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Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

70 points by bane 12y ago

jkw 12y ago
Or a reason GPA has gone is because it's also become more competitive as acceptance rates have gone down. Who knows.
- chisleu 12y ago
  They have not. Acceptance rates are increases. The school makes more money by having more students.
  - usmeteora 12y ago
    While this may be true for public universities, private maintain their prestige by student faculty ratios and keeping their incoming classes between 1000-1300 students. You will see most private universities have kept their class size constant in the passed decade while public ones have increased, further supporting the graph shown in this article attesting to the disparity in grades between public and private schools.
gonzo41 12y ago
This is the result of a user pays education system. If I was dropping a 100K on a degree then I'd expect all HD's. And those that do spend as much money expect the same. So how do you differentiate yourself from all the others with the same degree and same grades? go get more schooling. thus grade inflation and degree inflation. Down in Australia, its less of this and more "you should be thanking me for giving you 51% in physical and computational chemistry". edit - long day == giving up on spelling
- quonn 12y ago
  This argument is not very convincing, since grade inflation is also real in Germany, even though education is free here. I actually think it comes down to the fact that everyone feel that the middle class is in decline, which creates a more competitive environment and makes grades seem more important, so people work harder on that (which is not to say that others were lazy before - just maybe not optimising for good grades).
  - gonzo41 12y ago
    Well maybe I'm am just bad at physical chemistry then. It may also have some relation to weather a university is marking its students against each other or against criteria, if there is a bar to be passed, maybe the use of grades is irrelevant. Its should just be pass/fail, no other metric attached.
jackpirate 12y ago
One possible cause not mentioned in the article is that universities offer/require more filler courses. Last year, for example, I had to teach an intro to HTML course at a UC school. This is a required course for all non-engineering majors. To get an A, all you have to do is create a single html webpage using 10 different tags and 10 different css styles.[1] These courses are huge money makers for the university. I had 120 students in the lecture, and each student paid about $1000 to take that course. The course was a joke for 90% of the students, but they didn't care because they got their "easy A". In exchange, the university got a butt ton of cash. [1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be "easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.
- edtechdev 12y ago
  Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the “faculty-student non-aggression pact" - “Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of their professors". And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college. How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing it out to make it through a degree program).
  - gavazzy 12y ago
    EconTalk has a great episode on this. "ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased." http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
  - 12y ago
commentnull 12y ago
It's true - the professor awarded everyone who turned up to class that day fifty percent, just for turning up! One student then started to question that decision - the professor said "aha - critical reasoning! Very good, extra marks for you!". Another then said they would write to the dean to complain, the professor said "excellent, I will award even more marks to you in anticipation of your written effort". Seems like getting the grade got too easy...
- tormeh 12y ago
  Oh boy, that's a teacher that's given up.
bnegreve 12y ago
The scale on the first plot is a bit disingenuous. Here's the same data replotted with a proper scale (i.e. ranging from 0 to 4 instead of 2.6 to 3.4). http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png
- Drakim 12y ago
  "there are lies, damned lies and statistics" Your graph still shows the trend. But in a way, that's the most dangerous lie, the sort where you "help truth along" a little bit, to be more compelling.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  Considering that a "grade" is an artificial quantity which doesn't represent the "mass" of anything real, the given scale is appropriate. The axes are also labelled very prominently, so I'm not sure what kind of false impression you think a reader would get from the first graph but not the second.
  - bnegreve 12y ago
    Grades are at least supposed to reflect the quality of the students who pass the tests with some level of linearity. If the author doesn't believe this is the case, s-he shouldn't use them in the first place, especially not to discuss grade inflation. The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this is misleading.
    - pervycreeper 12y ago
      >the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity (somewhat). You don't get anything useful from multiplying grades by any "factor". Anyone in danger of thinking otherwise should not blame the graph. Fast food articles such as "Top 10 secrets of misleading graphs your profs don't want you to know" are probably more culpable in that regard.
lukasm 12y ago
Is it true that you cannot default on a collage loan in US? How is it legal? Isn't it the root cause of the problem. (I'm not American, my knowledge is limited)
- wyclif 12y ago
  You can't discharge a college loan via bankruptcy. You can certainly default on the same loan, but those are two different things.
- smil 12y ago
  IIRC student loan debt was made non-dischargeable by bankruptcy when the government started guaranteeing all student loans. This is the reason why tuition has been increasing so dramatically, because for the banks, making a loan is free of risk. Because supply of money is basically unlimited, schools can increase tuition each year.
  - jimhefferon 12y ago
    > Because supply of money is basically unlimited, schools can increase tuition each year. While I am not an expert on the matter, I do work at a college and in my experience there is more to it than that. Just to name one, when I went to school in the late 70's we lived in cinder block dorms and ate in a cafeteria that basically had one dinner choice, while if we offered that today students would not come here. All that stuff costs money, also. Plenty of blame to go around.
    - bryondowd 12y ago
      Room and board is generally separate from tuition. The college I went to charged obscene amounts for it's dorms. You could get a studio apartment to yourself twice the size within 15 minutes of campus for about the same price as having to share a tiny dorm room. The on-campus apartments were worse, since the amount the four people sharing an apartment were paying combined would be enough to rent a good sized house nearby with money left over. I'm sure they get enough charging for the rooms that it isn't affecting tuition price.
raingrove 12y ago
In Singapore, all grades are normalized using the bell curve (normal distribution), where 50% gets the "pass" grade (C+). This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect, you could still end up with just a pass grade. It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.
- mauricemir 12y ago
  It's better in the long run as you can compere results across cohorts fairly.
  - vegedor 12y ago
    I wonder, how is it fair if half a class would pass even if nobody scored more than 50% of the points? I'm sure I miss an integral part of the grading system.
  - bildung 12y ago
    > It's better in the long run as you can compere results across cohorts fairly. But cohort size changes (the number of babies born can differ substantially year over year), which impedes comparability.
    - mauricemir 12y ago
      The way it works is if the top 5% got an A you can say some one with an A grade that they where in the top 5% who took that exam in that year.
      - bildung 12y ago
        > The way it works is if the top 5% got an A you can say some one with an A grade that they where in the top 5% who took that exam in that year. Sure, both ends of the grading scale are easy to read when using bell curve grading. The problematic part is the center (where - by definition - the majority of graduates will be found): The C grade of year X could very well be better than the B grade of year Y. Bell curve grading seems to be the worst of both worlds - the students experience even less correlation between effort and grade and you weaken inter-cohort comparability. If grading reform is willing to lose comparability between students anyway it should move in the opposite direction and grade relative performance improvements of individual students. That is proven to result in better overall performance of students (especially for weak performers).
ponderatul 12y ago
What about grade deflation ? in the UK, where at least in social sciences ( Business Degree included) you are not graded against set standards but graded against your fellow students, with whom you are supposed to collaborate with as I understand it. Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data. Does anyone see any problem here ?
- M8 12y ago
  What if you infuse your papers with some minority and gender studies crap (even if it's not related)? Wouldn't it improve your grade?
  - irremediable 12y ago
    Well, if you hadn't studied those topics in sufficient depth, the examiner would doubtless decrease your mark for writing crap. If they weren't relevant, your mark would be decreased for writing irrelevant things. I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities-bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go around oozing their contempt.
    - logicchains 12y ago
      >If people don't like culture, that's fine I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all the staff who had taught them.
      - irremediable 12y ago
3minus1 12y ago
My wife is getting her Master's in bioinformatics from a prestigious university. No joke on the day of the final exam her professor showed up to class 25 minutes late and said he only had one copy of the exam because the photo-copier wasn't working. Everyone got A's. And there is no accountability.
- vegedor 12y ago
  Final exams have to be stored for years and approved by a second party I should think, for accountability.
- thearn4 12y ago
  I would say that graduate programs tend to be a bit more binary, i.e. you're either passing a course or you aren't, and the professor knows exactly who those people are. And if you aren't passing, your prof. will also quietly suggest to you early on that you drop it and take it again a bit down the road. This was my experience in masters & phd level math courses, at least.
  - eitally 12y ago
    Indeed. In my graduate program you were either get a B or higher, or you were in the professor's office having a tough conversation about your future.
usmeteora 12y ago
I am sure, as 3minus1 mentioned, there are many instances of grade inflation but it seems to vary by major and school. The overall rise in GPA over the years though could be influenced by other things I wonder. 1. jackpirate mentioned more filler courses 2. The internet? If you had a bad professor and a poorly written textbook back in the day, you were kind of screwed outside of working with friends. Today the internet offers pieces of courses and HW examples from all over the world, and things like Coursera and MIT opencourse software are available. 3. MORE AP and IB classes allow students to take college level courses but alot of kids at my college for example, in stead of carrying over the credits, chose to retake Calc I & II, even though they had ACED the AP exams, giving them a freshman year filler of courses that were relatively a breeze for them. I don't believe as many students took AP and IB classes back then. It seems to be the norm nowadays to use this AP/IB edge to actually help yourself ease into college courses be essentially retaking them. Besides, graduating early from a 4 year university is not encouraged, most kids at that level also want the full 4 year experience so their motivation to transfer the credits goes down. If you think about it, this gives the private universities grades a double edge. you are more likely to be accepted into a competitive private university if you are smart enough to be acing college level courses in highschool, and once you get to the private university, you breeze through those courses by essentially retaking them. Most students used a combination of all three of these things and obtained 3.8-4.0 Freshman year, allowing for more slack when the harder courses started to come in. 4. Lets not forget aderall meds are handed out like candy these days to help kids work harder longer. Use of these drugs at top private universities is rampant. In many cases, parents seek out medication for their kids claiming ADHD when really what they are saying is "my kid is not working hard enough to meet up to my standards and because he must be as smart as I am that must be because he is distracted with video games, and therefore has ADHD". Many kids seek it out for themselves. Roughly 1/3rd of the kids I knew were taking aderall regularly (either with or without prescription) to pull all nighters on a regular basis to keep up in school. one of many easily googled sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic... 5. As for the difference between public and private schools, competitiveness and cheating (illegal use of adderall included) is contagious and I definitely think competition, cheating, use of drugs to work harder longer (as opposed to enjoyment and recreation), seems to exponentiate itself amongst more competitiveness students, which statistically, are more likely to end up at more competitive schools. 6. Overall, more and more kids are going to college each year, but interestingly, the applicant pools for public universities does increase, the applicant pool for top private universities is exponential each year, allowing private schools to choose the cream of the crop, potentially creating more of a gap between the general caliber of students between private and public universities. Anecdotal sure but to give you an idea, my friend who went to Johns Hopkins told me stories of kids ripping pages out of textbooks in the libraries so other students had no access, and I've heard this happens at top law schools as well. I witnessed in my private university even as a freshman. In many cases these are kids whose entire identities and their parents value of them depend on acing through ivy league schools, and failure (failure in these case being Bs)is not an option. I can't speak for the average public school, but I feel as if this mindset is less likely to be the norm here. one of many sources to help support pt 5 & 6: http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-madness-of-rich-penthouse-parents/ http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-ma... 7. Someone else mentioned visa students who are TAs are pressured to give good grades for good reviews. With underclassmen on student visas, the competition seems to go up and they are in my experience more likely to engage in competitive behavior or cheating or aderall abuse because the stakes of failing out are also alot higher for them, but it seems to have the opposite effect if you are an undergrad versus be a grad grading TA trying to get good reviews from undergrads. Anecdotal story, but proves that not all private schools use grade inflation liberally: At my college, which is a private university ranked top 50, goes up and down each year by 20 or so in rankings, we are not top 5 but usually in top 25, grading is really tough and we were actually ranked top 3 toughest graders lumped in with MIT, except MIT exempts students from their entire freshman GPA (I've heard) to help with suicide and other such issues. Twice I was curved down because grades were so good we were suspected of cheating. The average GPA at my college was 2.7 when I graduated in 2012 and that is after 10% of students fail out. I wish I experienced more grade inflation at my school! In the three cases of severe grade inflation during my undergrad career, the averages on the exams were 20/100 or 40/100, and they had to curve up 30-40 pts just get a third of the class to pass, and still that meant most kids got Bs or Cs. I'll never forget when we got 18/100 average for 64 kids in a class and we were all Engineering Majors. Different topic but I believe that results from hiring Professors who are better at research (brings in funding) than they are at teaching. Theres no reason statstically why the average of 64 students junior year of one of the hardest Engineering Majors at a top Engineering School should all be failing unless of course the Professor sucks at teaching. So in this case, there was severe grade inflation, but that did not results in higher GPAs overall relative to other schools, it just helped A Professor not get in trouble for being responsible for causing the entire Electrical Engineering Department to fail and have to retake her course, which would have definitely put this Professor under review...
Dwolb 12y ago
There's an underlying assumption of 'grades matter' that may no longer be true. I think this assumption has been becoming less relevant as more people look to see what you did rather than what marks you got. i.e. I believe more people are interested in evaluating your body of work these days. I think this is a good thing since it would allow students to be more rigorous in their learnings for two reasons: 1) students are seeking true knowledge and demonstration of mastery instead of an artificial comparisons and 2) they can be more risky as they learn since the consequences of arriving at a wrong conclusion are minimal.
netcan 12y ago
Like a lot of the pathologies in higher education, there's a lot of bleed from one problem/question and its answers (like grades) into others. So first, what are grades even for? They give students and teachers feedback, they set goals and they enforce a certain amount of discipline, pacing, something to enforce practice. Basically, teaching tools. If I try to think of something analogous, a periodic fitness test as part of a fitness program might be it. Once grades exist, they pick up all sorts of other uses inside the system. Admissions of various sorts. Hiring. Proof. Measures of competence. Comparison. When this is the actual goal, the grading and testing looks different. GMAT is designed around this "secondary" use. I think if you roll back the history of how high schools or universities picked up all the habits and structures they have now, grades weren't as central as they are now. Matriculation was the main marker and that's a binary. Anyway…. I think this kind of focus on grades, grade inflation, deflation and such is more about the fact that most of us were at one time or another concerned with our grades. Any unfairness annoys us and when different generations, places or subjects "have it easy" we get annoyed. I don't think it matters much though. The main reason for grades is the first part, the teaching tool. Hopefully that becomes the focus. Better grading where better is "helps the student more." That probably means tracking and giving feedback progress, reacting to deficits, controlling the pace and stuff like that. I hope grading gets completely hijacked by the technology assisted pedagogy.
Rhapso 12y ago
Teaching as a graduate student i'm seeing a pattern where my department is swamped with students and thus has a lot of grad students teaching (a lot of people here on student visas), then then evaluates all the teaching grad students based on student reviews. A lot of those out-country students are scared of angering students, getting bad reviews and getting kicked out. End result, classes are getting easier and grades are inflating. Students are getting less prepared for later classes I'm a US citizen and I have a reputation for being a hard grader because my position is a lot more stable (it is a lot easier to get funding for US citizens). I teach mostly upper level classes and I am failing a lot of students with "good" grades.
- woliveirajr 12y ago
  Who ever read the "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" might have some idea about how people are over-confident that they can judge something, or give grades, that are correct, unbiased, and so on... and how that is a big... hum... lie.
  - Rhapso 12y ago
    That is the hardest part of teaching for me. After a semester of working with students. I am looking at a spreadsheet assigning them semi-arbitrary values. Grades are not fair. I give a lot of sub-grades on assignments and projects in an attempt to correct for error but I still don't feel great about the signal to noise ratio there. The only thing I grade on is an ability to communicate mastery, rather than mastery itself. There is not much I can do about that.
    - davidgrenier 12y ago
      Maybe I don't understand what you said... but I have a feeling introverts would get penalized? Have you read Quiet?
    - NhanH 12y ago
      I don't think anyone has ever solved the issue of "communicate mastery" vs "mastery" itself: in our field, that's pretty much why recruiting/ hiring/ interview is a big fat giant clusterfuck. Is it actually an issue with grad students worrying about being kicked out? That would be completely bizarre and unthinkable to me: I thought it would be at worst jeopardize the student's TA ship or some silly thing with quals.
dataker 12y ago
People tend to believe this isn't bad, as "other qualities" would be more important. These qualities often are not creativity or diligence(hard to be quantified now), but family connections or social status. Showing personal skills in an interview assumes you got one in the first place.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Dewie3 12y ago
I'm not an American. I think it's funny when I see people writing about a "C student" being a loser/slacker, a B student either being good or an underachiever, and a straight A student as the point where you finally have your shit together and are doing well.
- stegosaurus 12y ago
  Winner takes all. The same exists in the UK. Because if you don't get an A, you won't get into the high end universities, you won't get a high paying job, and that's you done. Life of serfdom. Exceptions to the rule exist but our society is based on small amounts of winners compared to many losers.
  - Dewie3 12y ago
    I was talking about grade inflation, not winner takes all. So getting straight As over there might be the equivalent of getting straight Bs over here. And this doesn't say anything about which place is harder to study or to get respectable results; obviously people's expectations rise with the inflation. But there is a downside to inflation though, namely that it is easier to get straight As, which means that you can't differentiate the academically gifted from the academically brilliant. Not unless you bring in other metrics, but I guess having other metrics is healthy according to some opinions. Life is probably less winner takes all over here, but I don't think it has anything to do with grade inflation or lack thereof in high school or college. For that matter; where you are accepted into higher education over here tends to be determined by a score which is your average grade plus some points for age (maybe for "life experience"?), and other things. Which ends up meaning that if you don't have near perfect grades out of "high school", you won't get into medical school (I guess this is the hardest one to get into). It is my impression that since the US has more privatization, you can at least find some university/college if you have money or connections even if you don't have stellar grades.
    - hga 12y ago
      Med schools are a particular problem because the pipeline that starts with them is constricted by the number of residents the society/government is willing and able to support ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) ). So as long as it's an attractive field (getting much less so in the US) there will be significantly more med school applicants than slots.
cmac2992 12y ago
Ah yes.... Purdue. Almost no grade inflation. When I was there, everyone saw this graph and it made them pissed because other schools had become 'easier' and Purdue had not. That was back before I realized no one gives a shit about GPA.
- nsajko 12y ago
  Don't employers filter candidate employees by their GPA, though?
SeanLuke 12y ago
> It is commonly said that there is more grade inflation in the sciences than in the humanities. This isn't exactly correct. What is true is that both the humanities and the sciences have witnessed rising grades since the 1960s, but it appears that the starting points for the rise were different. I am confused by this statement, because the Y axis label on the accompanying chart says the exact opposite: that both the average GPA and the average change in GPA is higher for humanities than for natural sciences.
- davidgrenier 12y ago
  It's higher, but the line is flat... i.e. it started with a higher baseline but stayed stable. So the rise over time of sciences has been similar to humanities.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    This still doesn't explain why the author is quasi-agreeing with the claim that the sciences has higher grade inflation.

70 points by bane 12y ago

jkw 12y ago

Or a reason GPA has gone is because it's also become more competitive as acceptance rates have gone down. Who knows.

chisleu 12y ago
They have not. Acceptance rates are increases. The school makes more money by having more students.
- usmeteora 12y ago
  While this may be true for public universities, private maintain their prestige by student faculty ratios and keeping their incoming classes between 1000-1300 students. You will see most private universities have kept their class size constant in the passed decade while public ones have increased, further supporting the graph shown in this article attesting to the disparity in grades between public and private schools.

gonzo41 12y ago

This is the result of a user pays education system. If I was dropping a 100K on a degree then I'd expect all HD's. And those that do spend as much money expect the same. So how do you differentiate yourself from all the others with the same degree and same grades? go get more schooling. thus grade inflation and degree inflation. Down in Australia, its less of this and more "you should be thanking me for giving you 51% in physical and computational chemistry". edit - long day == giving up on spelling

quonn 12y ago
This argument is not very convincing, since grade inflation is also real in Germany, even though education is free here. I actually think it comes down to the fact that everyone feel that the middle class is in decline, which creates a more competitive environment and makes grades seem more important, so people work harder on that (which is not to say that others were lazy before - just maybe not optimising for good grades).
- gonzo41 12y ago
  Well maybe I'm am just bad at physical chemistry then. It may also have some relation to weather a university is marking its students against each other or against criteria, if there is a bar to be passed, maybe the use of grades is irrelevant. Its should just be pass/fail, no other metric attached.

jackpirate 12y ago

One possible cause not mentioned in the article is that universities offer/require more filler courses. Last year, for example, I had to teach an intro to HTML course at a UC school. This is a required course for all non-engineering majors. To get an A, all you have to do is create a single html webpage using 10 different tags and 10 different css styles.[1] These courses are huge money makers for the university. I had 120 students in the lecture, and each student paid about $1000 to take that course. The course was a joke for 90% of the students, but they didn't care because they got their "easy A". In exchange, the university got a butt ton of cash. [1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be "easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.

edtechdev 12y ago
Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the “faculty-student non-aggression pact" - “Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of their professors". And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college. How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing it out to make it through a degree program).
- gavazzy 12y ago
  EconTalk has a great episode on this. "ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased." http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
- 12y ago

commentnull 12y ago

It's true - the professor awarded everyone who turned up to class that day fifty percent, just for turning up! One student then started to question that decision - the professor said "aha - critical reasoning! Very good, extra marks for you!". Another then said they would write to the dean to complain, the professor said "excellent, I will award even more marks to you in anticipation of your written effort". Seems like getting the grade got too easy...

tormeh 12y ago
Oh boy, that's a teacher that's given up.

bnegreve 12y ago

The scale on the first plot is a bit disingenuous. Here's the same data replotted with a proper scale (i.e. ranging from 0 to 4 instead of 2.6 to 3.4). http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png

Drakim 12y ago
"there are lies, damned lies and statistics" Your graph still shows the trend. But in a way, that's the most dangerous lie, the sort where you "help truth along" a little bit, to be more compelling.
pervycreeper 12y ago
Considering that a "grade" is an artificial quantity which doesn't represent the "mass" of anything real, the given scale is appropriate. The axes are also labelled very prominently, so I'm not sure what kind of false impression you think a reader would get from the first graph but not the second.
- bnegreve 12y ago
  Grades are at least supposed to reflect the quality of the students who pass the tests with some level of linearity. If the author doesn't believe this is the case, s-he shouldn't use them in the first place, especially not to discuss grade inflation. The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this is misleading.
  - pervycreeper 12y ago
    >the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity (somewhat). You don't get anything useful from multiplying grades by any "factor". Anyone in danger of thinking otherwise should not blame the graph. Fast food articles such as "Top 10 secrets of misleading graphs your profs don't want you to know" are probably more culpable in that regard.

lukasm 12y ago

Is it true that you cannot default on a collage loan in US? How is it legal? Isn't it the root cause of the problem. (I'm not American, my knowledge is limited)

wyclif 12y ago
You can't discharge a college loan via bankruptcy. You can certainly default on the same loan, but those are two different things.
smil 12y ago
IIRC student loan debt was made non-dischargeable by bankruptcy when the government started guaranteeing all student loans. This is the reason why tuition has been increasing so dramatically, because for the banks, making a loan is free of risk. Because supply of money is basically unlimited, schools can increase tuition each year.
- jimhefferon 12y ago
  > Because supply of money is basically unlimited, schools can increase tuition each year. While I am not an expert on the matter, I do work at a college and in my experience there is more to it than that. Just to name one, when I went to school in the late 70's we lived in cinder block dorms and ate in a cafeteria that basically had one dinner choice, while if we offered that today students would not come here. All that stuff costs money, also. Plenty of blame to go around.
  - bryondowd 12y ago
    Room and board is generally separate from tuition. The college I went to charged obscene amounts for it's dorms. You could get a studio apartment to yourself twice the size within 15 minutes of campus for about the same price as having to share a tiny dorm room. The on-campus apartments were worse, since the amount the four people sharing an apartment were paying combined would be enough to rent a good sized house nearby with money left over. I'm sure they get enough charging for the rooms that it isn't affecting tuition price.

raingrove 12y ago

In Singapore, all grades are normalized using the bell curve (normal distribution), where 50% gets the "pass" grade (C+). This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect, you could still end up with just a pass grade. It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.

mauricemir 12y ago
It's better in the long run as you can compere results across cohorts fairly.
- vegedor 12y ago
  I wonder, how is it fair if half a class would pass even if nobody scored more than 50% of the points? I'm sure I miss an integral part of the grading system.
- bildung 12y ago
  > It's better in the long run as you can compere results across cohorts fairly. But cohort size changes (the number of babies born can differ substantially year over year), which impedes comparability.
  - mauricemir 12y ago
    The way it works is if the top 5% got an A you can say some one with an A grade that they where in the top 5% who took that exam in that year.
    - bildung 12y ago
      > The way it works is if the top 5% got an A you can say some one with an A grade that they where in the top 5% who took that exam in that year. Sure, both ends of the grading scale are easy to read when using bell curve grading. The problematic part is the center (where - by definition - the majority of graduates will be found): The C grade of year X could very well be better than the B grade of year Y. Bell curve grading seems to be the worst of both worlds - the students experience even less correlation between effort and grade and you weaken inter-cohort comparability. If grading reform is willing to lose comparability between students anyway it should move in the opposite direction and grade relative performance improvements of individual students. That is proven to result in better overall performance of students (especially for weak performers).

ponderatul 12y ago

What about grade deflation ? in the UK, where at least in social sciences ( Business Degree included) you are not graded against set standards but graded against your fellow students, with whom you are supposed to collaborate with as I understand it. Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data. Does anyone see any problem here ?

M8 12y ago
What if you infuse your papers with some minority and gender studies crap (even if it's not related)? Wouldn't it improve your grade?
- irremediable 12y ago
  Well, if you hadn't studied those topics in sufficient depth, the examiner would doubtless decrease your mark for writing crap. If they weren't relevant, your mark would be decreased for writing irrelevant things. I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities-bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go around oozing their contempt.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    >If people don't like culture, that's fine I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all the staff who had taught them.
    - irremediable 12y ago

3minus1 12y ago

My wife is getting her Master's in bioinformatics from a prestigious university. No joke on the day of the final exam her professor showed up to class 25 minutes late and said he only had one copy of the exam because the photo-copier wasn't working. Everyone got A's. And there is no accountability.

vegedor 12y ago
Final exams have to be stored for years and approved by a second party I should think, for accountability.
thearn4 12y ago
I would say that graduate programs tend to be a bit more binary, i.e. you're either passing a course or you aren't, and the professor knows exactly who those people are. And if you aren't passing, your prof. will also quietly suggest to you early on that you drop it and take it again a bit down the road. This was my experience in masters & phd level math courses, at least.
- eitally 12y ago
  Indeed. In my graduate program you were either get a B or higher, or you were in the professor's office having a tough conversation about your future.

usmeteora 12y ago

I am sure, as 3minus1 mentioned, there are many instances of grade inflation but it seems to vary by major and school. The overall rise in GPA over the years though could be influenced by other things I wonder. 1. jackpirate mentioned more filler courses 2. The internet? If you had a bad professor and a poorly written textbook back in the day, you were kind of screwed outside of working with friends. Today the internet offers pieces of courses and HW examples from all over the world, and things like Coursera and MIT opencourse software are available. 3. MORE AP and IB classes allow students to take college level courses but alot of kids at my college for example, in stead of carrying over the credits, chose to retake Calc I & II, even though they had ACED the AP exams, giving them a freshman year filler of courses that were relatively a breeze for them. I don't believe as many students took AP and IB classes back then. It seems to be the norm nowadays to use this AP/IB edge to actually help yourself ease into college courses be essentially retaking them. Besides, graduating early from a 4 year university is not encouraged, most kids at that level also want the full 4 year experience so their motivation to transfer the credits goes down. If you think about it, this gives the private universities grades a double edge. you are more likely to be accepted into a competitive private university if you are smart enough to be acing college level courses in highschool, and once you get to the private university, you breeze through those courses by essentially retaking them. Most students used a combination of all three of these things and obtained 3.8-4.0 Freshman year, allowing for more slack when the harder courses started to come in. 4. Lets not forget aderall meds are handed out like candy these days to help kids work harder longer. Use of these drugs at top private universities is rampant. In many cases, parents seek out medication for their kids claiming ADHD when really what they are saying is "my kid is not working hard enough to meet up to my standards and because he must be as smart as I am that must be because he is distracted with video games, and therefore has ADHD". Many kids seek it out for themselves. Roughly 1/3rd of the kids I knew were taking aderall regularly (either with or without prescription) to pull all nighters on a regular basis to keep up in school. one of many easily googled sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic... 5. As for the difference between public and private schools, competitiveness and cheating (illegal use of adderall included) is contagious and I definitely think competition, cheating, use of drugs to work harder longer (as opposed to enjoyment and recreation), seems to exponentiate itself amongst more competitiveness students, which statistically, are more likely to end up at more competitive schools. 6. Overall, more and more kids are going to college each year, but interestingly, the applicant pools for public universities does increase, the applicant pool for top private universities is exponential each year, allowing private schools to choose the cream of the crop, potentially creating more of a gap between the general caliber of students between private and public universities. Anecdotal sure but to give you an idea, my friend who went to Johns Hopkins told me stories of kids ripping pages out of textbooks in the libraries so other students had no access, and I've heard this happens at top law schools as well. I witnessed in my private university even as a freshman. In many cases these are kids whose entire identities and their parents value of them depend on acing through ivy league schools, and failure (failure in these case being Bs)is not an option. I can't speak for the average public school, but I feel as if this mindset is less likely to be the norm here. one of many sources to help support pt 5 & 6: http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-madness-of-rich-penthouse-parents/ http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-ma... 7. Someone else mentioned visa students who are TAs are pressured to give good grades for good reviews. With underclassmen on student visas, the competition seems to go up and they are in my experience more likely to engage in competitive behavior or cheating or aderall abuse because the stakes of failing out are also alot higher for them, but it seems to have the opposite effect if you are an undergrad versus be a grad grading TA trying to get good reviews from undergrads. Anecdotal story, but proves that not all private schools use grade inflation liberally: At my college, which is a private university ranked top 50, goes up and down each year by 20 or so in rankings, we are not top 5 but usually in top 25, grading is really tough and we were actually ranked top 3 toughest graders lumped in with MIT, except MIT exempts students from their entire freshman GPA (I've heard) to help with suicide and other such issues. Twice I was curved down because grades were so good we were suspected of cheating. The average GPA at my college was 2.7 when I graduated in 2012 and that is after 10% of students fail out. I wish I experienced more grade inflation at my school! In the three cases of severe grade inflation during my undergrad career, the averages on the exams were 20/100 or 40/100, and they had to curve up 30-40 pts just get a third of the class to pass, and still that meant most kids got Bs or Cs. I'll never forget when we got 18/100 average for 64 kids in a class and we were all Engineering Majors. Different topic but I believe that results from hiring Professors who are better at research (brings in funding) than they are at teaching. Theres no reason statstically why the average of 64 students junior year of one of the hardest Engineering Majors at a top Engineering School should all be failing unless of course the Professor sucks at teaching. So in this case, there was severe grade inflation, but that did not results in higher GPAs overall relative to other schools, it just helped A Professor not get in trouble for being responsible for causing the entire Electrical Engineering Department to fail and have to retake her course, which would have definitely put this Professor under review...

Dwolb 12y ago

There's an underlying assumption of 'grades matter' that may no longer be true. I think this assumption has been becoming less relevant as more people look to see what you did rather than what marks you got. i.e. I believe more people are interested in evaluating your body of work these days. I think this is a good thing since it would allow students to be more rigorous in their learnings for two reasons: 1) students are seeking true knowledge and demonstration of mastery instead of an artificial comparisons and 2) they can be more risky as they learn since the consequences of arriving at a wrong conclusion are minimal.

netcan 12y ago

Like a lot of the pathologies in higher education, there's a lot of bleed from one problem/question and its answers (like grades) into others. So first, what are grades even for? They give students and teachers feedback, they set goals and they enforce a certain amount of discipline, pacing, something to enforce practice. Basically, teaching tools. If I try to think of something analogous, a periodic fitness test as part of a fitness program might be it. Once grades exist, they pick up all sorts of other uses inside the system. Admissions of various sorts. Hiring. Proof. Measures of competence. Comparison. When this is the actual goal, the grading and testing looks different. GMAT is designed around this "secondary" use. I think if you roll back the history of how high schools or universities picked up all the habits and structures they have now, grades weren't as central as they are now. Matriculation was the main marker and that's a binary. Anyway…. I think this kind of focus on grades, grade inflation, deflation and such is more about the fact that most of us were at one time or another concerned with our grades. Any unfairness annoys us and when different generations, places or subjects "have it easy" we get annoyed. I don't think it matters much though. The main reason for grades is the first part, the teaching tool. Hopefully that becomes the focus. Better grading where better is "helps the student more." That probably means tracking and giving feedback progress, reacting to deficits, controlling the pace and stuff like that. I hope grading gets completely hijacked by the technology assisted pedagogy.

Rhapso 12y ago

Teaching as a graduate student i'm seeing a pattern where my department is swamped with students and thus has a lot of grad students teaching (a lot of people here on student visas), then then evaluates all the teaching grad students based on student reviews. A lot of those out-country students are scared of angering students, getting bad reviews and getting kicked out. End result, classes are getting easier and grades are inflating. Students are getting less prepared for later classes I'm a US citizen and I have a reputation for being a hard grader because my position is a lot more stable (it is a lot easier to get funding for US citizens). I teach mostly upper level classes and I am failing a lot of students with "good" grades.

woliveirajr 12y ago
Who ever read the "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" might have some idea about how people are over-confident that they can judge something, or give grades, that are correct, unbiased, and so on... and how that is a big... hum... lie.
- Rhapso 12y ago
  That is the hardest part of teaching for me. After a semester of working with students. I am looking at a spreadsheet assigning them semi-arbitrary values. Grades are not fair. I give a lot of sub-grades on assignments and projects in an attempt to correct for error but I still don't feel great about the signal to noise ratio there. The only thing I grade on is an ability to communicate mastery, rather than mastery itself. There is not much I can do about that.
  - davidgrenier 12y ago
    Maybe I don't understand what you said... but I have a feeling introverts would get penalized? Have you read Quiet?
  - NhanH 12y ago
    I don't think anyone has ever solved the issue of "communicate mastery" vs "mastery" itself: in our field, that's pretty much why recruiting/ hiring/ interview is a big fat giant clusterfuck. Is it actually an issue with grad students worrying about being kicked out? That would be completely bizarre and unthinkable to me: I thought it would be at worst jeopardize the student's TA ship or some silly thing with quals.

dataker 12y ago

People tend to believe this isn't bad, as "other qualities" would be more important. These qualities often are not creativity or diligence(hard to be quantified now), but family connections or social status. Showing personal skills in an interview assumes you got one in the first place.

deleted 12y ago

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Dewie3 12y ago

I'm not an American. I think it's funny when I see people writing about a "C student" being a loser/slacker, a B student either being good or an underachiever, and a straight A student as the point where you finally have your shit together and are doing well.

stegosaurus 12y ago
Winner takes all. The same exists in the UK. Because if you don't get an A, you won't get into the high end universities, you won't get a high paying job, and that's you done. Life of serfdom. Exceptions to the rule exist but our society is based on small amounts of winners compared to many losers.
- Dewie3 12y ago
  I was talking about grade inflation, not winner takes all. So getting straight As over there might be the equivalent of getting straight Bs over here. And this doesn't say anything about which place is harder to study or to get respectable results; obviously people's expectations rise with the inflation. But there is a downside to inflation though, namely that it is easier to get straight As, which means that you can't differentiate the academically gifted from the academically brilliant. Not unless you bring in other metrics, but I guess having other metrics is healthy according to some opinions. Life is probably less winner takes all over here, but I don't think it has anything to do with grade inflation or lack thereof in high school or college. For that matter; where you are accepted into higher education over here tends to be determined by a score which is your average grade plus some points for age (maybe for "life experience"?), and other things. Which ends up meaning that if you don't have near perfect grades out of "high school", you won't get into medical school (I guess this is the hardest one to get into). It is my impression that since the US has more privatization, you can at least find some university/college if you have money or connections even if you don't have stellar grades.
  - hga 12y ago
    Med schools are a particular problem because the pipeline that starts with them is constricted by the number of residents the society/government is willing and able to support ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) ). So as long as it's an attractive field (getting much less so in the US) there will be significantly more med school applicants than slots.

cmac2992 12y ago

Ah yes.... Purdue. Almost no grade inflation. When I was there, everyone saw this graph and it made them pissed because other schools had become 'easier' and Purdue had not. That was back before I realized no one gives a shit about GPA.

nsajko 12y ago
Don't employers filter candidate employees by their GPA, though?

SeanLuke 12y ago

> It is commonly said that there is more grade inflation in the sciences than in the humanities. This isn't exactly correct. What is true is that both the humanities and the sciences have witnessed rising grades since the 1960s, but it appears that the starting points for the rise were different. I am confused by this statement, because the Y axis label on the accompanying chart says the exact opposite: that both the average GPA and the average change in GPA is higher for humanities than for natural sciences.

davidgrenier 12y ago
It's higher, but the line is flat... i.e. it started with a higher baseline but stayed stable. So the rise over time of sciences has been similar to humanities.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  This still doesn't explain why the author is quasi-agreeing with the claim that the sciences has higher grade inflation.