Trends in Postsecondary Education - There Are No Average Students Here: The Quality Of A Higher Education Degree

"To be an honors student is to create your own intellectual work in a thesis or a science lab — to have had a transformative experience." — Jamshed Bharucha, dean of the faculty at Dartmouth, where 40% of students graduated with honors in the spring of 2001. Bharucha was speaking to a reporter for The Boston Globe for a two-part story on decades of grade inflation at Harvard. The graph shows data compiled by the Globe staff for the story. If Bharucha's definition is correct, the percentage of Harvard graduates who had a "transformative experience" rose from 31.8% in 1946 to 90.8% in 2001.

In a follow-up story, the Globe reported that 48.5% of Harvard grades in 2000 were A's and A-minuses, compared to 33.2% in 1985. C grades fell from 10% in 1985 to 4.9%. This remarkable academic achievement happened the same year the College Board announced that between 1991 and 2000, the percentage of SAT test takers with high school grade averages in the A range soared from 28% to 41%. Are we getting smarter? Not according to standardized test scores. The College Board reports that SAT scores have declined since the 1960s. ACT scores were flat through the 1990s (see Chapter 7), and Koretz et al. reported no increase in achievement on the Graduate Record Exam.

By way of contrast, the table on the next page shows percentages of seniors graduating with honors from selected schools (data compiled by The Boston Globe). MIT does not award graduating honors on the theory that a diploma is distinction enough.

It seems that grade inflation is rampant. Grade inflation is defined by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as "an upward shift in the grade point average (GPA) of students over an extended period of time without a corresponding increase in student achievement." The Academy's report on colleges, Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing?, released in 2002, stated: "Most investigators agree that grade inflation began in the 1960s and continued through, at least, the mid-1990s." The report added that grade inflation is especially noticeable in Ivy League Schools.

Institution	Honors grads
Yale	51
Princeton	44
Brown	42
Columbia1	25
Cornell	8
Tufts	52
Boston U	39
Johns Hopkins	35
Boston College	29
Duke	28
MIT	0
Stanford	20

The most frequently advanced explanation for grade inflation is that sympathetic faculty inflated grades to keep failing students from being drafted for service in the Vietnam War. A more controversial explanation links grade inflation to the introduction of affirmative action. Also offered as explanations are the self-esteem movement and academics' preference for concentrating on research over teaching and their willingness to trade good grades for favorable reviews from students. Another, perhaps more cynical explanation links grade inflation to the view of students as consumers and colleges as big businesses. Students with good grades are happy customers.

Once the practice began, there seemed to be no stopping it. In 1977 Harvard toughened its rules for honors awards and, as the chart shows, the numbers declined for a while.

Reports about widespread grade inflation came as no surprise to educators, but the news about Harvard was greeted with derision in the halls of academe. Harvard accepts only the cream of the crop from the world's high schools. Should we assume that all but 9% of Harvard's students do equally superior work?

What are the ramifications of grade inflation in the outside world? There is one less way to distinguish between competence and incompetence. Employers have already turned to personal references as a better judge of ability, leading some to fear a return to the "oldboy old-girl" network (assuming we ever left it behind). The Dallas Morning News said bluntly: "The parents of graduating high school seniors … who are preparing to pay the freight on a $30,000-a-year Harvard education have a right to know whether the commodity is worth the asking price." As to Harvard, for the first time, it recently asked its professors to justify the grades they award students.

Sources: Chart: Patrick Healy, "Matters of Honor: Harvard's quiet secret: rampant grade inflation," The Boston Globe, October 7, 2001, Patrick Healy, "Harvard figures show most of its grades are A's or B's," The Boston Globe, November 21, 2001. Both stories retrieved May 9, 2002, from http://www.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/harvard_honors/. Henry Rosovsky and Matthew Hartley, Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing? Grade Inflation and Letters of Recommendation, Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2002, retrieved May 8, 2002, www.amacad.org/publications/occasional.htm. Daniel M. Koretz and Mark Berends, "Changes in High School Grading Standards in Mathematics, 1982-1992," RAND Education, retrieved May 13, 2002, from http://www.rand.org/publications/. "Academic politics: Harvard shouldn't duck grade inflation," Dallas Morning News, January 10, 2002.