If you were sitting on Healy lawn at graduation in the Spring of 2013, there’s a 55 percent chance that you were one of the many students graduating with the “distinctive” recognition of receiving honors. Three years from now, the statistics won’t be as great. Only approximately 25 percent of the class of 2017 will be granted the same recognition. This conspicuous reduction will be a result of new university-wide policies aimed at addressing an issue that’s been leading headlines nationwide—grade inflation.
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Last December, after learning from the Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education that the most commonly awarded grade at Harvard was an A and the median was an A-, longtime government professor Harvey Mansfield publicly expressed concern that this rampant grade inflation does not reflect the quality of work that students are producing.
“The situation is at its worst at Harvard now,” Mansfield wrote in an email to the Voice. “Recent studies show that today’s students are working much less hard than students of a generation ago.”
Even though recent headlines have been mainly targeting Harvard, the case of grade inflation extends beyond the gates of Cambridge. According to The Washington Post, since the 1960’s, grades in the United States have been on the increase with more students earning grades in the A range and fewer in the C range—Georgetown being no exception.
“When I joined Georgetown, I learned that the faculty on the main campus had a resolution for a reform of grading practices on campus, in order to address a nationwide issue of grade inflation, or more properly ‘grade compression,’” Provost Robert Groves wrote in a blog post on Dec. 25, 2013. A year and a half after coming to Georgetown, Groves has announced changes in the grading system in order to address the situation.
Groves’ announcement comes at a time when grade inflation is attracting nationwide attention. Professors at Georgetown have been noticing an adjustment in grading habits and norms in the past years. “I thought I had seen a change in time from a B being considered a good grade to now a B being seen as not a good grade,” said Marilyn McMorrow, visiting assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service. “There have been very few times that I have given a grade below a C.”
The shift to a grading system that is skewed to the higher end of the grading scheme consequently has led to an increase in the number of students graduating with honors. According to John Q. Pierce, University registrar and assistant provost, the percentage of students who earn honor degrees has been steadily increasing. In the graduating class of 2013, 64.35 percent of the students in the SFS, 56.23 percent of the students in the College, 58.79 percent of students in the NHS, and 38.51 percent of the students in the MSB graduated with honors.
Although grade inflation is becoming increasingly prevalent among universities, educators disagree on its causes and the implications for higher education. Michael Bailey, chair of the Georgetown Government Department, believes that inflation can be a completely natural phenomenon as a result of shifting of the expectations between students and faculty over time.
On the other hand, other professors believe that the quality of students coming to Georgetown has just been increasing, which leads to higher grades. “If you got in here, it’s for a reason. You have taken academics very seriously, and we’re all used to doing well,” said Parnia Zahedi (COL ’15), vice president of the College Academic Council. “I think coming here and being against even brighter people than you were in high school makes you want to try that much harder.”
Mansfield argues, however, that even if students are becoming more hardworking, the solution is to raise standards and push toward excellence rather than lower them.
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Professors could also have an incentive to give students higher grades so that students rate them more highly on evaluations. “Some faculty believe (and there is evidence to support this) that high average grades lead to positive teaching evaluations, a key criterion in their own merit review and promotion decisions,” Groves wrote in his blog post on grades.
Erick Langer, professor of history, agrees with Groves and believes that some professors are tempted to be dishonest when grading because higher grades may act as proof of good teaching. “If you give an exam where most people don’t do as well as they should, that means you haven’t done your job,” Langer said. “A curve will hide that. It hides poor teaching.”
According to Groves, another explanation might be found at the departmental level as a result of students switching into majors known to attribute higher grades to their students.
As the chair of the government department, Michael Bailey is concerned that some departments inflate grades in order to attract students to a major. “That means some majors can compete by giving lots of A’s and having lower standards. Now the other departments are losing lots of students,” Bailey said.
Problems arise also from the larger framework of how higher education is structured in the country. Because U.S. News & World Report college rankings take job and graduate school placement rates into consideration, it is in the interest of universities to produce candidates with higher GPAs.
Even though higher grades might give universities higher leverage in college rankings, uncovering grade inflation might affect universities’ credibilities. “If employers come to realize that 65 percent of the class is getting honors, well then it becomes meaningless,” Pierce said.
Some professors at Georgetown also feel that the problem with grade inflation is that it compresses the range of grades that can be offered. “As the grade system becomes compressed into only one or two grades, … how can you distinguish between the truly excellent and those who just did well enough?,” Langer said.
Furthermore, as the number of A’s increase the value of the grade consequently decreases. “If I actually think of a straight A as outstanding, that implies that you stand out in comparison to others,” McMorrow said. “So if many people are getting outstanding, just the notion of outstanding is undermined.”
Widely-known grade inflation presents other issues. Once students know that grade inflation exists, it’s possible that they will have less incentive to achieve as highly as they could. “We are not necessarily striving to completely grasp the course material, but just know it well enough to get some points,” Antonia Kopp (NHS ‘14), co-chair of the NHS Academic Council, said. “We are relying on the curve rather than our own academic capabilities.”
With the increasing concern about grade inflation, some departments at Georgetown have taken independent measures in order to address the increasing grades.
The McDonough School of Business, for instance, restructured its grading system at the beginning of the 2009 academic year to prevent grade inflation. All core courses’ syllabi stipulate that the average grade awarded to students cannot be above a 3.3 and that no more than 35 percent of the class can receive A or A- grades.
Reena Aggarwal, finance professor in the MSB, teaches a class that follows these regulations. “I think that by having a policy like this, it makes it completely clear to students what to expect and it’s consistent,” she said. “There’s a lot more objectivity and it’s transparent. Everybody knows it.”
On the other hand, although this policy addresses concerns of grade inflation, some people are concerned that it creates new problems. Zahedi believes that curves could foster an environment of excessive competition. To get a good grade, a student doesn’t only have to do well, they have to perform better than the person sitting next to her or him. “If you walk onto Lau 2 … you see people studying and helping each other out,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to hurt that part of our community if it became more competitive because of the grading system.”
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By promoting competition, curves could also discourage students from learning from fellow students, which Langer believes to be as important as learning from teachers. “A curve promotes people stabbing each other in the back rather than getting together to learn mutually,” he said.
Aggarwal, however, has not found this to be the case in her classes. “Students have not become more cutthroat in competition. I really haven’t seen that. 35 percent for core courses still allows a lot of leeway,” she said.
Even though this might be the case, that doesn’t mean that a definitive curve is the absolute solution to grade inflation. Curves only work when there is a large enough pool of students for it to follow regular grade distribution. “If you have only 15 students in a course, it’s harder to have a policy like this,” Aggarwal said.
Georgetown has looked for other ways to deal with grade inflation at a University-wide level by making grading policies more transparent and rigorous at the time of awarding honors. “One of the benefits of being more rigorous in the awarding of honors is to make students work harder. If you work harder, you learn more and the whole point is to take advantage of the opportunity to learn,” Pierce said.
The University changed the cutoff requirements for students receiving degree honors beginning with the class of 2017. Summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude will be awarded to those with a GPA equivalent to the top 5 percent, 15 percent, and 25 percent of the previous graduating class, respectively.
“The faculty and deans were noting that very large proportions of the classes were graduating with Latin honors and it was deluding the meaning of Latin Honors,” Groves said.
According to Pierce, in the graduating class of 2013, the twenty-fifth percentile cutoff was 3.728 in the College, 3.736 in the NHS, 3.730 in the SFS, and 3.614 in the MSB. All of these GPAs are higher than the previous cutoff for honors of 3.5.
Pierce believes that this policy might actually help students overall, especially the ones who wouldn’t be receiving honors in either case. “If you know that 65 percent of the class is getting honors and some student don’t have honors, then they must be way towards the bottom of the class,” he said. “However, if you know that the policy in the catalogue says that only 25% of the students in a class get honors, then you realize that there are a lot of students with good GPAs that don’t have honors.”
The other new policy beginning this academic year is that mean grades will be offered as an option on unofficial transcripts so that students can determine how well they are doing in classes relative to other students. “I think in my memory as a student, I wanted the highest grade point average as possible, but I also wanted it to mean that I was doing well relative to others,” Groves said.
To some, this adjustment has been more controversial. “Cornell did something kind of similar and what it lead to was students were just using that information to take those classes that were easier,” said Bailey.
Although the mean transcript results are private so that only the student in the class can see them, Bailey suspects that word of mouth will get out about which classes are easier to get A’s in. “I think that kind of already gets out,” he said. “But now people have evidence.”
Beyond the role that this new policy might have in students’ selection of classes, Bailey believes that the idea of calculating class means without taking other factors into consideration is in itself inherently flawed. “To determine whether a grade in a particular class is inflated, there are two factors, one is what the average grade level is, but two is what the average ability of the students is,” he said. “We’re only doing the former and we’re not taking any account of the latter.”
According to Bailey, in the Government Department, about 25 percent of the students in introductory level classes receive A’s or A-’s, while upwards of 50 percent of students in upper level classes receive them. “I’m less concerned about a high average in an honors class where [students] had to apply to get in,” he said. “That class probably should have a higher GPA and this policy would make it look like this terrible gut class.”
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Three years from now, the lawn won’t be as covered in distinguished graduates as before, but the ultimate solution to the grade inflation problem remains elusive.
To many, the reality of grade inflation is only a slight manifestation of a larger problem in institutions of higher education.
“We have to decide as an education institution: what do we want grades to mean? What are they trying to measure?” Groves said.
McMorrow believes that the importance placed on grades is actually leading students to prioritize their GPAs over learning.
“The grade is supposed to be the measure, not the goal, but we always mistake the measure for the goal,” McMorrow said. “That’s why grading is problematic to begin with. That conflation between the measure of what we’re seeking, and what we’re seeking. What we should be seeking is learning.”
