What Rojstaczer, a former professor, has found is that grades are going up, and have been going up for quite some time. Until the 1960s, only around 20% of grades awarded at US colleges were As. The most common grade was a C.
During the Vietnam War, grades moved up across the board as professors tried to save young men from the draft by keeping them from failing out of college. After a brief downturn in the early 80s, grades started rising again. Just before the turn of the millennium, As became the most common grade at US universities, and now look likely to exceed half of all grades in the not-too-distant future.
Grade rises of this nature aren’t unique to US universities. In England, the percentage of first-class degrees rose from 8% in 1996-1997 to 36% in 2020-2021, more than quadrupling in less than a quarter of a century.
At a selection of Canadian universities, meanwhile, the percentage of A grades increased from 16% in 1973-1974 to 21% in 1993-1994. And a recent study at the University of Sydney revealed that the percentage of high distinctions awarded there increased from 8% to 26% between 2011 and 2021, more than tripling in a decade.
Grade rises in themselves could be a good sign if we had reason to believe that they were simply tracking improvements in student performance. Unfortunately, researchers have learned to test for that possibility, and in most cases, they’ve found that better performance can’t explain the full extent of the grade rises that have occurred. Grade rises that can’t be explained by student performance constitute ‘grade inflation.’
Like monetary inflation, grade inflation has costs. Bright, hard-working students struggle to signal how well they’ve done to employers, who are faced with piles of CVs from students with impeccable academic records. Less motivated students, for their part, have very little reason to up their game, since they are likely to get good grades (or at least passes) whatever they do.
Is grade inflation a problem at New Zealand universities? It is. And that will be the subject of my next Insights column, which will summarise the findings of our upcoming report on the topic.
Dr James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington.This article was first published HERE
Grade rises of this nature aren’t unique to US universities. In England, the percentage of first-class degrees rose from 8% in 1996-1997 to 36% in 2020-2021, more than quadrupling in less than a quarter of a century.
At a selection of Canadian universities, meanwhile, the percentage of A grades increased from 16% in 1973-1974 to 21% in 1993-1994. And a recent study at the University of Sydney revealed that the percentage of high distinctions awarded there increased from 8% to 26% between 2011 and 2021, more than tripling in a decade.
Grade rises in themselves could be a good sign if we had reason to believe that they were simply tracking improvements in student performance. Unfortunately, researchers have learned to test for that possibility, and in most cases, they’ve found that better performance can’t explain the full extent of the grade rises that have occurred. Grade rises that can’t be explained by student performance constitute ‘grade inflation.’
Like monetary inflation, grade inflation has costs. Bright, hard-working students struggle to signal how well they’ve done to employers, who are faced with piles of CVs from students with impeccable academic records. Less motivated students, for their part, have very little reason to up their game, since they are likely to get good grades (or at least passes) whatever they do.
Is grade inflation a problem at New Zealand universities? It is. And that will be the subject of my next Insights column, which will summarise the findings of our upcoming report on the topic.
Dr James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington.This article was first published HERE
2 comments:
University assessment is a minefield. For most disciplines, there are no self-defining performance criteria (as there are for, say, Engineering and Surgery) and so a letter grade tells you very little about what that student can actually do. Even within departments, different lecturers may use very different assessment strategies, and there may be very little comparability between 'B' grades awarded by different instructors.
I have come across universities that put a cap on the number of Distinctions (A+) that can be awarded. This counteracts grade inflation by exerting a downward pressure on lower grades. But this approach works well only for large classes such as undergrad courses with hundreds of students all subjected to the same assessment regime.
For subjects that generate performance criteria by their very nature such as surgery, there is nothing wrong with having an entire cohort pass out with A+ grades - these are highly selected, gifted people being put through an intensive training programme that runs according to well-defined, explicit criteria. Indeed our objective is to graduate whole cohorts with A+ grades.
Did I hear someone mention mention the Bell Curve? That kind of applies to a large first-year undergrad class in disciplines like History and Sociology but the more esoteric a discipline or subject becomes, the less that curve applies.
We have to stop tarring all grades with the same brush.
I am a proponent of Universal Literacy (UN) which before the wrecking of our education system by academics , pre 1950ish, used to be an ideal practised in NZ, particularly in Otago.
UN was a Scottish education aim and part of their social justice. They believed even the plowman's child could acquire university qualifications. UL meant every child was to achieve every year the correct reading level for their age and it was tested by reading sections of standard reading books.
This was an absolute slog for a class teacher to achieve , and it required hours of extra work put into the 'heavies' -those who didn't learn easily . I had a family member who fitted this description and despite being so 'thick' ended up with a University degree. The belief was then that you could increase intelligence by stuffing more information into a brain which made more connections. I think cognitive science supports this.
Anyway I also had , in contrast , a family member who scored the highest grade for his intermediate year at Uni. in science subjects. But then most from his secondary school also achieved well because they had been taught very thoroughly by traditional methods.
Consequently I believe in skewed bell curves for much of learning, with a large proportion beyond the median. I am a firm believer traditional teaching methods produce this but strongly constructivist methods can't.
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