In 1974, 26.5 percent of grades given at Georgetown were A’s. The average GPA was a 3.05. By the fall of 2006, 55.5 percent of the grades were A’s or A-’s, 47.4 percent of seniors graduated with honors, and the average GPA had climbed to 3.42, according to data from the University’s “Intellectual Life Report, 2006-2007: The Undergraduate Experience,” which was published last year.
Although the rise in grades is campus-wide, it varies among the four undergraduate schools. According to the report, the School of Foreign Service gave out the greatest percentage of A’s in 2006, at 65 percent, followed by the School of Nursing and Health Studies and the McDonough School of Business. The College gave out the smallest percentage of A grades, at 52.5 percent.
The variation is even more pronounced at the departmental level. Language classes gave out the largest percentage of A’s, with A’s accounting for over 90 percent of grades in four departments in 2006 (including 95.5 percent in the Persian department). The social science departments as a group had the lowest percentage of A grades, primarily due to the Political Economy and Economics departments, which doled out 22.7 and 29.7 percent respectively.
“In terms of what has actually been happening over the past 20 years, there’s no doubt that there has definitely been grade inflation,” School of Foreign Service Professor Ted Moran said. Moran, who began teaching at Georgetown in 1978, has witnessed the upward surge of grades at the University first-hand.
Georgetown currently lacks any official policy to combat inflation. The University has a recommended grade distribution for all departments and instructors, suggesting that professors attempt to award 30 percent A’s, 54 percent B’s, 13 percent C’s, 2 percent D’s, and 1 percent F’s. But there are no formal, university-wide procedures to address deviations from the recommended guidelines.
Faced with the recent statistics and armed with the recommendations of the 2006-2007 Intellectual Life Committee, two subcommittees appointed by the Main Campus Executive Faculty have been wading through the intellectual life report for over a year, but it does not appear likely that they will initiate any immediate changes.
“The recommendations from the report are not being implemented as yet,” Interim Dean of the College Chester Gillis said. “This year there will probably be some more faculty discussion on this issue. These conversations take a while.”
For now, professors are fairly free from restrictions when it comes to grade distributions.
“Professors have a lot of autonomy over their courses,” Gillis said, adding that the Philosophy department has cracked down on high grades recently. In 2006, 43 percent of the grades handed out were A’s, the lowest percentage among the humanities departments. “We’re reluctant to impose on a professor’s autonomy. If there is an egregious case, the department chair or dean can bring up the issue. There are ways to do it diplomatically, without saying ‘now see here!’”
Gillis said that most professors recognize the problem of grade inflation, but finding a solution without stepping on professors’ toes or unduly hurting students’ GPA’s is more difficult, in large part because of a disagreement over the causes of inflation. No one wants to claim responsibility for the trend.
“Most professors think ‘there is a problem, but it’s not me,’” Gillis said.
Stuart Rojstaczer, a recently retired Duke University professor, creator of the web site gradeinflation.com, and author of Gone for Good: Tales of university life after the golden age, blames inflation on universities caving to a whinier generation. After his years at Duke, Rojstaczer seems disillusioned with higher education (he refers to college professors as babysitters for 21-year-olds on his website).
“Universities grade higher because they grade easier, end of story,” Rojstaczer wrote in an e-mail. “University officials try to convince themselves that grades are higher because students are better today than they were forty years ago. This is just plain silly. I’ve never talked to a university provost or president who can tell me this with a straight face.”
Psychology Professor Steven Sabat, however, sees inflation as substantially more complicated than a simple case of lax standards. He challenges the ability of critics to make meaningful generalizations about the level of rigor in courses, pointing out that it is difficult (if not impossible) for an individual to evaluate a professor’s standards and expectations without experiencing them first-hand. He also espouses the argument that Rojstaczer denies, saying that students today may deserve their high grades.
“I think that students today are more intensely motivated, are working harder, are coming out of high school better prepared, and are more frightened than they were 25 years ago,” Sabat said. He points to the documented rise in IQ scores over the past decade, the increasing numbers of parents enrolling their children in preschools, and the jump in the number of college applications as potentially influencing the academic performance of undergraduates and leading to higher grades.
“When you went to the new student convocation, you probably heard that you had one of the most competitive classes, maybe the most competitive class in the University’s history,” Sabat said. “It would be ridiculous to look at you all, and at the same time, announce that only 35 percent of you will get A’s. If you’re the most competitive class in history, why shouldn’t we expect
better?”
Student evaluations have also come under fire as a potential instigator of inflation because the forms that Georgetown students bubble in at the end of a semester can affect professors’ tenure opportunities or salaries. Because professors who give higher grades often receive better evaluations, the concern is that professors grade higher in an effort to improve their ratings.
“Student evaluations of a certain type are not very effective analytical tools and directly drive inflation,” Biology Professor Joseph Neale said. “The type we have at Georgetown is one of these types; it has extraordinarily little value in assessing the quality of teaching. For faculty that aren’t tenured, this is a particularly disastrous tool. It’s bogus, absolutely bogus.”
“I do think that faculty members feel this pressure, and I do think that there are faculty members who cave to it,” Psychology Professor James Lamiell said.
Not all professors agree with this assessment, though.
According to School of Foreign Service Professor Jeff Anderson, concerns about the power of student evaluations to inflate grades are potentially harmful exaggerations.
“I think it’s a myth that professors are sitting in their offices quaking in their boots over student evaluations, doling out A’s like they’re going out of style,” he said.
Looking ahead, University Provost James O’Donnell noted that Assistant Provost Randy Bass is currently leading a large project which works on improving the forms students use to evaluate courses.
“Working on improving [student evaluations] is a large project,” O’Donnell wrote in an e-mail. “Course evaluations are like grades. When they turn a complicated relationship into a simple number, they’re bound to oversimplify.”
To students, grade inflation may seem like a victimless crime. And while some faculty members argue that high grades are not scarce resources and should not be a matter of concern, others point to inflation as a sign of a dangerous trend in higher education.
“The real issue is the grade distributions in concert with the hours studied,” Neale said, mentioning that while grades continue to rise, students report working less – an average of less than an hour and a half of studying per credit hour per week. “If that’s the case, then maybe the average student isn’t working up to his or her potential. If we set the bar too low, which I believe we have, the result is that students don’t work that hard.”
The data suggesting that students study limited hours is self-reported by students on course evaluation forms, and is not necessarily conclusive. According to Sabat, several students have mentioned that they interpreted the question to mean only how long they crammed for an occasional exam, not how many total hours they spent working for a course, potentially skewing the results.
If students are studying less and less and good grades are readily available for less work, professors are concerned that students will not be as motivated to study, will learn less, and will party more.
“Go into any dorm at Georgetown on a Thursday night and tell me over 50 percent of the students are working hard,” Rojstaczer wrote. “It’s party town.”
The disappearance of lower grades has also resulted in students being more grade-obsessed,
according to Rojstaczer.
“Grade inflation seems to have caused students to be more neurotic about grades,” Rojstaczer said. “They worry about their GPA to the hundredth decimal point.”
O’Donnell is similarly concerned about the recent obsession with grades, noting that “when people are paying attention to grades it’s a sign that the real and best education isn’t happening … Grades are a lot less important in life than students usually think they are. There are plenty of duds with 4.0 averages and plenty of promising high achievers with averages much lower than that. There are a lot more interesting things about and in Georgetown than grades, and the people who know that are the ones who get the best grades.”
The effects of grade inflation extend beyond the undergraduate experience. As more schools dole out more A’s, it becomes harder for graduate school admissions boards and employers to distinguish between students who work hard and those who benefit from lowered standards. As a result, grad schools have taken to relying more heavily on standardized test scores, class rank, course work and relative difficulty of the undergraduate school, according to University of Virginia Law School Dean of Admissions Jason Wu Trujillo.
“The right thing to do is to try and deflate grades, but we don’t want to hurt our students at the same time,” School of Foreign Service Dean Robert Gallucci said. Mentioning the “first-actor” dilemma, Gallucci explained that if Georgetown acts first to deflate grades, students could be at a disadvantage compared to students from around the country.
Some universities, including Princeton, have taken action to stem the tide of inflation by implementing a strong curve in 2004 that would limit the amount of A’s given to 35 percent. Similar to Georgetown’s, Princeton’s guidelines are not mandatory, simply “strongly suggested,” Princeton Chemistry Professor Michael Hecht said (full disclosure: Hecht is the father of Voice Leisure Editor Shira Hecht). After the guidelines’ implementation, Hecht said they had “something of an impact.” He added that some departments were more affected and upset than others. Because Hecht teaches science courses, which use quantitative exams, it is easier for him to spread out grades. And while Hecht’s freshman classes were not affected by the change, he is now grading juniors and seniors and is bothered by the policy.
“Maybe if 95 percent of the seniors get A’s on their theses, it’s okay,” he said.
One of the few exceptions to grade inflation is Reed College in Portland, Oregon. At Reed, according to Dean of Faculty Peter Steinberger, the average GPA is around a 3.0 and has remained nearly constant over the past 20 years.
“We don’t have grade inflation,” Steinberger said.
Steinberger argued that while Reed does have a written policy suggesting the distribution of grades, its effect, if there is one, is minimal. He doubts that many faculty members are even aware of the policy “as it’s pretty well hidden,” and not enforced in any way.
“The lack of inflation at Reed is a product of the culture of the institution, not a written policy,” he said. “We think we’re a little bit different than other places.”
Despite Reed’s pride in its unconventional grading system (students don’t receive standard report cards unless they have a C- or below in a class, and there are no honors programs or deans’ lists) Steinberger admitted that Reed faces a challenge in being one of the only schools in the country where grades are not inflated.
Ensuring that Reed graduates with their lower GPA’s are competitive with students from other universities with higher averages is “something we worry about tremendously,” Steinberger said. Still, Reed manages to rank third in the nation in the number of PhD students produced per capita.
For Rojstaczer, the responsibility to end inflation lies squarely in the hands of university officials.
“Over 100 college presidents just got together to champion drinking for those 18 to 21,” he said.
“If they can do that, certainly they should be able to collectively combat the trivialization of undergraduate education.”
