Hypathway's Notes: Among
the Big Three (H, Y, and P), Princeton is the only school that made a
serious effort to control the grade inflation, a phenomenon spreading
across the universities and colleges in the United States. I have read
many complaints from Princeton
undergraduates on their grade deflation that could damage their
opportunities on applications for the professional schools. Medical and
Law schools have traditionally more emphasized on applicant’s college
GPAs in making their admission decisions. As Princeton
does not have any of the three professional schools (medical, law and
business) and is also famous for its focus on undergraduate education,
lower GPAs would be certainly a disadvantage factor for Princetonians
to apply for outside professional schools. However, we should have a
means to show the difference within the classroom performance. This
article gave us more information on how Princeton had a preliminary success on grade inflation on the condition of not hurting their undergraduates’ future careers.
By Russell Nieli, November 10, 2009, mindingthecampus.com
Grade
inflation is one of those realities of the post-60s academic world that
most college teachers bemoan but feel powerless to do anything about.
It is virtually impossible for any single faculty member to do much to
stem the tide of ever rising grade distributions. If a faculty member
refuses to go along with the upward shift in grades and gives his
students lower grades than they would have received for comparable work
in other courses, students will rightfully complain that to those
reading their official transcript it will falsely appear as if they
have done lesser work or achieved at a lower level in the hold-out
grader's course than in other courses. Such faculty members will find
many fewer students taking their courses -- including many
conscientious and competitive students whom the teacher does not want
to scare away. Worse still, since tenure and promotion decisions are
often partially based on student evaluations and student enrollments
that frequently reflect past satisfaction with a professor's grading
policy, university teachers today pay a heavy price for bucking the
inflationary trend.
Perhaps the best that a lone academic can
do is represented by Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield.
Mansfield can remember a time when the average GPA at Harvard College
was around 2.5 on a 4.0 scale -- today it is about 3.5. The transition
from C+ to B+ as the average grade has produced the ludicrous result
that in some years nine in ten Harvard seniors graduated with official
honors. For Mansfield the idea that grades should mean what grading
keys still often say they mean -- i.e., that an A means "Excellent,"
"Truly Outstanding," a B "Very Good," "Above Average," and a C
"Average" -- carries a good deal of weight. But implementing such a
grading policy is impossible in a grading environment in which C grades
have practically disappeared from most humanities and social science
courses (representing less than 5 percent of the grades in some
departments), and more than half of students in many Harvard courses
receive A range grades. Mansfield came up with a creative solution that
enabled him to avoid what would have been a bitter and ultimately
futile struggle against the inflationary flood waters of the times
without having to sing praises to the river gods. Mansfield has for
many years now given his students two sets of grades, one for the
official Harvard transcript, the other representing what the students
really deserve on a non-inflated grading scale.
Does It Really Exist?
Some
deny that grade inflation exists. According to these people -- usually
students or their parents -- students are simply getting smarter these
days, especially at the most prestigious colleges and universities
which draw from a huge talent pool. The higher grades obtained at such
places reflect genuinely higher achievement, these people say, just as
the superior performance in track and field events at the Olympics
represent genuine advances over earlier competitors, not changes in the
evaluation metric.
But no college teacher with
hands-on experience of the rising grades at the better colleges over
the past several decades can take such claims seriously. Term papers of
a quality that would have received a B or B+ in former times are now
routinely given an A-, and with the near elimination of C range grades
in many humanities and social science courses (except for failing or
near-failing work), the B and B- grades have come to absorb everything
that previously would have been awarded a C or even a D. To anyone with
knowledge of an earlier period, it is clear that there has been both
protracted grade inflation (higher grades overall for work no better
than in an earlier period), and grade compression (almost all grades
compressed into the A+ to B- range).
While
it may be true that today there are somewhat larger numbers of truly
stellar students at the high end of the most selective colleges, at the
same time two important factors have added very mediocre students to
the mid-range and lower end of these same institutions. First, there
are racial preference policies in place at all such schools for
"under-represented minorities," which make it much easier for black and
Latino students to get admitted to them than whites and Asians, a
situation which didn't exist prior to the very late 1960s. An even
greater factor in watering down the academic talent has been the
proliferation of college sports teams, with the number of women's teams
matching those of the men, and a general tendency toward ever greater
competitiveness and professionalization among all of the teams -- a
situation which produces much more intense recruitment of many
academically substandard high school athletes. Colleges now reach down
academically as much for recruits on women's sports teams and teams
that are usually described as "minor sports" as they once did only for
highly recruited male basketball and football players. (This whole sad
story is excellently recorded in James Schulman and William Bowen's, The Game of Life).
The result is that at many of the most selective colleges, students
with perfect 800s on their SATs and A+ high school averages sit side by
side with substantial numbers of recruited athletes and affirmative
action students with 550 SATs and B+ high school grades. This increase
in mediocre students has almost certainly offset any increase in the
number of the truly brilliant at the top end. Whatever its cause,
rising grades do not represent an across-the-board increase in
outstanding students.
Accelerating Grades: A Recent History
One
can get a sense of the extent of the overall grade inflation from a
look at changes over the years at Princeton. In the academic year
ending in the spring of 1970, 17 percent of Princeton students earned A
range grades. Five years later (1975) that figure had jumped to 30
percent. It would continue at this rate rising only slowly over the
remainder of the 1970s and most of the 1980s -- it stood at 33 percent
in the academic year ending in the spring of 1988 -- but would renew
its upward trajectory in the 1990s and beyond, reaching 41 percent by
1995, and almost 48 percent in 2003. While there is some evidence that
the rate of inflation has been greater at the Ivy League institutions
than at the state colleges, Princeton's level of grade inflation has
been in no way out of line with similar trends at the other Ivy's or at
other elite private institutions such as Duke, Stanford, or Pomona.
Stuart Rojstaczer, a geology professor at Duke who has compiled extensive statistics on grade inflation (see his website www.gradeinflation.com),
reports that about half of all grades at Harvard, Columbia, Duke, and
Pomona are now in the A range, while C range grades have practically
been eliminated. In a 2003 op-ed piece in The Washington Post,
Rojstaczer reported that two years had passed since the last time he
handed out a C in one of his Duke undergraduate courses explaining that
"the C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of
Cain on a college transcript." This is in marked contrast to the past
at Duke, where as late as 1969, Rojstaczer reports, "C was a
respectable thing, given more than one-quarter of the time." [The
present writer can confirm Rojstaczer's general numbers here, having
been a Duke student in the late 1960s and having taken at least two
undergraduate courses where the majority of grades were Cs -- in one of
them, a freshmen English course, there were no As given at all.]
Just
why grades have been so inflated is a subject of dispute. Many
attribute at least the first wave of grade inflation to the Vietnam War
and the desire of professors to insure that their students didn't do
poorly and jeopardize their draft deferment status. But this
explanation suffers from three fatal facts. First, draft boards were
only interested in whether young men were enrolled as full time college
students and passing their courses. They did not care about their GPAs
or how many As they got as long as they weren't flunking out.
The Faulty Vietnam Explanation
The
second problem with the "draft fear" explanation is that some of the
greatest grade inflation occurred as the Vietnam War was winding down
and after President Nixon instituted the all-volunteer army -- and, the
inflationary trend, of course, has continued to the present day. Surely
more long-term factors must be operative here than 60s era "draft
fear". Finally, the "draft fear" explanation cannot explain why a very
similar pattern of grade inflation has occurred over the decades in
Canadian universities which were spared the tumult of the Vietnam
protest era and student fears that they might be drafted and sent
overseas to fight and die. A recent study published by the University
of Toronto on grade inflation in Canada concludes: "We find significant
evidence of grade inflation in Canadian universities in both historical
and comparative terms, as well as evidence that it is continuing beyond
those levels at some universities so as to be comparable with levels
found in some American universities. It is also apparent that the
inflated grades at Canadian universities are now taken for granted as
normal, or as non-inflated, by many people including professors who
never knew the traditional system, have forgotten it, or are in denial."
However
wrong-headed the "draft fear" explanation may be, the search for an
explanation in the Vietnam era offers an important clue to certain
general changes in American -- as well as Canadian -- society and
culture that suggest a more plausible explanation of the forces behind
rising grades. For it was during this period -- the late 60s and early
70s -- when the universities lost their nerve as traditional sources of
authority and lost the confidence that they once had as the major
vehicles for passing on a valuable intellectual and cultural heritage
to future generations. With this loss of self-confidence in a higher
educating and civilizing mission, and the loss of whatever elements of
the medieval-hierarchic structure of university life that still
survived in the industrial age, universities became increasingly molded
by the same kind of populist-consumerist ethos that shaped America's
burgeoning shopping malls and populist mega-churches. The student
consumer was now king, and the demand to eliminate low grades -- like
the demand to eliminate burdensome course requirements -- proved
irresistible to institutions that had lost confidence in themselves and
sought above all to please their paying customers. And once some
institutions and some professors started inflating their grades, the
pressure was often irresistible for other institutions and other
professors to follow suit and keep up with the grade-inflating
competition. A "race to the inflationary top" ensued, a process which
has by no means reached its limit. According to Professor Rostaczer's
projections, if current trends continue -- and there is every reason to
believe they will -- by mid-century the B grade will have gone the way
of the C as almost all students will be receiving grades in the A
range. Some have suggested that new scales will have to emerge like
those in grading minor league baseball teams and investment bonds, with
AA, AAA, etc. being the newer additions -- but this is by no means
certain.
A Solution At Princeton?
Successful
efforts to combat grade inflation have been rare and there is reason to
believe that Rostaczer is correct and that the structural forces allied
against such efforts are so powerful that grade inflation will be with
us for many years to come. But there is at least one outlier to this
story and it centers around an unusually tenacious and determined
academic dean at Princeton, Dean of the College, Nancy Weiss Malkiel.
Academic administrators and college deans are not usually known for
their courage, tenacity, determination, or vision, and those at
Princeton and other Ivy League colleges are no exception. As Max Weber
long ago showed us, bureaucrats act like bureaucrats regardless of the
institutions they serve. But Nancy Weiss Malkiel is clearly the
exception as for several years now, despite enormous obstacles, she has
been the driving force behind Princeton's successful efforts not only
to slow but to reverse the trend toward inflated grades. It has been a
thankless job but one Malkiel has pursued with the determination of
genuine conviction and the firm belief that grade inflation has
produced many serious and harmful consequences for academic life at
Princeton and elsewhere.
"When students get the same grade for outstanding work that they get for good work," she explained to a New York Times
reporter, "they are not motivated to do their best." There has been a
"Lake Wobegon" pattern in grading, Malkiel says, where every student is
above average. "This is part of inflationary patterns of evaluation in
the larger culture." A faculty-staff committee she sponsored confirmed
such a pattern in Princeton grading in the introduction to a report it
filed in 2003: "Who could ever have imagined that we would reach a
point [at Princeton] where a student with a straight B average [that
is, a 3.0] would rank 923 out of a graduating class of 1079 -- or where
a student with a straight C average [2.0] would rank 1078?"
Malkiel
began her task of fighting grade inflation by first compiling and
disseminating to the faculty extensive statistics on the extent to
which grades had risen at Princeton since the 1970s. The statistics
were striking in what they revealed and it was hoped that by making the
degree of grade inflation publically known and exhorting the faculty to
lower their grading patterns, progress could be made. Alas, nothing
positive came of this strategy, which began in 1998 -- grading patterns
in the years immediately following this date were no different than
they had been in the previous years. This inform-and-mildly-exhort
policy failed because many department heads feared that if their
individual departments began to grade more strictly others might not
necessarily follow and they would have to explain to angry students why
they were getting lower grades than elsewhere. What was needed, it was
clear, was a well-defined university-wide policy that had the strong
backing of the entire faculty and university administration and was
accompanied by at least some degree of institutional oversight and
pressure to see to it that the different departments complied with the
new policy guidelines.
The breakthrough came in
April of 2004 when the governing faculty senate approved by a 2-1
margin a proposal by Malkiel to set an "expectation" that A grades
should not exceed 35 percent of all grades in undergraduate courses and
55 percent of grades in junior and senior independent work. The
expectation was not that every course in every year would conform to
the prescribed limit, but that most of the courses in each department
over any given three year period would at least come close to these
numerical guidelines. To lessen student concerns that the "grade
deflation policy" (as students termed it) might hurt Princeton students
in their competition with students of other institutions for coveted
positions after graduation, the university embarked upon an ambitious
publicity program, sending out letters to over 3,000 graduate schools,
professional schools, and corporate recruiters explaining Princeton's
more rigorous grading policy. Every transcript sent out from the
registrar's office is also accompanied by an explanation of the new
grading policy, and students can download from Princeton's website
copies of the new policy to send along in their applications for summer
internships or other programs.
In a least two
measurable ways the policy has been a considerable success -- perhaps
the only success of its kind among major private universities in the
U.S. In the three year period before the new grading policy was
instituted (2001-2004), 47 percent of the grades at Princeton were in
the A range. In the three year period since the implementation of the
new policy (2005-2008), 40.4 percent of grades were A range. For this
last academic year (ending in the spring of 2009), A range grades fell
to 39.7 percent of all grades, the first time grades in this range had
comprised less than 40 percent of Princeton's grades since the early
1990s. The new grading policy was clearly successful in reigning in
grade inflation, at least at the high end.
The
fewer As and correspondingly lower GPAs, however, haven't seemed to
hurt the prospects of Princeton graduates after college. Princeton's
Office of Career Services has compiled extensive data on recent
graduates which for the most part show no fall-off in the ability of
Princeton students to find jobs or get into various professional or
graduate programs after college. For instance, in 2004, the last year
before the implementation of the new grading policy, Princeton students
received 312 offers of admission to Top 10 law schools. In 2008, three
years into the new policy, they received 323 offers, an actual increase
of 3 percent. Of pre-med majors applying to medical school, 115
Princetonians graduating in 2004 gained admission to medical school --
a success rate of 92.0 percent. Among the pre-med grads in 2008, a
near-identical 114 gained a medical school acceptance, reflecting a
near-identical success rate of 91.2 percent.
The
picture with jobs after graduation was similar. While the number of
graduating seniors with a full-time job in hand in the July following
their graduation would decline in 2008 and 2009 due to the recession,
both the number and percentage of graduating seniors with July jobs
would rise in each of the three post-grade-inflation years, 2005, 2006,
and 2007.
The anti-grade-inflation policy
seemed to be working and not harming Princeton graduates in the
employment and professional school arenas. Student criticism, however,
has persisted. Some have protested that the 35 percent "expectation"
for A's in a course is often taken by professors as a fixed quota,
which, they say, encourages students to hope other students in their
classes will do poorly so that they can be the one's receiving the
limited number of high grades. In a recent letter to the Princeton
administration signed by the leaders of the student government,
students complained that if they are "thrown into a competition with
their classmates for the handful of A's that professors are able to
give, they will try to stay ahead of their fellow students rather than
learning from them and sharing ideas with them in a collective pursuit
of knowledge. No good can come of making grading a zero-sum game in
which students hesitate to clarify a concept for a fellow student
because it might cost them a good grade."
The
students here clearly have a point, but Dean Malkiel and the Princeton
administration respond to such criticism by saying that the 35 percent
figure for A's is only intended as a flexible guide, not as a rigid
quota, and that in classes with an overabundance of high-achieving
students the 35 percent figure will be exceeded, just as in classes
with a dearth of outstanding students much fewer than 35 percent of the
students will get A's. The 35 percent guideline should only be
understood, the administration explains, as a multi-year constraint
over all the courses in a department, not as a constraint on each and
every individual class in each and every given year. When the
performance level of students in a class rises, more A's can be given,
when it declines, fewer A's will be given.
The
administration's response takes away some of the force of the students'
complaint, but it must be admitted that almost any traditional grading
system that does not give all students the same grade can lead to the
malicious kind of competition that the students fear. (This may be a
good argument in favor of evaluations by national exams -- like the AP
exams at the high school level -- a proposal recently made by Charles
Murray. A classmate's high score on a nationwide exam hardly
jeopardizes my chances of scoring high on that exam, whereas that same
classmate's high achievement in a course where the professor is under
pressure to keep down the number of A's might well reduce my chances of
getting one of those A's).
No solution is
perfect, of course, but it is hard to argue that the Malkiel reforms
have not been on balance a positive force in Princeton's academic life.
According to a 2006 survey, 94.5 percent of the faculty who voted for
the new grading policy said they would vote for it again (only 82
percent of the minority who voted against it said they would vote that
way again, suggesting a non-trivial erosion in the opposition). Many
problems with grade inflation remain, of course, especially those of
grade compression, which the limit on A's has made even more acute. As
it stands now, a B+ grade at Princeton in most courses is a very solid
grade, indicating substantial work and mastery of the course material.
Even in other schools with more inflated grades, the B+ grade often
signifies decent work. But with the continued elimination of the C
grade in many courses in Princeton and elsewhere except as a
replacement for near-failing work, the gap between the quality of work
represented by the B+ and B- grade is often enormous. The Malkiel
reforms do not address this grade compression problem at the mid and
lower levels -- which, for the time being at least, is perhaps just as
well. Tackling big problems one at a time is often a wise strategy
especially if powerful forces are in place resisting their solutions.
Can the Malkiel reforms be duplicated elsewhere? The answer is "yes,"
but a highly qualified "yes." For the immediate future, such reforms
are probably possible only at the most prestigious institutions which
can count on receiving an overabundance of qualified applicants even in
the face of a reformed grading policy that may scare some students
away. The prestige institutions also have the financial resources to
make their stricter grading policies known to employers and grad
schools, and like Princeton, can usually assure their graduates success
in their after-college life. Faculties at the elite colleges can also
be counted on to give at least passive support to initiatives for
grading reform.
What is needed most -- but is probably in
shortest supply -- is strong leadership from the top. The kind of
successful grading reform that has taken place at Princeton is probably
only possible if a university president, provost, or senior academic
dean takes the initiative and shows an extraordinary level of resolve.
Such is not the stuff of which most academic administrators are made,
even at the elite institutions. But the path will at least be more
easily traversed now that Princeton has shown the way. If one or more
of the other Ivy's begins to fall in line, something like a bandwagon
effect could take place that will encourage others to follow suit. I
wouldn't bet the farm on it happening, but we can always hope.
Russell
Nieli, a graduate of Duke University (B.A. 1970, summa cum laude) and
Princeton (Ph.D. 1979), works for the Executive Precept Program
sponsored by Princeton's James Madison Program, and has been for many
years a Lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department. He has recently
completed a collection of essays dealing with affirmative action policy
and the origins of an urban black underclass.
Posted 星期六, 08/14/2010 - 16:37 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com (hypathway@hotmail.com)