Can Tough Grades Be Fair Grades?
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: June 7, 2006
The New York Times
OVER the span of his college career, Andrew Lipovsky has taken summer courses at Pace and Columbia in New York, spent three semesters at Northeastern here, and then transferred across town to Boston University last year. While he has majored in business, he has incidentally performed a kind of science experiment, in which he has been the control and those four universities the variables.
He earned grade-point averages of 3.2 at Columbia, 3.5 at Northeastern and 3.8 at Pace, a range solidly in the A's and B's. Then, in his two years at Boston University, he compiled only a 2.4, the borderline between B minus and C plus. When he had to repeat some of the same business courses at Boston that he already had taken at Northeastern, part of the transfer process, his marks dropped by as much as two full grade points.
The conclusion Mr. Lipovsky drew, an extremely common one among Boston University students, is that he was the victim of "grade deflation." By that euphemism, the students mean that, bending to unofficial but pervasive pressure from the university administration, professors force marks to conform to a curve.
"They want to make it harder," said Mr. Lipovsky, a 20-year-old from Manhattan. "They want a B.U. grade to mean something. But here's the problem. When I apply to grad school, the admissions officers don't know of this policy. It's not written down. The administration denies there is grade deflation."
These are not the whines of a grade-grubber. The outgoing president of the Student Union, Jon Marker, said other students considered the grading habits here as "unfair on principle." The student newspaper, The Free Press, has editorialized against the grading. "The biggest crime against students is not low grades," one editorial argued, "but having their work judged based on how it fits into a rigid curve rather than its true quality."
Just suppose, though, that the student grievances, however sincere, begin with a faulty premise. Average grades at Boston University have risen slightly for 30 years, and marks at many competing universities have been so inflated over the same period that A's and B's pile up like wheelbarrows full of devalued currency in Weimar Germany.
So the story of Boston University and its "grade deflation" becomes the story of the difficulty, for students and administrators alike, in being the only honest guy in town. Even the university officials who defend the integrity of their grading system admit that students like Mr. Lipovsky have good cause to wish that the university cooked the books the way others do.
"These students are competing for admission to graduate school, for post-docs, for study abroad," said Jeffrey J. Henderson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. "And to the extent G.P.A. is important, they say, we come out of B.U. and we have a lower grade point and no one can tell why. That is a legitimate concern."
While neither students nor administrators will acknowledge as much, there is another less defensible explanation for the student criticism and for the university's defensiveness on the grading subject. If a degree from a respected institution is a commodity, as well it might be at a time when annual costs at private universities are in the vicinity of $40,000, then grade inflation is a service being purchased. No elite college, in vigorous competition to enroll the top high school seniors, is going to make its recruiting slogan, "Home of the Gentleman's C."
Maybe it is just too naïvely idealistic to wish that Boston University would boast about what it has done in holding the line against grade inflation. A study in the university's College of Arts of Sciences found that from 1972-73 to 2003-4, the percentage of A's and B's went up by a few percentage points (to 79 from 75) and the percentage of C's went down slightly (to 18 from 21). Meanwhile, Boston University has managed to attract a student body with far higher grades, class rank and SAT scores than it did a generation ago.
All this has occurred against a backdrop of rampant grade inflation, some of it just across the Charles River. By the early 2000's, 9 of every 10 Harvard graduates received honors at commencement and nearly half of all undergraduate grades were A or A-minus, according to "Excellence Without a Soul," a new book about Harvard by a former dean, Harry R. Lewis.
A skeptic could contend that Harvard students are so gifted that the stratospheric grades reflect the collective brain-power, except that in state universities that are far less selective, the same phenomenon holds. At the University of Minnesota's main campus, 40 percent of undergraduate grades are A's. The percentage of A's at the University of Delaware went up by half, to 35 percent, from 1987 to 2002.
The net result, as a report on grade inflation by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences put it in 2002, is "a system that fears candor." Or, perhaps, a system that delivers the desired product to its consumers. Or, maybe, a system that believes self-esteem is bestowed rather than earned.
AMID this climate, Boston University officials six years ago began sending deans, chairs and individual instructors data comparing average grades in courses and departments. While some other universities do share such information with faculty members, Boston University's administrators went further in suggesting ideal distributions of grades, C's very much included, and in recommending departmental averages, with par near a B.
Students sometimes heard about, but rarely saw, such documents. Boston University did not follow the example of Cornell and Dartmouth in including not only individual grades but class averages on a student's transcript, putting each mark in context. Such a move is now under consideration at Boston University.
More commonly, when students challenged their grades in a class, professors found it expedient to put the blame on the unseen administrative directives. A few instructors, at least in Mr. Lipovsky's experience, pre-emptively announced grade distributions at the outset of a semester, giving a foreboding sense of predestination. Not surprisingly, innuendo thrived about a policy of "grade deflation."
Even William Skocpol, a physics professor who endorses the rigorous grading standards, said he understood undergraduates' anxiety. "I don't blame the students," he said. "They haven't been given enough information to make any judgments at all."
But more generally, this article highlights what to me seems like a serious problem in higher education (and possibly even secondary education). 
