Students love to hate them, professors hate to give them, most colleges refuse to part with them ... and they are rampantly on the rise. Grades -- the catch-22 of the modern university -- have steadily increased in recent decades, and grade inflation is now a larger concern in the academic community than ever.
A recent Boston Globe article by Experimental College professor Phil Primack outlined the grade inflation epidemic. Featured in the Globe's College Issue, the article's headline, "Doesn't Anybody Get a C Anymore?" reflects Primack's sentiments, as well as those of some of his colleagues, on the source of contention.
"For teachers, it's been an issue for quite a while," Primack said. "Grading has always been important both to faculty and students but this resonated so much. The issue of grade inflation is nothing new, but it has certainly gotten significantly more pronounced in the last decade."
A study of 29 institutions, excluding Tufts, showed that grade point averages at private schools increased from 3.11 in 1992 to 3.26 in 2002. The Tufts average GPA on the other hand, has been consistently higher. It rose from 3.26 for 1997-1998 to 3.39 last year; according to Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, an average that took into account over 39,000 grades from all courses. The School of Engineering average was slightly lower at 3.25.
Primack cited a number of possible factors contributing to the rising number of high grades.
"There's some competitive pressure to get into the best medical school or law school that drives pressure for good grades," he said.
But Primack said this was secondary to another factor concerning the relationship of student and faculty. "Most faculty don't want to deal with whining students," he said.
Still, the most concerning aspect of the trend is that rising grades could reflect an overall cultural shift, according to Primack.
"You could get into a broader societal issue -- the whole issue of entitlement," Primack said. "[Today's students] grew up in an environment where you were the best at everything, the best at soccer, the smartest kid in the class ... and to be told you're not superbly excellent -- you're not an A, you're a B" bothers people.
While no one can argue with the fact that grades have risen, not everyone agrees with Primack that inflation is a problem that needs to be addressed.
"I think there's been grade inflation. I don't think it's a problem. Grades have gone up; I think there are reasons perhaps," University Professor Sol Gittleman said.
Gittleman explained that Tufts offers many more general education courses now than it did in the past. These courses have fewer prerequisites, so the expectation is that every student can master the material, he said.
"Our students are smart and smarter. You give them a body of knowledge; they acquire knowledge. You test them on it and they demonstrate it," he said. "Faculty expectations are not lower, but more positive. We think the students should do well in our courses and I'm personally disappointed when they don't. I like giving good grades."
Sophomore Maxx Caicedo also shared the belief that meeting faculty expectations should merit high grades.
"If the teacher has the standards, and if people reach that, then good work for the kids," he said.
Even if, overall, more students are successfully demonstrating their knowledge, Primack argued this does not mean that grade inflation is acceptable.
"You hear, 'We got a lot smarter students, therefore the grades are better.' Sure, I agree, but if your overall caliber student is higher, are you telling me that students are therefore all the same caliber? There are distinctions to be made in an overall higher tier," Primack said.
The lack of these distinctions implies that it can be difficult to determine the actual meaning of an A, an A- or a B+. The lines between "above average," "satisfactory" and "poor" are increasingly blurry.
"For the student who works hard and really puts their all into a class and gets an A or A-, because of grade inflation, there isn't much distinction between that A and a B+ or a B. The person who busts their butt doesn't get the credit they deserve. It all gets lost in the mix," Primack said.
Senior Amanda Ruud said that in many of her classes, converging grades are the norm.
"I often feel like if you do that which is minimally required with the smallest amount of inspiration, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get an A," she said. "That is the inflation. I don't feel you have to do supremely excellent work to get an A. You have to do passable work that's cleanly constructed and has some creativity."
Ruud's comments came with a caveat -- "I take a lot of subjective classes" -- but she said that the highest grades are not reserved solely for students who go above and beyond.
"Most students give as much as they feel they need to give, though I can understand why professors do it, because there's probably indignation if students have done the most cursory amount and they don't get the grade they want," she said.
The grade system allows for the avoidance of low grades as well, as students are able to drop courses up until the last day of the semester and receive a W rather than a grade on their transcript. The ability of students to make such decisions without consequence to GPAs may also contribute to grade inflation, or at least contribute to greater difficulty in its regulation.
"One big issue that keeps coming up in our department is 'We don't want grade inflation,'" said a philosophy teaching assistant who requested anonymity. "Grade inflation is equated with having too many A's."
Having a large number of high grades is unavoidable, she said, when students doing poorly in a class inevitably drop it.
"What happens is that the majority of students left are the ones who are doing well," she said. "It seems unfair for the people grading to somehow change around the grading scale at the end of the semester so there's no accusation of grade inflation. Students who have been doing well throughout the course ... these people earned their A's, and we're stuck between a rock and a hard place."
Perhaps most revealing in the discussion of grade inflation is not the rise in good grades, but the amount of importance placed on them.
"The inherent flaw in any system of grading is it becomes more about the system of designating the grade than what you actually know," Ruud said. "I guess it is status or self-affirmation or competition. I definitely feel that at the end of a course, a lot of students are more satisfied by an A than by a tangible amount of knowledge they've attained."
"Tufts students are obviously hard workers, so it's important to them to get the good grades. Once they figure out what they need to do in order to achieve them, they'll do that much. I don't know if it's grade inflation as much as Tufts students doing everything they can to get the grades they want," senior Ashley Pandya said.
Professors acknowledge that letter grades may not be the best way to evaluate students, but some assessment is beneficial.
"I hate grading. [Professors] don't mind making judgments, but I don't like to put a grade on it. We need the judgmental part. I don't like putting A, B, C, D, F on it, but we haven't figured out another system," Gittleman said. "I don't know what to do about that. The faculty despises having to put grades on exams."
"Grading, at least for me, is the worst part of teaching -- not so much giving grades as anticipating the complaints," Primack said.
As Primack's Globe article points out, the fear of these complaints is exactly what may be leading some professors to give higher-than-deserved grades -- but this is not the case for Gittleman.
"People have expectations as [if they were] consumers or clients. The one thing I do not like is to be thought of as a clerk in a haberdashery, with students saying 'I want an A,'" he said. "I'm sorry; we don't have your size."
