Grade deflation is a method imposed by an institution to curb grade inflation. At the university level, grades have been rising at a rate of .15 points per decade since the 1960's on a 4.0 scale. The problem, of course, is that the meaning of a grade has been devalued, the effort necessary to attain exemplary standing has diminished, and the difference between good and great students has all but been blurred. Most students now seem to expect a B simply for putting in mediocre effort and attendance; anecdotal as the evidence may be, but I have a classmate who was infuriated that he might get a C in class, simply because he doesn't understand any of the material. To him, his continued presence should be enough to let him scrape by with a B.

Some institutions implement a system of grade deflation by imposing a mandatory curve on all courses. That is, the grades must be distributed in accordance with a standard distribution with a pre-determined median grade. This way, you only have a set number of As, A-s, B+s, etc that can be given out, preventing a mass inflation of grades. Students typically object to this system for obvious reasons, not the least of which being wherever they go with their transcripts, they'll likely be competing against students who weren't graded under as harsh a system. Also, it denies the possibility for examining performance of students from different classes; while student A might have been at the top of his/her class and student B at the top of his/her, there's no way to compare the relative standing based on GPA between students A and B. It also seems that many people will admit, generally, that grade inflation is a problem but will simultaneously be frustrated when methods to curb this problem are implemented at their expense.

So, GTF, would you support methods to combat grade inflation and, if so, by what means?

It REALLY needs to be fixed. As you said, people now basically see a C as failing. However, some schools do a decent job with this.

The problem then, as you said again, is that the schools that prevent grade inflation have the connotation (bad word choice?) of hurting their student's job chances. If I go to a school that doesn't inflate grades and have a 3.5, and you go to a school that does and have a 3.9, dumb employers will think you are better than me. While good companies rely much more on an interview than GPA, you might not even get the interview if your GPA is low.

So far, the best method I have seen is weed out classes. For example, the first college I went to had an intro to accounting class for all business/econ students regardless of specific major. It was a short 8 week class that consisted of just a midterm at week 4 and a final at week 8. The class was designed to be extremely hard for students. Over 50 % of students enrolled in it either dropped out or failed it. Students who enrolled in the class 2 times (might have been 3, I forget)but did not pass were ineligible to continue in the business program.

This system at least got rid of the students who should (according to a normally distributed curve) be getting D's and F's in the higher level classes. That way, if the school is going to grade inflate in upper division classes, at least they aren't giving complete idiots C's or B's. This clearly doesn't fix the problem, but I think it does help.

I really don't see this getting fixed anytime soon. It is in a schools best interest to have their students get good grades and graduate. The only reason a school would ever fix the problem is if their reputation started to get hurt because of it.



That being said, I have a 17.5 gpa on a 4.0 scale.

Absolutely. I think we can blame the inflation on how the humanities have taken over most universities. Attendance and trying hard take the place of correctness in fields that deride the value of yes/no answers.

So I imagine grade inflation is sharpest in majors like literature, cultural studies, sociology, and the fine arts. It seems like combating grade inflation generally by curving GPAs would be totally unfair to those who are majoring in the sciences. Furthermore, curving GPAs would have disastrous consequences if it was not a measure taken by all universities.

I think the correct solution is for universities to examine those departments from which the grades are the most dubious and enforce higher standards. Or maybe we could rely on people to recognize that an A from a mathematics major means a lot more than an A from a sociology major (I'm certain hiring practices indicate that this recognition is already widespread).

When applying for a job that requires high level math, of course an A in a math class is more important than in A in a sociology class.

I am all for pushing advancement in math, sciences and engineering in the US. People suck at them, and it is pathetic. However, just because those three things are important, it does not mean that anything "humanities" related is unimportant. Just because you lack interest in something, and feel it is a waste of time, does not mean it doesn't have a positive impact to research these things.

For example, the study of sociology plays a huge role in making correct business decisions. Without research into this field, businesses would be less efficient and not as successful.

The humanities are not alone in this trend (though they are by far the largest offenders). On average, engineering departments give grades at roughly the same level as social science departments do. Also, as Xan said, just because something doesn't have obvious, monetary value doesn't make it unimportant. I'd say the problem with the humanities is that they're used as catchall departments to increase enrollment rather than the subjects they teach are inherently worthless. That is, that universities are treated as a business rather than a school.

There's a similar trend in high schools too though. This isn't something that begins at the university level. Grade inflation is happening all the way down.

For A-levels (well, mine at least), raw marks on every paper are converted to UMS marks (a curving system where the a set percentage get each mark), which seems fair enough. Only then it means that gaming exams becomes a factor in your mark; for instance, many private schools (who always get fantastic marks) don't take exams in January, and only take them in May/June (might be the other way around actually...), meaning that the top grades are harder to achieve in these exam seasons.

On the other hand, a raw-marks based system would also have major flaws, as it's well-known that some exam papers are simply harder than others, and the timing of your exam shouldn't affect your grade. Having said that, I don't think curving/standardising etc really makes all that much difference, especially with all the retaking opportunities available these days. Really, it just makes the top marks easier to achieve (ie, I got 100% on a couple of papers where I know I got things wrong because c.99% of other entrants got way more things wrong).

On the point of grade inflation - this is absolutely a problem. I heard from somewhere that all A-level grades from 20 years ago can be bumped up by 2 whole grades to get to today's standards. That's just wrong. The A* is another example of this inflation, as are rising university requirements. The rule of thumb these days is that at least 1 A* grade is required for admission into the UK's top universities, especially for science/maths/med/vet courses. It's not all that long ago that you could get to onto a top course with a mixture of As and Bs, now it's the former polytechnics requiring those grades. This can partly be blamed on the widening of access to university in recent years, but I don't think that can entirely be to blame - Oxbridge have always only taken the very best, and I don't think the very best can have improved by multiple grades over the past 50 years unless those grades have become easier to achieve.

Having said all that, I can't really suggest a solution. Formal testing will always be necessary for clear and consistent grading, but will always have these weaknesses. Maybe it just is that people are getting smarter, that teachers are getting better and that students are working harder; I suspect that's not the case. But yes, solutions: standardising marks does help, but in the end some way to avoid the moral hazard of the graders being the ones assessed for teaching performance would be the only solution. And I don't think that's possible.

You're quite right. I should have said that this recognition is reflected in their salaries instead.


Dale Carnegie wasn't a sociologist, but I have no doubt that he has done more for interpersonal business relationships than the whole of sociology put together. It's sad that sociology has been reduced to encroaching on psychology to say things anyone with any social talent already knows. It really hasn't been usefully applied since the days of Raymond Aron.


I still blame them.

Sciences make money, humanities make words and fluff and pensive looks.

I don't agree with the implicit assumption in any system of grade deflation -- that is, that a bell curve is an accurate representation of effort. This assumption tends to diverge from reality when you have smaller class sizes in upper division courses with as few as 10 or 20 students. For instance, a small physics class might consist of eight very studious, dedicated students and two or three slackers. A curve requires that the small differences between the hard workers become unreasonably large; what would otherwise result in an A and an A- turns out to be an A and a C. It's the same issue that baseball statisticians run into when they apply linear regression to an individual player's performance in order to predict future performance (e.g. xFIP).

I think as long as colleges maintain reasonably high standards, the issue isn't really dire enough to take action. Grades are always taken into consideration by employers and graduate schools, to be sure, but there are other indicators of excellence that distinguish the good students from the very best: extracurriculars, field work, internships, published papers/theses, etc.

I feel that when I have class that is graded on a curve (that is, a class where the grades are "deflated"), it's primarily because the professor isn't competent enough to create an effective system of evaluation. A good professor is not only a good teacher, but he/she must also be good at creating exams that challenge those who put in little effort and reward those that put in a lot of effort. There is a natural order here, where some kids score above average, some below, but most score in the middle. It takes a good professor to uncover this natural order. When a professor can't do this, he/she resorts to an artificial curve.

Unrelated: FUCK professors who are unnecessarily difficult. At my school, we have the dreaded "Math 3 series" with a certain professor. My freshman fall quarter, our school newspaper ran an article about how 60% of the students in this (large) class flat-out failed it. Seriously? If you're failing 60% of your students, get the fuck out of the teaching profession.

I have a professor like that next semester for organic chemistry. The average exam grade is about 50%, but students somehow appreciate him because they had to work their asses off just to pass, and they know their shit. And you know what? They walked out of that class better prepared than their peers who took organic with a more lenient professor. It could be a blessing in disguise.

Yet, at the same time, grades are increasing across the board, and it's not because students are getting better. Standards have dramatically dropped. Pull out a textbook in any given field from the 1950s and compare it to what passes for a textbook today. Even pull out a textbook from the 70s and compare the two. Students are expected to do less and rewarded more for it because it's better for the university to push out graduates to boost numbers. So while your classroom of 5-10 geniuses might get slighted when they all happen to take a course together, they also have the opportunity to actually shine when they're in a class of 20+ because their mediocre peers aren't also making A-s just for showing up, something they're more or less incapable of doing at all anymore.

Although I do agree that there is an issue with an imposed bell curve. I suppose the easiest solution to this though would be to include on every student's transcripts what the median GPA for his or her graduating class was. This way, prospective employers know what they're looking at when they see numbers on a transcript.


Not necessarily. It's not uncommon in upper-division courses for the majority of students to recieve poor numerical grades on a test. This isn't because of some laziness or ineffectiveness on the part of the professor but because the material is so dense that it's unreasonable to construct an examination of the material that can be completed in an hour. A curve corrects this problem.

But why do we have to force all classes to use a bell curve? Why can't we just raise the standards for the grades? I understand the bell curve solution is easier to implement, but I don't necessarily think it's all that fair.

this is just me, but with a system like that in my school the smartest people in the grade would be dead by the end of the week. I know i speak for more then myself when i say that i would go to extreme lengths to get rid of competition.
I think thats why we have AP classes and such
so an a in a non AP is like a B and it makes the good students easier to spot, it just takes more work
in the other system your just asking to undo all the progress we made in not bullying the "smart kids"

I agree that a forced bell curve is not a perfect solution. But how do you raise the standard for grades? And whose standards? Allowing for a subjective standard in grading is dangerous and leads to an inflation of grades. However, course work has to be graded, to some extent, subjectively (outside of standardized weedout courses). So it does seem that the best method for controlling grades while simultaneously affording professors any sense of autonomy in grading is to limit the extent to which grades can be inflated with an artificial cap.


While I don't like the AP system, I do think that, in this instance, it does a good job of separating students on skill level. It's easier to implement here though because it's possible to introduce a national standard for the subjects on an AP exam. So long as the exams remain fairly static in content level though, they will continue to do a good job of displaying skill level at the high school level.

But it's not really possible to extend this model to higher levels of education because it's not at all feasible to have a national examination for every course that one could conceivably take at the university level.

I think grade deviation is now necessary because in a global economy, if one country is pushing out sub standard B grade students then everyone else has to do the same otherwise that country will appear to have students of a high standard but in reality, are actually worse.

Apparently this is REALLY bad at BU, I'm worried. People say it's hard to keep your GPA up because the deflation is so bad. Working your hardest constantly might only get you a B because of it.

So yeah, I'm against grade deflation...

I mean, I'm in high school and I think my grades are deflated. Private vs. public apparently means something in my neck of the woods. Who knew?

.

I know in New York, many want to raise the lowest passing grade from a 65 to a 75 to motivate (and scare) low achieving students to get a higher grade.

Also, adding more AP classes has only caused this situation to worsen. Most schools throughout the country allow anyone to take APs. My school does, and I've noticed that my AP classes are no more difficult than a basic class because so many students are in the class but don't belong there. I know that many of my teachers have to make their classes easier so the bottom line can pass.