CAROLINA, AND ABOUT EVERY OTHER COLLEGE in America, has a problem with
continually inflating grades, having become an institution where all the students are
above average — almost literally. As the Daily Tar Heel said last fall regarding grade
inflation: “The numbers are striking. So striking that many people don’t believe them.”
Between the late 1960s and now, the overall grade point average at the University of
North Carolina has risen almost a point. In 1967, the average GPA was a 2.49. Last
fall, it was a 3.21. This trend has made grades nearly useless, or worse, for
distinguishing among students’ abilities. The most common grade given out at UNC is
an A, and 82 percent of all grades are either A’s or B’s. Once upon a time C meant
average.
In a UNC report on grading, Donna Gilleskie notes that, in addition to grade inflation,
UNC is experiencing grade compression, which means the best students cannot be
distinguished from each other. UNC is also experiencing grade inequality as different
departments and different instructors assign different grades for similar performance.
Grade inequality makes grade comparisons between students in departments not just
difficult but completely misleading. For example, the average GPA, using a scale
where an F is 0.0 and an A is 4.0, in the UNC math department for the fall of 2008 was
a 2.62, while the average in the School of Education was a 3.72. (I worked on
university campuses, including UNC, for a couple of decades, and, just for the record,
students taking education courses are not smarter than those taking mathematics.)
This is not a random inequality; this is a perverse, inverted distribution of grades where
the highest grades are given in the most vacuous courses, which leads students
searching for better GPAs to take easy classes from easy graders. This does not lead
to the optimal educational experience for them, needless to say.
And it is now easy to find easy. Googling “Pick-A-Prof” gets this description of their
service: “View official school records to see how many A’s professors give before you
register.” Students have long found crip courses from pushover profs — albeit with
poorer, hearsay data. I have often counseled students that they can get a great
education simply by taking classes from the professors everyone else is avoiding
“because they’re too tough.” In my experience, they are generally among the best
teachers on campus. But for many this would be GPA suicide.
While the Vietnam War and the draft once drove grade inflation, the main driver now is
the relationship between easy grading and student evaluations — combined with the
omnipresent desire of students to get high GPAs. Having students evaluate teachers is
a good thing, in my view, but there is one major problem: these evaluations are used in
tenure and other hiring decisions, and students give higher evaluations to courses (and
professors who teach them) in which they think that they are getting higher grades.
And in return, whether consciously or not, faculty give high grades because students’
perception of what grade they are going to get in a class is the primary factor in their
course evaluations. In 2000, UNC’s Educational Policy Committee found that
instructors who awarded an average grade of 2.7 suffered, holding all else constant, a
32-percentile-point disadvantage in student approval compared to those who awarded
a 3.6 average grade. It just happens the second bout of grade inflation began in the
late 1980s, at the time that the UNC mandated student course evaluations for all
faculty.
As a consequence, for a faculty member, giving higher grades thus means a higher
chance of getting tenure or getting promoted. Since higher grades cost teachers
nothing, there is an incessant pressure on faculty to increase grades (and thus their
evaluations).
So, is it inevitable that UNC remain LWSU — Lake Wobegone State University? You’ll
see when you come back next week to find out what UNC can do about spiraling
grades.
Gary D. Gaddy graduated from Furman University in 1975 mit fast ein drei punkt fünf
auf Deutsch.
A version of this column was published in the Chapel Hill Herald on Friday February 12,
2010.
Copyright 2010 Gary D. Gaddy
garygaddy.com 