Contributed by Denise D. Knight, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita, English Department, and Noralyn Masselink, Professor, English Department –
As part of The Cortland Cause’s Spotlight on Course Teacher Evaluations
Years ago, when our careers were in their infancy, a colleague in our department confided that he never assigned a paper grade lower than a B. A kind-hearted and well-meaning soul, to be sure, he told us that anything less than a B had the potential to damage a student’s self-esteem. To our protest that inflating grades had, among other things, the effect of exaggerating a student’s perception of her skills, he responded that that was a good thing, because it would bolster her self-confidence. We eventually agreed to disagree.
The issue of grade inflation has the potential to cause discord in even the most collegial quarters. Inflated grades are a common occurrence on college campuses, for reasons ranging from our colleague’s philosophy that artificially promoting positive self-esteem does more good than harm to the position that it is much easier to assign a high grade than to defend a low one. Concerns about students retaliating against low grades by producing damaging course teacher evaluations is another reason faculty exaggerate grades. An article in Forbes by Tom Lindsay in March 2019 paints a particularly grim picture of the trends in grade inflation: “Virtually all new college graduates sport nothing but A’s and B’s on their transcripts. For the same reason, grade inflation also hinders the ability of graduate school admissions boards to differentiate meaningfully among student transcripts.” Likewise, Duke University professor Stuart Rojstaczer, on his website, www.gradeinflation.com, which features extensive research on the topic, documents the trend with a series of graphs and charts. Rojstaczer’s study also confirms that “A is the most popular grade in most departments in most every college and university.” On some campuses, there is subtle pressure, in a market that competes for students, to raise the institution’s profile—and hence its appeal—by inflating grades. As Jonathan Dresner observes, “Student retention and graduation rates are used as measures of institutional effectiveness, which mitigates against failing (or even discouraging) even the most unprepared students.” The problem pervades all levels of higher education, from community colleges to elite universities. In an illuminating article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2001, Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield exposed the problem of grade inflation at his Ivy League institution by noting that fully half of Harvard’s students graduate with “outlandishly high grades” of A or A-. “Grade inflation has resulted from the emphasis in American education on the notion of self-esteem,” Mansfield writes. “According to that therapeutic notion, the purpose of education is to make students feel capable and empowered. So to grade them . . . strictly, is [viewed as] cruel and dehumanizing.” But however well-intended, we would argue that grade inflation is never justifiable. While much of the literature addressing this topic examines the impact on the professor and on the institution, little of it deals directly with the effect of grade inflation on the student. Not only are there ethical concerns, certainly, but another critical factor should be taken seriously: when we create a culture in which we overstate the worth of a student’s performance by assigning a grade that does not honestly reflect ability, we are not serving that student responsibly. On the contrary, we may very well be setting the stage for future failure.
Most of us who assign honest grades have heard the familiar complaint levied by frustrated and oftentimes angry students: “But I get As on all my other papers!” Our response is not one that they want to hear. We tell them that if their essay reflects the quality of writing that they are submitting in other classes, their professors are committing a profound disservice by awarding a grade of A. The student will sometimes return with an A paper in hand from another course to “prove” to us that our standards are impossibly high. When we inevitably point out serious weaknesses in their essay, from incomplete sentences to errors in agreement and arguments made without the benefit of textual evidence, the student typically becomes more adamant in her assertion that the problem is ours. After receiving a course grade of B-, one student e-mailed the following query: “I am writing you in concern for [sic] my overall grade in the course. . . . Does [the B-] mean that I did that bad on the final? I really believe I did well on the final. Did something else take into effect [sic]? . . . I did not miss more than the alotted [sic] classes. I have enough class participation. The only thing that I had that was bad was the paper. Could you please let me know what I got on the paper and anything [sic] I should know?” It was only after three more messages from the student, each one more urgent and defiant than the last, that she finally accepted the outcome as a simple question of mathematics. What is most curious, though, about the student’s inquiry is her belief that a grade of B- is somehow “bad.”
At SUNY Cortland, and at countless other institutions, an A is defined as “superior performance,” a B indicates a “good performance,” a C is awarded for “fair performance,” and a D is “minimally acceptable.” Many students, however, view a “good” grade as not good enough. Anything less than an A is often perceived by the recipient as a dismal failure. As Mansfield states, “today a B- is a slap in the face” (qtd. in Bruno). We have seen countless tears, listened to emotionally wrought pleas, and witnessed outright meltdowns when students earn a “good” grade of B. Unless professors work very hard to justify grades of C or D, there are almost always follow-up e-mail inquiries, phone calls, or office visits from dissatisfied students demanding an explanation. Many of them seem unable to fathom the fact that their performance is legitimately less than superior, or, at the very minimum, merely “good.”
A number of factors contribute to students’ perceptions that a B is “bad.” One leading cause, as Kurt Wiesenfeld notes, is that the current generation of students has “been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem” (16). Indeed, in our experience, students today often perceive grades lower than an A as a judgment of their character, rather than as a measure of their performance. Because the popular wisdom endemic in their generation has been to preserve and bolster self-esteem (criticism of any kind is viewed as destructive and unkind), many students have been coddled and rewarded for mediocre achievements. Like Wiesenfeld, Mansfield, too, condemns the present trend. “There is something inappropriate—almost sick—in the spectacle of mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise,” he argues. Honest grades, as opposed to those that are routinely inflated, are often a wake-up call for students who spend much of the semester in a state of intellectual slumber. When it becomes apparent that not all instructors subscribe to the culture that promotes easy As, students often become reactionary. Panic, anger, and defensiveness are common responses.
A second factor influencing students’ perceptions of grades is that they view themselves as customers in a consumer culture who are, in essence, “paying” for a degree rather than earning one; as a result, there is a sense of entitlement in their demand for higher grades. “Students have developed a disgruntled-consumer approach,” Wiesenfeld notes. “If they don’t like their grade, they go to the `return’ counter to trade it in for something better.” At Cortland, this practice is encouraged by the fact that students can withdraw from a course as late as three weeks before the semester ends without many consequences. In the past, when a student withdrew, instructors could indicate whether the student was passing or failing the course. The present system, however, enables students to withdraw with no record of their course status. It has become too easy to simply erase indicators of past performance, lulling students into a false sense of security—or, worse yet, denial—about their academic abilities. With no official record establishing a history of uneven academic performance, it is easy for students to convince themselves that all is well. The sad irony, of course, is that when students bail themselves out of a course in which they are struggling (valid reasons for course withdrawal notwithstanding), they become complicit in their failure to meet a legitimate intellectual challenge. As Dresner notes, “the ideology of ‘student as consumer’ has changed the power relationships within the academy, placing satisfaction higher than intellectual growth as a measure of success.”
A third reason that students challenge fair assessments of their work stems from the simple semantic inversion that leads students to conclude that the “good” grade of B is actually “bad.” While most dictionaries offer some two dozen definitions of “good,” students apparently view the word as an antonym for “excellent,” rather than the next logical stage on a linear scale. Surely, we can apply the term to even the poorest student work and end up characterizing that student’s performance as “good.” For example, “it was ‘good’ of this student to turn in his [otherwise atrocious] work on time.” Or, “despite a disappointing result, this student at least made a ‘good’ effort.” An instructor might even find that a student’s dismal performance on a final draft is at least “‘good’ compared to the first one.” The list goes on and on. At the same time, however, since a grade of C is meant to indicate a “fair performance”—and considering that “fair” can mean anything from “moderately good,” “acceptable or satisfactory,” to “promising”—we wonder why professors who resist assigning C grades find them so destructive. If no student’s work is being judged as being “fair” or “minimally acceptable,” then why do institutions retain the possibility of assigning grades of C or D at all?
Certainly, this question has evoked a spirited debate on college campuses nationwide. In a 2005 Washington Post article that garnered much attention, Alicia C. Shepard confronted the issue head on. She acknowledged that early in her teaching career at American University, she had, on occasion, bowed to the pressure from students who challenged their grades. Students “bribed,” “pestered,” “bombarded,” “harangued,” and “harassed” her. Although she had reservations about modifying grades, she nevertheless succumbed, until a “university official,” citing unfairness, rejected a grade change, effectively ending her reputation as a softy. In our own program, students who need to retain a minimum grade point average in order to stay in the teacher education program regularly engage in such grade lobbying when they miss the cutoff by a few tenths of a point. Thus, the end of the semester regularly finds such students making the rounds from one professor’s office to the next pleading their case. The problem, however, is that students who “squeak” into programs through such back-door means generally struggle when it comes time for them to perform in their own classrooms. In other words, poor grades and a low or borderline GPA often corresponds to poor performance as a student-teacher—a correlation which comes as no surprise if the courses in which the student has done poorly are meant to equip the student for later professional performance as a teacher. In essence, then, when sympathetic professors agree to change a student’s grade, they often set the student up for an even greater struggle further down their academic path, when the stakes are generally higher. Such well-meaning gestures are a recipe for future disaster.
So why do so many faculty members compromise their integrity by assigning fictitious grades? Rojstaczer, for one, is candid about his reasons for assigning a disproportionate number of As and Bs: “As are common as dirt in universities nowadays because it’s almost impossible for a professor to grade honestly. If I sprinkle my classroom with the Cs some students deserve, my class will suffer from declining enrollments in future years. In the marketplace mentality of higher education, low enrollments are taken as a sign of poor-quality instruction. I don’t have any interest in being known as a failure.” In fact, faculty are oftentimes reluctant to issue fair and honest grades because they fear retaliation from students on end-of-the-semester course teaching evaluations. This anxiety is fueled on college campuses where high teaching scores are tied to tangible monetary awards in the form of raises or discretionary salary increases. Inflated grades become the currency that buys strong evaluations. Websites like ratemyprofessors.com encourage students to rate the “average easiness” of their professors, and high “easiness” ratings typically result in strong overall scores for those professors. As a result, it’s not uncommon to see comments like the following, which were made about a professor with an overall score of 4.5 out of 5: “Not a very difficult class, and we ended up watching clips from family guy and Jackass the movie. Really easy to talk into cancelling class.” There is an implicit quid pro quo: students will provide inflated teaching scores in exchange for high grades (and, in this case, for canceled classes). In another class, where the instructor rated an overall score of 5.0 and a difficulty level of 2.0, a student wrote that the instructor “doesn’t assign much work at all, in fact most of the reading is done in class.” Several other students wrote of this instructor that his courses were “super easy” or an “easy A.” Untenured faculty may be particularly vulnerable to the pressure to secure strong CTEs, since continued employment is so often contingent upon satisfactory teaching. “Unfair” or “hard” grading is a commonly voiced complaint on course evaluations. One student wrote on their CTE that the instructor “grades as though we were at Harvard.” Such a statement suggests that because admission standards at a public college are lower than those at a private or Ivy League institution, the grading standards should be adjusted downward as well. But we believe that regardless of the insignia on one’s diploma, all students should be held to a rigorous standard. Offering them anything less is simply irresponsible.
Yielding to student and even institutional pressure, however, is only one factor behind exaggerated grades. Some members of the profession may, perhaps unwittingly, be plagued by nagging doubts about the quality of their teaching, which, in turn, elicits the belief that if their students underperform, they have themselves somehow failed. The ensuing guilt (“I must be doing something wrong”) can cause instructors to overcompensate for their inadequacies—either perceived or real—by elevating grades. But when instructors do impose honest low grades, they can still be riddled by guilt, particularly when the student pleads for mercy, because a low grade will mean that they won’t be qualified to continue in a program, to apply for a scholarship, or to graduate on time. In his 1996 short story, “A Gentleman’s C,” American author Padgett Powell examines the devastating consequences of assigning an honest grade. The story focuses on a college English professor who gives his 62-year-old father, a student in his course, “a hard, honest low C.” When the grade prevents his father from fulfilling his long-held dream to earn a college diploma, he suffers a fatal heart attack, causing the narrator to be haunted by guilt.
While honest grades don’t usually result in the degree of drama depicted in Powell’s story, the repercussions of routinely assigning high grades for inferior work are, nevertheless, far-reaching. As reported in Ken Bain’s recent study What the Best College Teachers Do, several studies have demonstrated that when students are given extrinsic rewards like good grades, both their motivation to do well and their intrinsic interest in the subject matter actually decrease if the reinforcement of good grades is removed (32). Compounding this problem is perhaps the more serious consequence that students learn to get by without making much effort. If they can whip out a paper in the hours before a final draft is due and know that they will be generously rewarded regardless of quality, their motivation for achieving genuine excellence is compromised. Why labor over a paper for weeks if winging it in the eleventh hour will yield the same results? The impetus to improve one’s analytical, research, and writing skills will be diminished or altogether eliminated.
In fact, we have found this scenario to be true even when students are given the chance to revise their work. It is not unusual for students to submit for initial feedback what they characterize as a “rough draft,” work that often resembles little more than brainstorming notes. Despite our warning that such drafts will require serious revision, students quite frequently engage instead in a superficial cleanup of the essay. They then express bewilderment as to why their “revised” draft has earned a grade of D. “But this draft is so much better than my first!” they cry, with little understanding that the word “draft” implies a preliminary sketch, rather than a finished product. Certainly, responding to drafts, and allowing students to revise, affords them an opportunity to learn from their mistakes, but in an environment where students have been able to artificially excel, demanding additional work is often viewed as a punishment rather than an opportunity. When we insist that extensive revisions need to be made, students often balk. It’s not unusual for them to resist—or even to challenge—the notion that it may require considerable work for their performance to be good, let alone superior. Even with additional efforts on the part of the student, however, we don’t make promises about grades that we simply can’t keep. There are times when we have evaluated third and even fourth drafts that don’t meet the standard of “fair” work; at the same time, however, we have seen poorly conceived preliminary drafts undergo the kind of extreme makeover that has resulted in a bona fide grade of “superior.” Those students who rise to the occasion seem to understand that until their work is truly “superior” or “good,” it will not be awarded a grade of A or even B no matter how many revisions they have undertaken. In other words, we do not award effort unless that effort results in significantly improved work. Once students accept those terms, they can meet the challenge and adopt the mantra of all good educators that “every student is capable of learning,” if we enable them to.
Sometimes, in order to illustrate our point that “effort” alone can’t always be rewarded, we offer analogies. We ask students whether they would seek treatment from a doctor who had tried “really hard” to get through medical school, who put endless hours into his work, but who couldn’t pass his final exams. Or similarly, we ask how many students would be willing to fly in a plane piloted by someone who had logged hundreds of hours in the cockpit, but who was unable to pass his licensing test. Having students think about the expectations they have for working professionals—and the possible repercussions of falling short—gives them a better sense of how we view their performance in our classes.
Another consideration is that rewarding substandard work with inflated grades is blatantly unfair to those students who do labor over their essays and who push themselves to achieve excellence. One of our students was incensed when nearly all of her classmates received final grades of A despite the fact that many of them boasted publicly about how little work they had done for the course. As she put it, “It’s not fair that I read every page assigned and do all the work, and those who read only part of the work and fake their way through assignments end up with the same grade.” Not fair, indeed. Such scenarios make getting an education seem more like an exercise in seeing how little one can do than an effort to learn anything of value. And since the students are aware of this culture on campus, one must wonder about the degree of respect they hold for either the professor or for their education in general. As Mansfield argues, “professors who give easy grades gain just a fleeting popularity, salted with disdain. In later life, students will forget those professors; they will remember the ones who posed a challenge.”
In fact, students who are falsely conditioned to believe that they are producing A work will also have a harder time facing the inevitable disappointment when they are denied a job or admission to graduate school. Although some administrators, including Ronald Ehrenberg, Director of Cornell’s Higher Education Research Institute, believe that the quality of today’s students is higher than in the past, extant data doesn’t support that conclusion (Bruno). On the contrary, Rojstaczer’s research suggests that “There is no evidence that students have improved in quality nationwide since the mid-1980s” (gradeinflation.com). As a result, those students who have been awarded fictitious grades typically have inflated expectations and distorted judgments about their ability to find and secure employment. Students who have been accustomed to sailing through a course, regardless of the quality of their performance, may be overly confident about their candidacy. Prospective employers and graduate schools, however, who recognize that grade inflation is rampant, may ignore grades in favor of entrance exams, or, those who do they review letters of application are likely to be put off by cover letters that are poorly written. What students may not realize is that they will often be competing with hundreds of applicants and that employers often make the first cuts from the applicant pool based purely on the impression that applicants make in cover letters or resumes.
A handful of institutions are finally yielding to the pressure to address the problem of grade inflation. In 2004, Princeton University, by a vote of 156 to 84, passed a grade deflation policy that limits “A-range grades to 35 percent in undergraduate courses.” Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel emphasizes the benefits of “grading in a more discriminating fashion.” One of the advantages, she notes, is that “faculty members are able to give clearer signals about whether a student’s work is inadequate, ordinary, good or excellent” (Bruno). The trend toward changing the culture that accepts grade inflation, however, is discouragingly slow.
Those professors who rubberstamp student papers with As and Bs, because they are easygoing, indifferent, desperate to attain strong CTEs, or simply overwhelmed by mountains of essays, make life much harder for their colleagues who do insist on high-quality performance. But the biggest detriment to students who are subjected to a culture in which an “easy A” is a given is that it denies them the opportunity to strengthen their skills, to grow intellectually, and to experience the enormous sense of accomplishment that comes from genuine hard work. Assigning honest grades consistently is the first step in preserving not only personal and institutional integrity, but also in promoting responsible teaching. We owe our students that much.
