Copyright The Atlantic
Harvard is worried about going soft. Specifically, about grade inflation, the name for giving ever higher marks to ever more students. According to an “Update on Grading and Workload” from the school’s office of undergraduate education, released last week to faculty and students, this trend has reached a catastrophic threshold. Twenty years ago, 25 percent of the grades given to Harvard undergrads were A’s. Now it’s more than 60 percent. For all those students, though, the mere release of this document could be taken as its own catastrophe. “The whole entire day, I was crying,” one freshman told The Harvard Crimson. “It just felt soul-crushing.” One of her classmates warned that stricter standards would take a toll on students’ mental health—“I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies,” she said, “rather than being killed by them”—even as the report itself observed that deference to mental-health concerns has made the problem worse. A member of the men’s lacrosse team lamented that the findings failed to account for “how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.” As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades. I have also endured the confusing wrath of students who seem to think we professors are ruining their lives by awarding only 60 percent of each class with A’s. The spectacle unfolding at Harvard is more visible, but the condition that underlies it is widespread and chronic. On the surface, grade inflation might seem simple to address: Just reestablish, in clear terms, that the baseline mark for showing up is not an A, but something lower; then give special credit only to the students who demonstrate their mastery and achievement. But it’s not so easy. Grade inflation has become a strange and wicked problem on campus—and it’s one without a single cause or an obvious solution. If the culture of grading has eroded, it has done so over years and decades. Not all of the reasons are bad. Lower standards help first-generation college students and others who might arrive on campus with less traditional academic preparation. They also accommodate more modern forms of teaching, such as the “creative assignments and group projects” mentioned in the Harvard report. In total, the change has been so slow and steady that even faculty can barely feel it. We’ve simply been adjusting the expectations of our students, year after year. Back in the mid-aughts, I was teaching at Georgia Institute of Technology, a highly selective technical university. One of my classes involved many different types of student work, including software projects, essays, and formal exams. The exams were hard, but everything they tested had been covered in my lectures, and the answers were definitive; grading was straightforward. Assessing the projects and essays was more subjective, as I was looking for creativity and insight. The students found this difficult, because they were unsure of what I wanted. The thing is, figuring out what I might have wanted was supposed to be part of the assignment! I was asking my students to interpret my instructions in unexpected ways that exercised their own interests, abilities, and perspectives. For example, if I’d asked for a nontraditional computer paint program, and a student made one that let a user toss virtual pebbles into an on-screen pond to simulate water ripples that swelled and vanished, that would have surprised and delighted me. If the student really pulled it off, they’d get an A. But students were complaining, so I tried to be responsive: I started giving unambiguous requirements. I told the students that simply meeting those requirements on a written or creative assignment, and doing nothing more, would earn them a C. To get a B or even an A, they would have to go further—not just by doing more, but by demonstrating a synthetic grasp of the material, carrying out their creative vision, completing the work with special polish, and so on. As ever, students were invited to my office hours to discuss the details. The students hated this. They raised complaints with me or my teaching assistants: Why was mine a B and hers an A? What more could I have done? Appeals to “effort” were also common—as if exertion were a stand-in for achievement. What I was asking for was well outside the established norm. Students complained. A few even posted anonymous threats against my family in an online forum. (Such threats are not entirely uncommon in academia.) In other classes, a grade of A might have been earned by having met requirements. To get anything less would represent having “points taken off”—a concept that for students had by then become a gross obsession. Sometime since then, it became an ideology. Over the past 25 years, while grades were going up, college was also getting more expensive and harder to get into. In 2001, Harvard accepted 10.7 percent of its applicants—an all-time low at the time. Last year it took in 3.6 percent. As a result, today’s average student may be of higher quality, and more deserving of an A, than ever before. But even if so, that’s not the whole story. Over the same period, college administrators institutionalized a concept called “student success.” Originally intended to reduce churn and increase graduation rates, student success expanded into something much broader—a blend of traditional academic achievement, personal satisfaction, and even wellness. These and other factors helped transform students from scholars into customers. College in America has always been confused, a combination of a coming-of-age facility and a credentialing service. But the customer-centric, professionalizing function of undergraduate life muddled matters even further. College wasn’t just for discovering who you are or even meeting a future spouse, but for getting you into a career. The Harvard report notes this phenomenon: Many undergraduates see clubs, internships, and other extracurricular activities as necessary for getting jobs. Meanwhile, the job of being a professor became more tenuous and provisional—some 75 percent of faculty are nontenured, many working term to term, with the fate of their employment determined, in part, by student course evaluations. Those surveys are, in turn, notoriously unsound as a measure of learning, but they do exert pressure to make students happy. And you know what makes a student happy? Giving them an A. During the same period, due to changes in the university-accreditation process, a milkshake of new bureaucratic demands on classroom management was also served to the faculty. Failing to meet these requirements could put a school’s federal funding, including Pell Grants, at risk. Administrators started urging professors and departments to connect classroom work directly to “measurable learning outcomes” through “evaluative rubrics,” as the lingo of the process calls them. These are the elements that would satisfy the accreditors, and thus help the school maintain its student-aid support and ability to award degrees. But isn’t that what the grades are for? professors asked. Not anymore. We got the sense that as far as the accreditors were concerned, grades could not be trusted, because they sometimes varied by instructor, lacked diagnostic detail, or failed in other ways to provide sufficiently granular or reliable evidence of specific learning outcomes. In other words, the faculty was told—and has been reminded ever since—that grades do not prove mastery or achievement. Amid and around this Kafkaesque affair, costs kept rising, students became even more like customers, and faculty came to accept that state of affairs. Constant pressure to perform and compete produced students so wound up with anxiety, they often came to office hours not for academic help but for therapy, despite our profound lack of qualifications for that role. In the meantime, worries over students’ mental health, and a reasonable desire to accommodate disabilities or disadvantages, made us ever more inclined to yield to the rising tide of grade-inflationary demands. Administrators, attuned to student gripes and terrified of the accreditors, were pressing us to avoid any ambiguity in what we asked of students. I can say this from experience: Even the faculty who resisted these changes would endure year after year of pressure to conform. And let’s not forget the computers. They’ve made it easier for undergrads to cheat on their assignments. But networked software services have also changed how classrooms work, and how students and professors relate to grades. By virtue of those changes, digitizing college life has led to grade inflation, too. In the 1990s, when I was in college, your final grade in any class would be something of a mystery until you got it in the mail, or saw it taped to the professor’s office door. Until then, you’d do assignments and take exams. You’d get your scores, and if you were obsessive or concerned, you could calculate how you were doing by referring back to the syllabus: If I get an A on the second paper and the final, I can still eke out an A for the semester. These days, thanks to the “courseware” that has become ubiquitous in higher ed, students can see exactly how they are performing in every course all the time. The software can even project their final grade based on how they’ve done so far, in a data-dashboard sort of way. Students love this, or think they do, because they don’t want to be surprised. But the courseware data dashboards have another clear effect: Like so many other aspects of the current college experience, they orient students’ attention toward their grades above all else. At some colleges and universities, courseware has been mandated. Schools have done this, in part, because students are accustomed to using the software and prefer to see all their work in one place. But the mandates also help colleges shovel heaps of bureaucratic muck—validating data for accreditation, carrying out enrollment, flagging troubled students, aggregating metrics of all kinds. Whether this IT-ification of university life makes teaching and learning any better is not important for the topic at hand. The point is, all of it together has reinforced the focus on graded performance, offering students and faculty more opportunities for anxiety and conflict. I have tried to find ways to return to the old ethos of grading, in which I would judge a student as a whole person rather than as a series of assignment transactions. But in the age of courseware, I must give this holism a name and a value and a slot in the gradebook. Fine. I call it “Slush”—a grading category that I put into the system to account for whatever the rubric, the outcomes, and their computerized rigidity cannot. Slush is my gesture at an overall assessment of student performance and growth. But, alas, my Slush is making students anxious, too. “What’s Slush?” they sometimes ask, halfway through the course, because they didn’t read my explanation in the syllabus. Some complain, “Yours is the only class where I don’t know my grade.” Assessing overall performance and growth, it seems, might not be worth my trouble. More students get A’s, yet students are unhappy with their grades. Professors, too, have been worn out by the grading nightmare. We now plan with dread for all the ways our students might misconstrue our feedback or petition for the “additional points” that they are sure we have stolen from them. Grading was never fun, but now it is odious. The easiest answer is just to give the students what they expect, at least some of the time, so you can get on with the rest of your job—which has been made immeasurably harder in lots of other ways. The knots tighten and multiply. The courseware grading system enforces the use of an unambiguous grading rubric, which furthers the bureaucratization of classroom life that helped to amplify grade inflation in the first place. Just as the students seek out easier classes for a certain A, the professors pursue simpler course designs that de-escalate the fighting over grades. Everybody understands that, in the current state of things, grades say little about what students know or learn. But the machinery of grading churns on. The same students who scrabbled for achievement to gain entry into colleges like mine, where they clamber for the A’s they believe they deserve, know that grades still matter—for medical- or professional-school admission, or to compete with their peers for limited slots at management-consulting internships, or even just to appease their parents, who may be just as prone as they are to mistaking assessment for achievement. To demand a fix for grade inflation is to put multiple-choice answers on an essay question. It asks for something that cannot be marked as right or wrong. This, as it happens, is the type of lesson most professors yearn to impart in our classes: that process, not its product, is the goal. Many students learn that lesson much later, after they graduate, when they look back and wonder at their former obsession with grades. By then, however, they are no longer customers of higher ed. As for us professors, we never leave. Each year the grades rise a little more; each year we feel it less. And the bureaucratic strangle that leads to this inflation continues its creep.
