.</p>
<p>So how does this all relate to grade inflation? The bottom line is that a new grading system will not change Yales underlying culture. We will still seek out easier courses, and we will still poorly rate a professor who values intellectualism over academic conformity. Sure, professors can make finer gradations giving out 93s and 94s instead of an A but grades will still remain high. And to pursue social validation, too many students will continue to prioritize the public success of extracurriculars over the private pleasure of true scholarship.</p>
<p>I wish I could offer a pithy solution to our cultural problems, but I cannot nor, am I sure that all our culture is a problem. But the bottom line is simple: We need to admit that this culture exists before we can tackle its flaws flaws including and far exceeding grade inflation.</p>
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<p>Still another group of students at Yale acknowledges the existence of grade inflation but is protesting attempts to deal with it. </p>
<p>Defining the Yale College ‘A’ (Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>[UP</a> CLOSE | Defining the Yale College ‘A’ | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/04/11/up-close-defining-the-yale-college-a/]UP”>UP CLOSE | Defining the Yale College ‘A’ - Yale Daily News)</p>
<p>For the first time in recent memory, students gathered outside a monthly Yale College faculty meeting to protest. . . </p>
<p>Students stationed themselves outside Davies Auditorium, where the April 4 Yale College faculty meeting took place, to protest a variety of proposals to overhaul Yales grading system, including the adoption of a 100-point grading scale and a recommended rubric of grade distributions. As professors and administrators filed into the auditorium, students distributed leaflets outlining their concerns about the proposals impact on student life and academic culture.</p>
<p>Proposals to change the grading system follow decades of steadily rising average GPAs across Yale College: the gentlemans C, it seemed, had become the gentlemans B. And after 62 percent of the grades awarded last spring were in the A-range, many professors have acknowledged that grading in Yale College is headed in a dangerous direction.</p>
<p>While the trend may have solid statistical backing, its cause remains a source of dispute among faculty and students. Admissions rates to Yale College have plummeted throughout the last decade, and with selectivity comes greater talent, some professors said. Others point to broader cultural shifts among students, namely rising expectations to achieve high grades in all classes. But regardless of cause, some members of the Yale community fear that every top grade awarded ultimately cheapens the value of a Yale A. . . .</p>
<p>[T]he available information was enough to cause [Dean] Miller to convene a committee to re-examine grading at Yale this fall. . . .</p>
<p>For many departments now, there are in effect only three grades used: A, A-minus, and B-plus, the report stated. For the less generous departments, B is added to this group. Yale is approaching the point, at least in some departments, in which the only grades are A and A-minus, which is close to having no grading.</p>
<p>Without students earning a wide spread of grades, Miller said grades themselves may be becoming ineffective. While the letters on a transcript convey a certain measure of absolute information to employers and graduate schools, Miller said grades should also help students learn and improve their own work.</p>
<p>The available statistics suggest that grades will continue to follow their upward trajectory if the high number of grades at the top of the spectrum remains unaddressed. . . .</p>
<p>In a News survey sent to approximately a third of student body earlier this week, 57 percent of 573 respondents said they think grade inflation exists at Yale. But the statistics are not so simple: While 37 percent of respondents said they feel they have received a final grade higher than they deserve, 72 percent said they feel they have received a final grade lower than they deserve. And, when asked to define grade inflation, answers did not always align. . . .</p>
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<p>I find the last paragraph as shown above particularly illuminating. Of the Yale students surveyed, 57% think that their Yale grades are already inflated but 72% feel that their final grades should have been even higher. I doubt that these Yale students are atypical in their desire to get good grades but one can see the difficulties that the faculty must face in controlling the relentless upward pressure on grades.</p>
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<p>Finally, here are some additional articles on the subject from the national press and some relating to Princetons peers:</p>
<p><a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/[/url]”>http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/</a> </p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Grade Inflation : NPR](<a href=“http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1133702]Harvard”>Harvard Grade Inflation : NPR)</p>
<p>[College</a> Inc. - Grade inflation is making students lazy](<a href=“http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/07/grade_inflation_is_making_stud.html]College”>http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/07/grade_inflation_is_making_stud.html)</p>
<p><a href=“http://econ.ucsb.edu/~babcock/GradeInflationUCSD.pdf[/url]”>http://econ.ucsb.edu/~babcock/GradeInflationUCSD.pdf</a> </p>
<p>[The</a> Initiative to End Grade Inflation](<a href=“http://www.endgradeinflation.org/]The”>http://www.endgradeinflation.org/) </p>
<p>[Grade</a> Inflation Minnesota State University, Mankato](<a href=“The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning | Minnesota State University, Mankato”>The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning | Minnesota State University, Mankato) </p>
<p>[The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian :: Profs, students discuss grade inflation](<a href=“http://thedp.com/article/profs-students-discuss-grade-inflation]The”>http://thedp.com/article/profs-students-discuss-grade-inflation)</p>
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<p>I would not attempt to guess how Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other institutions will end up dealing with grade inflation but I think its clear that they will have to take some kind of action. Given current trends (and as noted by Yale Dean Miller) Yale and some other schools will soon effectively grant only A letter grades. Once this is widely known, the value of a good GPA from these schools will be greatly cheapened and the differences between the truly brilliant students and all others will be obscured. This appears to be a fear shared by many members of the Yale faculty.</p>