Grade Inflation Part 2

The New York Times has an article about the grade inflation mentioned in a study I blogged about yesterday. Rampell, the author of the Times article, provides this graphic. It shows a comparison of private and public universities in the years 1960, 1980, and 2007. Yes, private schools are the main offenders. Shame on you!

Rampell cites the paper's authors as to the likely (but unproven) causes of grade inflation; it being due to:

a more “consumer-based approach” to education, which they say “has created both external and internal incentives for the faculty to grade more generously.” More generous grading can produce better instructor reviews, for example, and can help students be more competitive candidates for graduate schools and the job market.

This seems to answer my second question from yesterday. Yes, market based universities need to curry favour with their "customers" in the form of grade inflation.

More worryingly, however, is recent evidence that students actually don't learn that much in American colleges. Again, is this a global trend? A study, 'Academically Adrift' gave a basic logic and writing test to college students before, during, and near the end of their college education. It was designed to measure critical thinking skills supposedly learned in college, and required for later life.

The findings of the book are nicely summarized at The Chronicle. The study found that:

“gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (i.e., general collegiate skills) are either exceedingly small or empirically non-existent for a large proportion of students”;

36 percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the CLA) over four years of schooling;

less than one-half of seniors had completed over 20 pages of writing for a course in the prior semester;

total time spent in academic pursuits is 16 percent; students are academically engaged, typically, well under 30 hours per week;

scholarship from earlier decades suggest there has been a sharp decline in both academic work effort and learning;

“students…majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields…demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study. Students majoring in business, education, social work , and communications had the lowest measurable gains”;

35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone; the average for all students was under 9 hours.

So basically, students are not learning very much, doing less work than previous generations, but receiving ridiculously high grades. These findings, coupled with the rise of tuition prices, begs the question: Is a college worth the price? Especially considering that an American college education (tuition) easily costs around $100,000 for four years.


Financially, the answer seems to be, yes, university graduates earn more money than non-graduates.



Even if the Academically Adrift findings hold true, it still seems a large portion of students do make learning gains. Still, if a good chunk of students are now learning less, paying more, but still enjoying a job market premium over non-degree earners, what actually happens at college for these non-learning students to be successful after college? Most probably, for the average non-learning college student, college buys access to networks and/or real learning happens later. I suspect, for the low (non) achievers of college, an undergraduate college degree merely buys them the paper which certifies that they enjoy the critical skills necessary for higher paid jobs. Moreover, the traditional university has never been about gaining vocational skills. It is about gaining critical thinking skills. But now this certificate is being called into question for a subset of students, which in turn raises the question: Has the university system failed the non-learners, or are they simply not up to the grade inflated standard?

That A was really a B or a C.

A new American study revels that around 43% of all letter grades are As in university. Private colleges have more grade inflation than state ones. I wonder two things: 1) Is this a global phenomenon? 2) Is it a function of market forces invading the university? The implication here is that when students are viewed as consumers, the need to please them -- by rewarding higher grades -- becomes more urgent.