However, data collected throughout a study performed by the Teachers College Record indicated that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988.
The researchers collected their data from over 200 four-year colleges and universities. However, the New York Times pointed out that private colleges and universities are more culpable than their public counterparts in driving this trend of grade inflation. The study published this week by TCRecord were consistent with this assertion: Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity.(If you really want to see how rampant grade inflation has become in American colleges and universities, this link provides actual graphical data and evidence collected between 1991 and 2007, along with comparisons of public and private schools.)
It begs to question why parents would spend the big bucks to send your kids to private institutions when all evidence points to private institutions setting the lowest standards? Let's play devil's advocate: What's wrong with grade inflation? So what if professors make an A very achievable? After all, my kid deserves it.
Here's what's wrong with it:
These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.
As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.
However, these studies have placed a Tonka truck-sized load of blame onto instructors for permitting inflation, but many this research fails to consider another factor - student pressure. How many grade grubbers do you think professors receive at office hours weekly begging for a couple extra points on their last lab grade? How many students do you think show up week after week after class to heckle at least half a letter grade on their last test? Professors aren't throwing extra slack without a little bit of arm pulling from students, students who feel entitled to nothing shy of an A or A-.
It's a sad day for American education when excellence becomes obsolete.
I think you're so right in pointing out student pressure as a catalytic factor in grade inflation. One of my notoriously tough profs last semester spent a whole class trying to convince us that a C grade in one class would only affect our GPAs by about .05, but I don't think it changed my classmates' unrealistic ideals much. And, of course, the students' grade perceptions aren't helped by the pressure by high schools and the college admissions process to be perfect.
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