Grade A Failure?

In the great majority of courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, the average gradepoint is above 3.0 and in a few, it is 4.0, meaning that every student received an A. The question is whether that is a problem.

Evidently, some people at the university believe that it is a problem because the Educational Policy Committee, a subcommittee of the Faculty Council is going to address the matter of grade inflation. Said Professor Peter Gordon, who chairs the committee, “We have begun to explore techniques that give an alternative to the traditional grade point average.”

Grade inflation is a national trend. Former Duke University professor Stuart Rojstaczer, who maintains a Web site on this subject comments that “The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript.” Many professors now give their students only As and Bs, often with the former outnumbering the latter.

But might it not be that students are just getting smarter and more diligent – that they really earn those wonderful marks? Hardly. By many accounts, the level of preparation for college work among incoming students has fallen substantially over the last several decades. High school students for the most part are not required to study very much, so they don’t. They enter college with weak language and math skills, a paucity of knowledge about our history and institutions, and – most important of all – an expectation that college will be like their previous schooling.

No, grade inflation can’t be explained away as a result of better, more diligent students. A more convincing explanation is that professors don’t want the trouble that can come from giving a student a low grade. These days, students and parents are so apt to initiate hostile action over anything less than a B that many professors have taken to a grading scale with only As and Bs. Professor Murray Sperber calls it “the faculty-student nonaggression pact” – students get high grades for easy work in return for not bothering the professors, who’d rather be working on their own research projects.

So what if grades are rising for what is often mediocre work? Why should UNC – or any other school – be concerned about it?

The strongest reason is that grade inflation obscures the accomplishments of students who have truly excelled. If just about everyone gets either an A or a B, the distinction between the student who really masters the material in a course and the student who just coasts by with a minimum of effort because he knows he will get at least a B is greatly reduced. That isn’t fair to the student who excels, and it also tends to induce slovenliness among students who don’t want to put forth their best effort.

One idea that UNC is considering is to devise a system that accounts for the difficulty of the courses students enroll in — a kind of power ranking such as is used in some sports. In basketball, a team that schedules a lot of patsies and wins all of its games doesn’t receive as high a ranking as one that plays a tough schedule and wins most of its games. Why not come up with a similar system for courses and grades?

Suppose that earning (yes, that’s the word) a B in a rigorous math or science course where the class grade average is 2.5 did more to enhance a student’s overall class standing than earning (if that’s the right word) an A in an easy sociology course where the class grade average is 3.9? Wouldn’t that be more fair? Wouldn’t it more accurately represent intellectual achievement?

And besides being more fair, wouldn’t that change tend to take students’ minds off of the quest for the easy courses that keep their GPAs high without a lot of effort? One thing we often hear about college students these days is that they look diligently for the courses that will get them easy As – even if the courses are “complete blow-offs.” College ought to be about the quest for knowledge, not a high GPA.

When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, he suggested that the school not have grades or even grant degrees, feeling that such trappings would get in the way of true education. He’d probably think that the proposed UNC grading system was a step in the right direction.

George Leef serves as executive director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.