Fear of Inflation
by Kevin Cool

A sophomore student entered an administrative office late last spring waving a paper and looking slightly flushed. "Here's some evidence of grade inflation," she said, and displayed the paper to the man behind the desk. A large "A-" was scrawled at the top of the page. "I hardly studied for this," the woman said. "I don't know whether to be happy or sad."
That anecdote may not accurately depict grading practices at Colby, but something like it has gotten the attention of the College. Grades are under investigation.
A task force composed of faculty members Charles Conover, David Findlay, Jane Moss, David Nugent, Ira Sadoff, Mark Tappan and Dean of Faculty Robert McArthur is studying whether grade inflation exists and, if so, what to do about it.
"We haven't reached any conclusions," said McArthur, who speaks candidly about the issue and concedes that "there certainly is a phenomenon of higher grades." The data backs up that contention. The median cumulative GPA of the senior class has risen from 2.38 in 1967 to 3.01 last year. "Average" used to be a C-plus; now it's a B.
If grade inflation is occurring at Colby--and roughly half of the faculty surveyed by the task force believe it is--the College may be experiencing what has been a national trend in recent years, McArthur says. "Grade inflation has been a problem at the Ivies and, to a lesser extent, at the smaller highly selective private [schools] for some time," he said. An article in Link magazine reported that in 1992 the average grade among Stanford University undergraduates was a B-plus. And the Princeton Alumni Weekly noted in April that undergraduates there received twice as many A's last year as did their counterparts 25 years ago.
At Colby the rise in grades appears to have several variables. McArthur says structural changes made over the past two decades may be responsible for "the virtual elimination of D's and F's" and a gradual upward creep in grades overall. In the 1980s the College introduced the use of pluses and minuses with letter grades, which may have contributed to a compression of grades at the high end of the scale. "There was a time when there were four grades you could pass with--A,B,C and D. Now there are that many distinctions just between A and B," McArthur said. He also noted that until recently students were allowed to withdraw from a class they were failing right up to the last day of the course, which had the predictable result of reducing the number of students with poor grades. Effective with the class of 1999, students can only withdraw from a class before mid-term. Accompanying these changes, he says, has been a different approach to teaching that is more collaborative and emphasizes student success. For example, a student who turns in a paper that 20 years ago would have received a C now has the opportunity to rewrite the paper until he or she produces a satisfactory result and is subsequently rewarded with a grade that reflects their final work, not their original submission. "It's not clear, therefore, that there is a direct relationship between rigor and grades," McArthur said. "Some of the increase [in grades] may be attributable to this change in teaching philosophy."
McArthur does not advocate a grading system that would arbitrarily distribute students among the five letter grades, so that, essentially, there would be one F for every A. "That's not the answer. You want students to reach a point where they have learned the material. We aren't here to fail students," he said. However, he believes there is some value in moving toward a more rigorous but uniform standard of grading.
The most controversial of the task force findings is that some faculty may be grading less strenuously to avoid poor student evaluations. Sixty of 116 faculty surveyed said they believe there is a correlation between the grades they give and the evaluations they receive, and 45 of those said the evaluations influence their grading standards. Because student evaluations figure heavily in tenure and promotion decisions, some faculty believe they can be used as leverage to extract better grades. But McArthur doesn't buy it. "Our students are smarter than that," he said. "There is a fair amount of evidence that the opposite is true. Some of our most revered faculty are the toughest graders."
Still, says McArthur, the perception that rigorous grading produces poor evaluations does exist, and the task force has attempted to deal with it both by investigating the credibility of such claims and by considering procedures that would indemnify faculty against "punishment" for maintaining high standards.
The task force also is trying to resolve widespread variability between departments' grading patterns. Statistics show that one department gave virtually nothing but A's and B's in a recent year, while others gave a much lower percentage. McArthur said this disparity is unfair to students competing for Latin honors and other all-College distinctions. He is collecting reports from all departments to aid in assessing the origins of these differences and ways to remedy them.
Despite acknowledging that average grades have risen, thus raising the possibility they would be viewed as less credible, McArthur says the phenomenon probably hasn't impaired Colby students entering graduate school or the workplace. "Because of the universal nature of this problem, our students have not been put at a disadvantage," he said.
Study will continue through most of the next academic year, McArthur says, and the task force will prepare a set of recommendations aimed at addressing the core issues involved with grade inflation. "The study already has changed some behavior," he said. "Faculty are talking about and thinking about their own grading practices. We've begun a dialogue about what grades mean and how they should be administered. I expect more positive benefits to come out of this."