Vincent Phillip Muñoz is a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
University administrators have long known that grade inflation is a problem, but no one has been willing to do much about it. The Harvard faculty, to their credit, took a stand last week and voted to limit the number of A’s they give in each course. It’s a fine start, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Four of the faculty members who developed Harvard’s policy inadvertently revealed a fundamental problem with inflated grades in a statement released after the vote. “A Harvard A grade,” they wrote, “will now tell [students], as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved. An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”
By granting students distinctions they don’t merit, Harvard faculty have been deceiving students, employers and graduate schools. The faculty, in other words, have been lying. While Harvard might excel at this (last school year 66 percent of all grades were flat A’s), the same is true almost everywhere.
Faculty — and I include myself, with shame — have acquiesced in this dishonesty because it’s easier, and there’s little incentive to do otherwise. Grading is tedious, sometimes dispiriting and extraordinarily time-consuming to do well. It’s not hard to distinguish a good paper from a bad paper, but an A paper from an A-minus paper? Not so straightforward. To justify a disappointing A-minus, to say nothing of the abominable B-plus, takes more comments than the grader wants to write or the graded wants to read. And it often leads to a therapy-like meeting and a complaint to the dean. For tenured and tenure-track faculty who are evaluated almost exclusively on research productivity, the path of least resistance is simply to give out A’s. Students like you more as a bonus.
For adjunct and teaching faculty, whose renewal depends on positive student evaluations, the incentives are worse. The easiest way to boost end-of-the-semester evaluations is to inflate students’ grades. The surest way to ensure they take your classes is to be known as an easy grader. As things stand, there’s little incentive for faculty to be tough and honest.
Harvard’s new policy — that only a fifth of students in any given class can earn full A’s, plus four — won’t change that. It will lower grades but not by much. Faculty will be forced to award fewer A’s, but that probably just means more A-minuses. Grading will be more truthful but not really fair.
More promising is a second policy Harvard adopted, which is to use “average percentile rank” — a measure of a student’s relative academic performance compared to his peers — rather than grade point average to determine internal honors, prizes and awards. But the policy, as recommended to the faculty, explicitly states that a student’s APR won’t appear on his transcript. The very information that Harvard believes to be most useful when evaluating its own students won’t be shared.
A better and more effective policy would offer more transparency. A proposal I have circulated would require transcripts to include the average grade for a given class next to a student’s individual grade. Prospective employers or graduate schools could more accurately evaluate the meaning of an A-minus if they knew that the average grade for that particular class was a B. Students who do well in tough courses would be able to show it.
Academic honors would be based on what I call “grade distinction points,” or GDP, the difference between a student’s individual grade and the average grade for that class. If John gets an A letter grade (4.0) in a class that has an average grade of 3.5, he’d earn 0.5 GDP. If John received a C (2.0) in the same class, he would receive negative 1.5 GDP. The university could base class rank and academic honors on that metric, so everyone would know that students at the top of the class actually outperformed their peers rather than simply take easy classes in grade-inflated disciplines.
Under my proposal, the average grade for every class a faculty member teaches would be accessible to all members of the university. When students enroll in classes (or when a dean evaluates a faculty member using student evaluations), they could tell whether a professor is an easy or hard grader. Students who seek academic distinction would be incentivized to take professors with lower average class grades — the lower the class grade, the more GDP available.
Professors would have an incentive to lower their average grades, too. Doing so would allow them to reward their best students with more GDP and thus attract more serious students. Positive evaluations for a tough grader would suggest excellence in teaching, and tough-grading professors would be less scarred by lower evaluations. Some easy graders might even feel a sense of shame for being known as insufficiently rigorous.
If professors still award easy A’s, at least everyone would know that an A from their classes is just average. More transparency would provide more honest and accurate information, even if we professors persist in dishonest grading.
In the spirit of its new grade inflation policy, I’ll give Harvard an A-minus for effort. But it actually deserves no better than a B.
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