“I’m supposed to graduate summa cum laude so I need an A in this class.”

That sentence, repeated to me at the end of most sessions of a 2-credit elective, was one of the strangest student interactions I ever had, made stranger by the use of “supposed to.” I took it as the obsessive noting of an expected outcome, if only I wouldn’t get in the way and screw it up.

My usual responses to the student, such as: ‘So, that means you’ll work really hard in this class, right?” only received a blank stare. My prodding of what interested her in the subject matter were similarly blank.

And yet, at the end of almost every class, that “supposed to” returned.

“Re-Centering” Academics

The last several generations saw tremendous changes in the expectations of university education.

We went from academic admissions exams to an appeal for well-rounded students, from the introduction of aptitude tests to the test prep industry and the normalization of test retakes, from the blanket availability of student loans to dramatic tuition increases, from college attendance being the exception to the expectation, from mostly men to mostly women attending college.

Access to the subject matter changed as well. While advanced content was formerly locked away in specialized books only available in university libraries and in the heads of professors, today you don’t need to join an institution. An explosion of online courses, YouTube channels, niche newsletters, and now AI, means that interested students have education at their fingertips in just about any subject. Many of those library books I wished I had access to growing up are digitized, sometimes free, or available to search and purchase.

But what those books and online content don’t do – or don’t do very well – is provide a trusted evaluation of performance – a grade.

Many recent articles and faculty have been debating what grades actually mean anymore. So I read the recent report Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College: Update on Grading and Workload.

As we discuss grading, let me call out some sections of that report.

Faculty are concerned. “They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work. Faculty newly arrived at Harvard are surprised at how leniently our courses are graded, and those who have taught here for a long time are struck by the difference from the recent past.” “Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded… for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work. It’s a farce.”

Faculty admit that the grading situation has “hollowed out academics.” “When the median grade is an A, academics can start to feel, as students sometimes put it, ‘fake.’”

Should we just share more data? Could we solve grade inflation by “recording the median grade for every course on the transcript”? Good idea, but until grades are recentered, the top students will look like slackers. Grade compression at the high end will continue to be the problem, with the truly outstanding and merely good students both receiving A’s.

Real achievement is still known, but not in academics. “Our students know what real achievement feels like: they experience it in their research, their sports, their clubs, in the start-ups they launch, and the non-profits they found. But they don’t always feel that same sense of achievement in their courses.” So why did it disappear in the courses?

Student workload. An interesting balance to the grade inflation concern is that reported student workload has not changed over the years. If this is true, then the amount of work is not related to excelling in the subject matter, is busy-work, or students have become less able to do the work over time.

In support of the unprepared students theory, reading scores from entering freshman are lower than in the past. But even if students are worse prepared for higher education that doesn’t explain why the appropriate response was grade inflation.

From critical feedback to emotional support. Related to the above is the focus on supporting students who are not prepared, whether for academic rigor or for emotional issues. “Another kind of pressure comes from the College itself. For the past decade or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others.”

This seems to be more of a problem for the admissions committee to work out. Also, why should student emotional support be solved by higher grades?

New approaches to teaching. “Almost twenty years ago, the Compact to Enhance Teaching and Learning at Harvard (2007) called on the FAS to ‘reward excellence in teaching and advising’ and to ‘improve pedagogy and student learning.’ …. We have focused more attention on our teaching, and many of us have redesigned our courses to increase learning. Some of these changes, however, have had unintended consequences. For instance, many of us shifted from high-stakes exams to more frequent lower-stakes assignments, believing that this would help students retain the material. A number have found, however, that lower-stakes assignments are more effective at rewarding effort than at evaluating performance, giving students the false sense that they’d mastered material that still eludes them.”

In other words, the new teaching methods were flawed since they resulted in less learning?

Course evaluations were made mandatory. “[I]n 2008, the FAS Faculty voted to formalize the process: Institutional Research took charge, faculty were required to participate…. Newly formalized, the scores given by students seemed to carry more weight…. Teaching Fellows and non-ladder faculty fear that low scores will limit their job prospects, while tenure-track faculty fear that low scores will damage their tenure chances. Nor are tenured faculty immune, since they feel responsible for drawing undergraduates into their concentrations. These concerns shape grading.” Professors traded inflated grades for inflated course reviews.

Let’s create higher grade options. “[A]llowing faculty to award a limited number of A+s. Currently, we permit faculty to award B+s and C+s, but not A+s. Permitting faculty to award a limited number of A+s in each course would increase the information our grades provide by distinguishing the very best students.”

But again, high-end grade compression is the problem. This change seems like it could be liable to provide even more opportunities to inflate grades.

At Harvard, the percent of A grades has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 24% to 60%.

Notice that blip during COVID? I expect that many colleges saw the same thing. In a departure from normal grade point average targets, at that time, at my institution I was told that I could assign as many A’s as I wanted. I wonder about the aftereffects of that policy shift.

Looking at the chart above, even a few years later, Harvard remains 10% over the pre COVID rates for A’s.

Real and Ironic Grades

Several long-term Harvard professors, such as Steven Pinker, have enough class data to demonstrate that performance on similar exams has declined over the decades.

Combined with students entering college unprepared and believed to be in need of emotional support, maybe professors should just make the classes easier.

But when professors make classes easier, what do we lost?

“On grade inflation.

*“As a sophomore in college I took a comp lit class in medieval. I kept getting A’s on my essays with no feedback. So I went to my professor’s office and asked her to give me a real grade–one that reflected her honest professional assessment of my work. *

*“She was confused. I told her I wanted to go to grad school and I needed real feedback on my writing/scholarly chops. She said OK and said she’d return my essay after the next class. *

*“True to her word, after the next class she handed back an essay that went from an A to a C-. She pointed out everything that was wrong/missing. We talked about what a professional paper looks like/attempts to do. I learned so much and I was grateful. She let me keep my A tho. *

*“Anyway, our relationship after that changed and she began to give me advice, real feedback, and ultimately she helped me discern that I didn’t want to be a literature scholar but a philosopher. She began to hold me to a higher standard. *

“What’s interesting to me looking back is that I had to place myself under that higher standard and give her permission to hold me to it. Imagine if I didn’t have to do that. Imagine if the higher standard was par for the course and the A truly meant excellence.”

How far must things have gone for it to take a student to hold a professor accountable for grading. But this former student (now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa) knew that her easy A’s were robbing her of value.

And she got that value while keeping the A.

Frey’s story reminded me of something that retired Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield did years ago to accommodate grade inflation. He gave “real” and “ironic” grades. The real grade (like the C- above) showed a true grading of a student’s work. His ironic grades (the A) translated those for the current inflated ratings.

My “supposed to” student above was coming from the world of ironic grades. I wonder if she made summa after all.

Supposed To

I sometimes think back to another student of mine, very different from the one at the start of this post. He took one of my classes, struggled with the material, and received a C. Years later he returned to ask for guidance on something he was working on. I asked to see his financial model and it made no sense. After some questions I realized the core problem: he didn’t know basic business math.

When I say basic, I mean that he didn’t know how to divide by 10. (This is where most people start to think that I’m joking, but I’m serious. I confirmed in person that he couldn’t divide by 10. And if you can’t do something like divide by 10, you might be able to type numbers into a spreadsheet, but basic math has no meaning for you.)

I always wondered, how did he get this far? Surely he would have been stopped somewhere along the way, in his first year in college, or in high school, middle school, elementary school. If he actually had to prove mastery, maybe he could have been helped.

But there he was and I finally knew why he struggled in my class. His C grade gave me a rough estimate that that course relied half on foundational skills and half on soft skills like teamwork and creativity.

Grades were supposed to symbolize mastery, but at least partly ended up symbolizing participation. My first year teaching, a colleague mentioned that she gave her class a pop quiz on topics they’d been discussing for the past month and they all failed. “Wow, you’re a terrible professor,” I secretly thought, resolving to try a pop quiz myself. I did and calculated a not-quite-failing class average grade of 70/100. (See, I was better after all.)

How could this happen? In this case, it does go back to a noted shift in grading style from exams to participatory exercises, discussions, and group projects.

You can discuss a topic for hours, think you understand it, and then sit for an exam and be bewildered. Talking is not understanding, as most political discussions show.

Why Didn’t Grade Inflation Happen Earlier?

A study of average grades (up to 2013) shows two periods of inflation, the Vietnam era period and the student as consumer era.

Just as with the percent of A’s chart from above, after a period of inflation, we do see deflation, at least for a while.

From: gradeinflation.com

But the past is a foreign country. Looking back further, the changes in the 4-year college grade distributions nationwide chart shows an implied average of 2.4 average in 1940 (a little higher than a C+).

From: gradeinflation.com

Also from gradeinflation.com:

“College grading on an A-F scale has been in widespread use for about 100 years…. Until the Vietnam War, C was the most common grade on college campuses. That was true for over fifty years. Then grades rose dramatically. A’s became much more common and C’s, D’s and F’s declined… GPA’s rose on average by 0.4 points. By 1973, the GPA of an average student at a four-year college was 2.9. A’s were twice as common as they were before the 1960s, accounting for 30% of all A-F grades.

“Why did this happen? The reasons were complex. Here’s an attempt at a simplified explanation. Faculty attitudes about teaching and grading underwent a profound shift that coincided with the Vietnam War. Many professors, certainly not all or even a majority, became convinced that grades were not a useful tool for motivation, were not a valid means of evaluation and created a harmful authoritarian environment for learning. Added to this shift was a real-life exigency. In the 1960s, full-time male college students were exempt from the military draft. If a male college student flunked out, chances were that he would end up as a soldier in the Vietnam War, a highly unpopular conflict on a deadly battlefield. Partly in response to changing attitudes about the nature of teaching and partly to ensure that male students maintained their full-time status, grades rose rapidly. When the war ended so did the rise in grades.”

This theory: professors raised grades during the Vietnam War in order to keep male students out of the draft. To that I’d add growing anti-authority attitudes and possibly not wanting to be too domineering with students.

But what about today?

The Student As Consumer Era

From the same Grade Inflation website:

“During this era, which has yet to end, student course evaluations of classes became mandatory, students became increasingly career focused, and tuition rises dramatically outpaced increases in family income. When you treat a student as a customer, the customer is, of course, always right. If a student and parent of that student want a high grade, you give it to them. Professors faced a new and more personal exigency with respect to grading: to keep their leadership happy (and to help ensure their tenure and promotion) they had to focus on keeping students happy. It’s not surprising that grades have gone up during this era. I call this period of grade inflation the ‘student as consumer era’…”

I include this explanation here, although I have not directly seen effects as radical as those. But maybe I’m just swimming in the “student as consumer” sea, unaware of the water. There is some subjectivity to grading, which today is probably true in even the most analytical classes, even if it’s only where to draw the line between A and A-minus.

Students receiving higher grades rate their professors more highly on those now mandatory course evaluations. We have more adjunct professors as a percentage of faculty and those professors are more responsive to student evaluations since they need to be reappointed each semester.

But higher course evaluation ratings don’t mean more learning. As noted in many studies, as well as David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, there is often an inverse relationship between the way students evaluate professors and how much they actually learn and retain in the long run.

But if we consider the combination of all of the above effects something else happens. Professors want to give higher grades and their departments don’t hold them to tougher standards.

Is that the way it’s “supposed to” be?

Favorite attempted grade negotiations (none worked):

• Could you regrade this? I got an A-minus and was expecting an A.
• “If I get an A in this class I’ll qualify for [award].”
• “Do you think you could give me an A? I’m thinking of applying to medical school.”