Grades over the past few decades at elite colleges have mostly gone in one direction: up. The grade inflation trend is so pronounced that when Wellesley College told professors they had to start giving lower grades, students and graduates worried that they were being put at a disadvantage in the job market.
Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
So the trend is easy to spot. But is it actually a problem that students are getting higher grades than they used to? Here are three reasons why grade inflation might not be as big a problem as it’s made out to be — or why we might be worrying about the wrong thing.
1. Students are smarter and better qualified than they used to be
Grades at the Ivy League are certainly higher than they were in the past, as this chart from The Economist shows:
What this chart also shows is grade inflation isn’t new: the biggest changes on that chart show up between the 1950s and ‘60s through the 1990s. And if anything, grade inflation over the past few decades appears to have slowed a bit.
During that time, the Ivy League was also becoming much more selective. The average verbal SAT score for a student admitted to Harvard in 1952 was 583; by 1960, it was 678. The median verbal SAT at Harvard is now 750. And the university accepted about 25 percent of its applicants in 1961. It’s now five times harder to get into Harvard, meaning the students who get in have already run a formidable academic gauntlet.
The Ivy League used to be famous for the “gentleman’s C” — a passing grade for wealthy students who didn’t need a college education to get ahead. It might be an endangered species not just because it’s been inflated to a “gentleman’s B+,” but because the Ivy League ranks are populated with fewer gentlemen than they used to be.
A 2005 study at the University of Georgia found that rising SAT scores at the university could explain 20 to 25 percent of the increase in grades over several decades. While other factors were playing a role, students in some cases were just better qualified.
2. A curve might not be the best or fairest way to distribute grades
Worrying that colleges hand out too many A’s means assuming that most college students shouldn’t be getting such high grades in their coursework. But it’s not clear that the traditional method of assigning grades based on a bell curve makes much sense, either.
Grading on the curve means assuming that most students shouldn’t be getting A’s; in fact, following a standard normal distribution, only about 10 percent of students would get A’s. But that also assumes college students’ abilities are distributed the same way they would be in the general population — whereas at elite colleges, students are selected precisely because they have above-average abilities.
It’s also possible that more students are meeting expectations than used to, and deserve the grades they’re earning. Whether expectations should rise as student abilities increase is a different question than whether professors are handing out grades students haven’t earned.
3. The real problem is that grades are a black box
The reason to worry about grade inflation goes something like this: if it’s too easy to get A’s, the best students aren’t really rewarded, and employers, graduate schools, and other people who look at transcripts have no way of knowing how well a student actually performed.
But bringing average grades down, so that an A was really an example of extraordinary effort, might not solve the latter problem. That’s because college curriculum and coursework varies so much from college to college and even from professor to professor. The problem isn’t just that an A at one college might be easier to earn than an A at another. It’s that the name of the course and an arbitrary letter grade doesn’t really tell us anything about what a student has actually learned.
There are several new ideas that could solve this problem. A standardized exit exam, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that some employers are requiring measures the skills students have gained in college. The Wall Street Journal dubbed it the “post-college SAT.” Awarding badges for learning specific skills, a trend borrowed from the Girl Scouts and Silicon Valley, is spreading to some colleges as well.
In the long run, those could make a much bigger difference than getting colleges to give lower grades.
