It’s the same old scene for undergraduates at Northwestern: stressing about grades, spending too much time on extracurricular activities, cramming for finals and then running off to relax over whatever break afforded.
Of course, some students try harder than others to get that A on their report cards. Some actually study by keeping up with readings. Others spend a few too many Thursday nights at the 1800 Club — then resort to rummaging through test files from their nearest fraternity, sorority or residential college. But in the end — when students log on to CAESAR from home or the beaches of Cancun or wherever the time away from the campus grind takes them — the slackers, the bookworms and everyone in between are getting the same grades: A’s and A-minuses.
Oh yeah, and some B-pluses, too.
These parent-pleasing marks weren’t always the norm. Over time, at least as far back as NU’s data books show, grades have inched — or sometimes leaped — their way to the point where D’s and F’s are almost nonexistent and C’s are well on their way out, too.
Indeed, the grades are high universitywide, even in the sciences, where most members of academia would expect grades to be substantially lower. The larger truth, however, is that NU is part of a nationwide trend of rising grades. Nowadays nine out of every 10 grades handed out at NU and most of its peer institutions are A’s or B’s, according to universities’ reports. That sits just fine with some NU educators but has others questioning the value of the grading system.
And the critics have these numbers to consider:
The average grade handed out at NU has risen steadily between 1970 and Fall Quarter 2001 (the most recent quarter for which the university has crunched numbers), but most of the increase has occurred in the last half of that period. In the average class, students in Fall 2001 earned an A or A-minus about 55 percent of the time. This compares to about 35 percent in 1985. Meanwhile, the number of C’s has been more than cut in half — to about 8.6 percent of total grades given.
About 85 percent of all Fall 2001 grades given in the School of Music were A-range grades — and almost nine out of 10 of those were solid A’s rather than A-minuses. In 1970 just 36 percent of grades handed out in Music were A’s. What’s more, just 2 percent of grades given were a C-pluses or lower.
The Medill School of Journalism is almost as generous as Music with its grades. Ninety-seven percent of the grades given in Fall 2001 were A’s and B’s — counter evidence to Medill’s hard-line reputation.
The School of Communication and the School of Education and Social Policy are not far behind Music and Medill when it comes to the number of A’s and B’s they hand out. About 96 of Communication grades fell in that range in Fall 2001 and 94 percent of Education grades hit that mark. These two schools, however, differ from the others in that they have seen little change over time. About 82 percent of Communication grades were A’s and B’s in Fall 1970; Education’s figure was at 92 percent.
The two largest schools, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, give the lowest grades overall. Weinberg gives about 47 percent of all its grades in the A range and 89 percent in the A-B range. Similarly, McCormick gives 48 percent of its grades as A range and 86 percent in the A-B range. However, the schools’ increases in these figures since 1985 are among the highest when looking at all of the schools, suggesting Weinberg and McCormick are well on their way to catching up.
(A note: These numbers excluded pass-no credit grades, which don’t factor into grade-point averages, and incomplete grades, which almost always are changed to a letter grade within weeks.)
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS …
Grade-distribution information is readily available to the NU community; the most recent data books can be found on the Office and Administration and Planning’s Web site. But few administrators or professors ever consult the data, and little has been done since a report by the Provost’s Office in November 2000 and an nyou cover story in May 2001 drew attention to the issue.
Disinterest in the subject might be due to most administrators’ belief that it is inappropriate to demand that instructors lower they grades they hand out. The Weinberg departments’ handbook, for instance, specifically mandates: “The College has no policy concerning the distribution of letter grades. Many departments provide new faculty members with a list of their own rules and policies, along with current information about the relative distribution of grades in various courses within the department.” Most of the undergraduate schools have similar policies.
Moreover, few chairpersons keep information about their departments’ grade distribution, and deans and officials in the Provost’s Office unanimously say they would never interfere with a professor’s grading practices. But they might provide faculty with information to spark discussion about whether or not there is grade inflation — that is, what education scholar Alfie Kohn defines as the “upward shift in students’ grade-point averages without a similar rise in achievement.”
The most visible attempt to increase awareness about NU’s rising grades came in November 2000 from Stephen Fisher, associate provost for undergraduate education. The Chicago Tribune had quoted University Provost Lawrence Dumas as saying there was no grade inflation at NU. The evidence, of course, showed that the university’s grades were way up.
Dumas became embarrassed and asked Fisher to launch an investigation. He found that the average GPA for Fall Quarter 1998 was 3.32, compared with 2.99 in 1982. That’s an increase of about .02 each year.
Fisher said in a March interview that he had hoped the 2000 report would spark conversation among professors and departments. He even took the time to calculate the average grade that each school had given out for those periods; the Office of the Registrar doesn’t keep any of those numbers, University Registrar Suzanne Anderson said in an e-mail.
After Fisher’s report was released, Dumas said in a statement: “These data raise issues that the faculty and the individual schools must engage. … Grades should reflect differences in achievement among our students. That is, grades should be measures of a student’s achievements relative to other students at the institution, not of achievement against those who didn’t gain admission.”
But as Fisher now puts it, his report “passed unnoticed.”
Not only did the report go unnoticed, but the trend of rising grades has continued. For Fall Quarter 2001, the average GPA was 3.38. This precisely follows the .02 increase pattern, an ongoing jump that exceeds increases seen in the Ivy League schools and other peer institutions.
ON THE BANDWAGON
Ultimately, there is no dispute that grades are on the rise around the nation. Doubters were silenced in January with the launch of GradeInflation.com, a Web site started by Stuart Rojstaczer, an associate professor of environmental sciences at Duke University. His site now contains data for more than 70 universities, including NU, and represents the grades of about 916,000 students.
“I said to myself, ‘What data is out there?'” Rojstaczer said in a March interview. “There wasn’t a whole lot of data out there.” If nothing else, the professor had anecdotal evidence: his own practices. He wrote in a Jan. 28 Washington Post opinion piece that he has not given a C, “and certainly no D’s or F’s,” in more than two years.
Rojstaczer did manage to pry information from public and private schools. He found that college GPAs increased on average by about .6 from 1967 to 2001 — with private schools inflating at a rate about 20 to 25 percent faster than public schools. NU, according to the data, has an average GPA on par with that of the Ivy League schools and other peer institutions. But that might
not last for long — although NU once was known not to have grade inflation at all, it now is increasing at a rate much higher than most other top-tier universities.
It is Rojstaczer’s guess that major events tend to spur the trends. For instance, the D and F grades started to diminish during the Vietnam War, when many professors, he said, stopped failing students so they could stay in school and avoid being drafted. After the war, there was a plateau in grade inflation, but grades again began to rise steeply in the mid-1980s.
“That’s really the era under which universities started to develop consumer-like attitudes toward their students,” Rojstaczer said. “You see something and you say, ‘Is this random, or is this cause and effect?'”
No one knows for sure why, and it’s almost impossible to test, but schools nationwide, public and private, followed this pattern. NU was among them.
TO FIND ‘WHAT HELPS THE STUDENT MOST’
So as NU and other schools continue to award higher grades, the question remains whether or not the rise is actually a problem universities should address. In other words, so what if everyone is getting A’s and B’s?
Rojstaczer pointed out that if students don’t receive grades to their liking, enrollment will decrease in a professor’s class, which could in the long run affect department funding or the prospect of getting tenure.
The only way for a professor to give lower grades and not suffer in enrollment, Rojstaczer added, is through stellar teaching — something unattainable for most research professors.
“One (way to get around grade inflation) is to teach an outstanding class — just knock their socks off,” he said. “You could do that, if you have talent. Most faculty members weren’t hired for that. Most of them make a fairly mediocre effort. It’s not going to be possible. They don’t have that much time.”
The other alternative, Rojstaczer said, is to simply “give an easy class: watered-down requirements or high grades, modest achievements.” He added that this is the most common path taken by professors, himself included.
At NU some administrators and faculty have rejected the notion that grades have risen as a result of pressure from students.
“I’ve never observed any of that here,” said Richard Weimer, Weinberg assistant dean for undergraduate academic affairs, who has been at NU for 34 years. “I would hope (professors are) not yielding to student pressures.”
Psychology Prof. Michael Bailey, on the other hand, acknowledges the pressures that exist — and even that his own grades have risen over the years.
“Because there is no administrative pressure, it’s really pretty one sided. You bet there’s student pressure,” said Bailey, who serves as the psychology department’s chairman and added that he has never “encountered any constraints” from administrators.
Moreover, Bailey added, not inflating grades is more harmful for professors than helpful — especially when it comes to faculty seeking tenure, which is partially based on Course and Teacher Evaluation Council ratings.
“If you’re a person who bucks the trends and gives hard grades, you’re in trouble. Students really will kill you on the CTECs. I’ve seen it happen.”
If administrative pressure is what is needed, NU deans and professors are getting nowhere fast. Peter Webster, a Music professor who took over as the school’s associate dean for academic affairs in 2002, shared a view common among deans and professors. “I would never welcome an administrator telling me how to grade,” he said. “Grading is very much a personal matter with a professor and his or her students.”
Some cases, however, call for a degree of intervention. Adjunct instructors often come to Medill with no idea about how the school works, Medill Dean Loren Ghiglione said.
In Medill the standard has been that an A is reserved for work that would be deemed publishable and the notorious “Medill F” is given when a student makes a factual error — the ultimate journalistic faux-pas.
“You have a responsibility to explain the standards,” Ghiglione said. “If somebody doesn’t explain the ‘Medill F,’ how can they give it?”
But Ghiglione said he has seen in his nearly two years as Medill dean that grading philosophies vary greatly among the full-time faculty, who have discussed issues of grade inflation in his tenure. Some have done away with the “Medill F”; others hold to their tough reputations. Ghiglione’s stance is unclear.
“It’s hard to know what helps the student most,” he said. “We all have our own theory on this.”
One problem with rising grades that almost everyone agrees with is that once grades get to a certain level, those students who are outstanding no longer stand out from those who are just so-so.
“That’s what happens when you compress at the top,” Fisher said. “It has the appearance of helping mid-performance students.”
These issues get compounded with students’ complaints that they need A’s to attend graduate school and parents’ expectations of high grades. The end result can be seen in something as small as graduation honors, which Fisher said frequently come down to a couple thousandths of a grade point.
NU students are known for showing their excellence through extracurricular activities. But students who prefer to show their talents in the classroom can become frustrated when a slacker peer is equally rewarded for less effort expended.
Music junior Stephanie Zimmerman said this happens in her ensemble classes.
Some students clearly are better prepared than others, and it shows, Zimmerman said. But these loafers oftentimes get away with not practicing their music without penalty. It is in these cases that she wishes professors were more firm with their grading.
“If students were given more applicable grades — not A’s or high B’s all the time — that would … influence them,” she said. “Students don’t like getting lower grades than A’s and B’s.
“I don’t think it would be harmful for professors to keep that in mind.”
Zimmerman added, however, that professors shouldn’t lower grades just because they want to stop the ballooning statistics.
“I don’t think they should be giving lower grades because they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to add to grade inflation,'” she said. “Teachers should really take a look at what students have done.”
SOLUTIONS VS. STATUS QUO
A number of proposed solutions to grade inflation are floating about, but none has yet to stick.
One option is to change the way grades are computed.
Fisher recommends having the average grade for each individual course next to your earned grade for the course, so employers or admissions officers at graduate school can see how students fared compared to their classmates. Other professors suggested ranking students instead of giving a letter grade at all.
Some deans and professors, including the GradeInflation.com professor, would rather do away with grades.
“We’ve had this letter-grade system in place for about a century. It doesn’t work very well at higher institutions,” said Rojstaczer, who instead would like to see a method of evaluation that adjusts with time. One short-term suggestion he made was a grade above an A, such as the “AA.”
But solutions such as these seem far off when problems with grading, whatever they might be, have hardly been discussed on a universitywide level. The first step, said Tamara Kagel, former Associated Student Government academic vice president, is putting the issue out on the table.
“Educating everyone about it is important,” said Kagel, a Communication junior. “Faculty should be talking about it more. Northwestern should step up and lead on the national level.”
National leadership seems highly unlikely at this point, especially when the Provost’s Office is not ready to make any official statements about the state of grade inflation at NU. Moreover, Fisher said, any universitywide resolution about grade inflation would require the endorsement of all of the faculties.
He added that even if the university made sweeping policy changes about grading, the effects would be small, as NU is not regarded as a trendsetter. “If NU did it, it would be a ripple,” Fisher said. “If Harvard or Princeton did it, it would be much more of a wave.”
Rojstaczer said he was working to put together a 2004 conference for universities to discuss the issues at a national forum — a venue that currently doesn’t exist.
With ideas simmering on the back burner and no sign of change in the future, some faculties are just fine with the status quo. Instructors such as communication studies Prof. Michael Leff have recognized the evolving culture of teaching — one that focuses on team projects and other nontraditional evaluation methods.
“Ten years ago I used to worry about whether my grades were too high,” he said. “I’ve ceased worrying about that. I think that might also represent a change in the culture.”
More basically, many professors don’t find that students are getting off easy with rising grades — it’s a reflection of better performance. Stephen Carr, McCormick’s associate dean for undergraduate engineering, said the school’s faculty has discussed grade inflation and decided there was nothing wrong with it.
“The rationalization was that the quality of the students continues to rise,” said Carr, adding that students were meeting the performance standards of the faculty.
He pointed out that on the back of the report card, an A is defined as excellent. And if professors feel the students are meeting that standard, he said, why shouldn’t everyone get an A?
“If a student does an excellent job,” he said, “shouldn’t you call that excellent?”
