by Walter Brasch
About 1.8
million students will graduate from college this year, according to the National
Center for Education Statistics. At least one-third of them will graduate with
honors. In some colleges, about half will be honor graduates.
It’s not
that the current crop is that bright, it’s that honors is determined by grade
point average. Because of runaway grade inflation, the average grade in college
is now an “A.” About 43 percent of all college grades are “A”s, according to a
recent study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, and published in the
prestigious Teachers College Record. About three-fourths of all grades are “A”s or “B”s.
Throw out the universal curve that applies
to everything from height to house prices. That curve is reality. College
grades are not.
At one time, the universal curve applied
to college grades: “A”s were about 10 percent of all grades; “B”s were about 20
percent; “C”s were about 40 percent; “D”s were about 20 percent; and “F”s were about
10 percent. That grade break-down, which could be more or less, depending upon
a number of factors, isn’t even ancient history—it’s more like an ethereal
ghost that no one understands.
Drs.
Rojstaczer and Healy report that in 1940 about 15 percent of all grades were “A”s.
While grades of “B” have remained stable at about 35 percent for the past six
decades, grades of “C” have dropped sharply from 35 percent to about 15
percent. Grades of “D” have dropped by
half over the past six decades, while grades of “F” apparently are issued only
to those students who didn’t show up for class or whose brain is bottled in
formaldehyde in a science lab.
Several
studies show a high correlation between high grades issued by professors to
students and high evaluations of professors by students.
Why that
matters is that professors are pragmatic. College administrations have taken an
easy way to evaluate professors’ teaching abilities by having students fill out
a multi-question survey at the end of the semester. Professors know that
19-year-olds will typically rate “likable” and non-demanding professors higher.
Add those evaluations to a few meaningless professional papers delivered to a
couple of dozen yawning academics at boring conferences and a list of
university committees the professor was appointed or elected to, and opportunities
for tenure and promotion increase.
Although
there are thousands of excellent professors who excel in all areas of teaching
and scholarship, many professors, even those with a string of academic letters
after their names, may not even be aware they are not as rigorous as they
should be. After all, their own professors, wanting to be liked and promoted,
may not have demanded significant academic sweat, so they aren’t aware of what
reasonable criteria should be for their own students. There is also the reality
that collegial “get-togethers” and participation on useless college
committees—and being liked by one’s colleagues—may be an easier route to tenure
and promotion than doing rigorous scholarship and demanding the same from
students.
Because of
grade inflation, students avoid professors who believe the grade of “C” is the
average grade and who set up standards that require students to do more than
show up, read a couple of hundred pages, and answer a few questions. Fewer
students in classes usually results in questions from administrators who may
claim they believe in academic rigor and integrity, but who have the souls of Ebenezer
Scrooge.
Some departments traditionally grade
tougher than others. Science and engineering departments tend to have lower
overall grade averages than those in social sciences and humanities. Education programs
tend to have the highest grade averages. It’s not unusual for the average grade
in elementary education courses to be an A-minus, and in secondary education to
be a B-plus. That means either our future
teachers are brighter than the light from a supernova—or that some of the profs
who are teaching our future teachers don’t know there are more than just two
letters in the alphabet.
In some
classes, at all educational levels, we don’t even require students to know
anything more than hand signals, preparation of crib sheets, and techniques of
paraphrasing five different articles and calling the result a research paper—assuming
the professor even requires that much. The one class in which most students can
legitimately earn a grade of “A” without cheating is Cheating.
Add into the
slurpy mix of academics a few inconvenient pressures. Athletics coaches want to
make sure their pack of future draft picks stay academically eligible. A
significant minority of students spend more time trying to plea-bargain the
professor into raising the grade than they do studying for the exams. And when
plea-bargaining fails, hovering overhead are the helicopter parents who want to
make sure professors truly understand how brilliant their darling children are,
and how (horror!) a B-minus not only
is the wrong grade, but can damage their darling little Boo-Boo’s fragile
psyche and chances to become a Fortune 500 CEO. Besides, the parent reasons
that buying a college degree is like buying a car—if you pay the money, you
should get a car.
If the
professor doesn’t yield to parental pressure, there’s always some administrator
with jelly for a spine, and a pencil-brain that equates quality of education
with how many children she or he can capture and put into brick-and-mortar
buildings. The pursuit in college has been of achieving a critical mass of
students who earn high enough grades to stay in college, sometimes for six
years, rather than in developing knowledge and critical thinking skills—traits
that administrators all claim they believe but don’t do more than pay “lip
service.”
The
problem of runaway grade inflation is that the exceptional student receives the
same grade as the above average student, and the mediocre student can slide
into a degree. Until professors stand up for academic rigor, even against the prattling
of their administrators and the practices of their more “likable” peers, and are
willing to push not only themselves but their students beyond their limits,
there is no reason for students to expect academic rigor—and every reason for
them to expect to be able to graduate with honors.
[Dr. Brasch is an award-winning journalist,
former newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, and professor emeritus from
a Pennsylvania state university. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an in-depth investigation of the health and
environmental effects of deep earth drilling in the Marcellus Shale.]
