As often happens with attention-grabbing issues in higher education, much of the conversation about grade inflation is focused on the most-selective colleges.
But Peter Burkholder, a professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University, thinks that rising grades are also a problem for a more-typical institution like his, where administrators are more focused on improving student success than on whether too many students might be getting A’s.
There’s limited data on grade inflation. So Burkholder came up with his own proxy for it: the share of graduates who have earned Latin honors. He has tracked this at Fairleigh’s Florham campus, where he teaches, and has seen the numbers rise over the years. He reached out to The Chronicle after a recent episode of our podcast, College Matters, on grade inflation to share his process and explain why he thinks this subject is important.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first become concerned about grade inflation?
I think I always knew to a certain extent that grades were pretty highly subjective, especially in the humanities. I saw some of the usual evidence, you know, the gradeinflation.com site. I read Valen Johnson’s book Grade Inflation, which came out in 2003.
There is widespread concern about grade inflation but limited data. Tell me about how you’ve tracked rising grades on your own campus.
I noticed during commencement ceremonies that there seemed to be an unusual number of honors graduates in commencement programs at my school. So I did some basic arithmetic; I just totaled up the number of graduates and then the total number who were graduating with honors, and I found some results which seemed rather shocking to me, although maybe they’re actually not, compared with other institutions.
I probably started in about 2006 or 2007, but then I was able to get some back-commencement programs from before I was even at my institution, going back to 2000, so now I have 24 years’ worth of data. And what I found is, those honors grads, sometimes there’s more, sometimes less, but it’s now the case that half or more students are routinely graduating with honors, which kind of begs the question: What are honors?
I think grade inflation is just a microcosm of the public’s growing distrust in higher ed.
Things went really bonkers during Covid. The narrative was, Students are just absolutely falling apart. And they may have been, but their grades have really never been higher. And so now the highest honors, the summa cum laude cohort, those are now in double-digit percentages — that’s the first time that that happened, during Covid. And they’re staying there. So there’s no doubt that grades are getting higher and higher, at least at my institution. But I think this is a nationwide issue.
And you’re interested in trying to collect data from other colleges, right?
Yeah. I think it would be very interesting if professors at other colleges did something similar and collected that information.
You’ve brought concerns about this to your own administration. What’s come of that?
In total, not much. Some people have been more receptive than others. I have met with some administrators. Some have said, OK, this is a problem. We need to do something about it. But then, nothing happens. So there’s just a lot of kicking the can down the road.
I’ve presented this information to all the faculty in my college, too. And there’s the usual response. There’s a lot of hyperventilating, pearl-clutching, people can’t believe this. But then the next year, the whole situation just repeats itself.
[Reached for comment, Benjamin Rifkin, the university’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, told The Chronicle via email: “We are not concerned that too many of our students are being successful. Our students earn the grades that are posted to their transcripts and Latin honors are assigned to students whose GPAs meet the relevant thresholds.”]
A lot of the concern about grade inflation focuses on the most-selective colleges, because at some of them pretty much everyone is getting A’s and also graduating. It’s different at a place like Fairleigh Dickinson where the six-year graduation rate is 72 percent, according to federal data. How does that change the idea about what’s going on here — that among graduates, a lot of them are getting Latin honors, but then there’s this other chunk of students who aren’t making it to graduation at all?
Yeah, that’s true. These grad statistics I’ve come up with, they are a proxy; they’re not telling us what all the students’ grades are because we have people who fail out, people who simply don’t finish. It’s an imperfect situation. But getting the data tends to be very hard, so I still think it’s very interesting and useful data.
Do you think that students at your institution are coming in more prepared?
Generally speaking, no. Don’t get me wrong, we have some very strong students. I don’t want to diminish what they’ve done.
I take a little issue with what’s going on with the Ivies because of course the Ivies have an issue. They’ve got a lot of legacies coming in; they’ve got athletes coming in, who, if not for that status they would not be getting in. And yet those students are probably getting very, very high grades. So it seems to me there’s sort of a presumption about people who get in. But anyway.
But your sense is that at your own institution the story is not that students are academically stronger than decades ago?
I don’t think so, and what I’ve read on this is it’s more of a buyer’s market right now for people going to college, due to the demographic cliff.
So students are maybe able to get into colleges that maybe 10 years ago they weren’t able to get into. A lot more people are moving up, and if you’re at a less-selective college, you’re having to deal with what you’ve got. So certainly, speaking with colleagues, from my own experience, I would say, over all, students have gotten weaker — and by quite a bit.
So why do you think grades have gone up at your college?
I think there’s a lot of things going on. Charlie Munger, who was a partner to Warren Buffett, has a famous dictum. He says: Show me the incentive; I’ll show you the outcome.
If we’ve got colleges that are competing for a shrinking demographic pool, they have to make themselves look more attractive. If we want to make the customer, i.e., students, happy, well, grades have to deliver on that.
I’m not just hypothesizing about that. We know students seek out and can very easily find who the easy graders and what the easy courses are. Valen Johnson talks about this in Grade Inflation. The pseudonymous Rebekah Nathan book, My Freshman Year, which came out in 2006: She went undercover and embedded in college life, and she observed, firsthand, students have networks for figuring out what’s easy. In Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift, in 2011, they have all sorts of evidence that colleges are becoming less challenging.
So institutions and instructors both have very strong incentives to inflate grades, avoid rigor, and that just takes me back to Munger’s statement.
Why is grade inflation so important? What’s at stake?
In my case, at my school — and again we’re probably not unusual — 50 percent-plus of students are honors students. We’re signaling that these students are really prepared for professional life, but they’re probably not.
So the future work force isn’t as prepared as advertised. And that also makes colleges look bad?
If we’re slapping grades on students and saying, This is an honors student, and it turns out they can’t do basic work, that’s a big problem. Beyond that, remember back in 2017: Kellyanne Conway got out there and referred to alternative facts. Academics were aghast at that, and they would agree: Basic facts do matter. But at the same time, what are we doing? We’re calling a C a B, and a B an A. That’s disingenuous, it’s hypocritical.
I think grade inflation is just a microcosm of the public’s growing distrust in higher ed.
Concerns about that distrust are pretty high right now. I’m curious, at the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned realizing that grades are subjective. But here, you’re saying they should be or they are objective, that professors know what’s a B and what’s a C and what’s an A. How do you square that?
It’s a tough one to square. I guess I would say — and this can vary from institution to institution — but there isn’t really a lot of purposeful grade-norming going on. When I, for instance, graded for “AP World History,” we spent a couple days doing grade norming. Nobody enjoys it. It’s hard; it can be frustrating. And I would never suggest that everybody is on the same standard.
But I was just reading in The Chronicle, there was a column and the professor was writing about a crisis for higher ed because of AI. And he had just read a paper by a student, and he was sure that the student hadn’t written it and that it was AI-generated. He met with the student on Zoom. He describes it all; it’s clear that the student had no idea what he’d written. And the professor said, What did I do in the end? I gave him an A.
I give that professor an A for honesty. I also give the professor an F for what he did. I find that inexcusable. But you know, the professor was saying, I’m tired; I just can’t handle this anymore. And I’m sympathetic to that, but I don’t think the reaction is just to raise the white flag and say, OK, we’re done, because then there’s really no purpose to our institutions.
What do you think should be done about grade inflation?
If there were a really simple solution to this, somebody would have already come up with it. Certainly, I think we know that collective action is needed, but nobody wants to be the first to act. It’s the classic prisoner’s dilemma.
We have tried to act. For instance, in my department, this was over 10 years ago, I drafted a statement about what an acceptable distribution of grades should look like. It had a lot of wiggle room in it. The department voted on it. Overwhelmingly we approved it, sent it to the dean and our senate handbook committee — and we got absolutely no response from either.
So this is kind of a radioactive subject. Nobody wants to touch it. And, unfortunately, if there’s a failure at this level — the department level — the hope of institutions actually collaborating is maybe not very practical.
Look, even if there’s not a really easy solution to this, higher ed in general has to admit there’s a problem here. There’s no perfect time to address this, especially with what’s going on in higher ed right now. It’s easy to say, Well, we have more important things to deal with. But you can always do that. There’s going to be no perfect moment to do this, and in a climate of desperation, which a lot of colleges and universities find themselves in, it’s really easy to justify any action that’s perceived as beneficial to the institution and the faculty. And that’s a problem because then we can say, Well, grades just don’t really matter.
