For about a decade, Princeton University took a controversial stand against grade inflation, asking academic departments to limit the number of A-range grades they awarded. The policy was meant to standardize grades across disciplines and give students a realistic picture of their performance. And at least to some extent, it worked: The fraction of A’s awarded dropped, though A’s and B’s remained the most frequently-used grades.
Even so, the university changed course in 2014, citing a host of negative side effects on athletes, members of ROTC, the mental health of students over all — and the university’s reputation.
Since the reversal, student grades have been rising again, according to an analysis published in The Daily Princetonian, a student newspaper, this week. The column, by Liam O’Connor, a Princeton senior, describes unevenness and a lack of clarity about what grades at the university represent and a student culture of obsessing over them. It quotes Paul N. Courant, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who has studied grade inflation and who reviewed O’Connor’s calculations.
The Chronicle followed up with Courant — who has also served as Michigan’s provost — to hear what other colleges might learn from Princeton’s experience. He described the forces that drive grade inflation, why students care so much about their grades, and what colleges might do differently. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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Did anything about Princeton’s experience with its grade-deflation policy surprise you?
I’m not surprised that it got repealed. I’m not surprised that when it got repealed it, the effect started to go away and seems to be continuing to go away. I’m actually quite impressed that it worked at all, because it’s really hard to get faculty members to do what the administration wants them to do in matters like this.
Just like real inflation, grade inflation happens when you print money. And it’s a kind of money — satisfaction — that the faculty is in a position to print.
You’ve studied grade inflation. What causes it?
The pressures that face faculty members in grading all tend to be in the direction of being just a little softer this year than we were last year. The students like it, and there’s some evidence that they give higher teaching evaluations for courses that grade a little bit easier. And there’s really nothing to prevent it. Just like real inflation, grade inflation happens when you print money. And it’s a kind of money — satisfaction — that the faculty is in a position to print.
The other thing is that grading easier is one of the methods that a given department can use to try to get more students. And there is a fair amount of evidence out there that that is indeed one of the things that that will happen from time to time.
When people worry about grade inflation, it’s often with the sense that colleges are too consumer-oriented and catering to student satisfaction.
I think that that criticism has some merit. But what I think is worst about it is students take courses based on what sort of grade they’re going to get in them, because they think that grade-point averages are important. And that is a misuse of the wonderful things that universities can do.
Your earlier research has also examined how grades vary by discipline. How does that factor in here?
There are persistent differences across fields, and it’s approximately true that the natural sciences and engineering grade hardest, the social sciences somewhere in between, and the humanities grade easiest. It’s only approximately true, but it’s certainly a consistent difference that we view across fields over a long period of time.
The fields that tend to grade hard are fields where it’s relatively difficult for students to complain that they got treated unfairly. If you’re supposed to reproduce a bunch of equations, you either got them or you didn’t. And it’s awfully hard to come into office hours and say: “You shouldn’t be giving me a B minus on this” — the answer is: “Well actually, you got the equation wrong. So of course I knocked your points down for that.”
There are lots of other fields where a lot of interpretation and interaction is involved in figuring out how to evaluate the work, and in those fields it’s really much harder to grade hard. Students come in, they may have a legitimate beef, they may not have a legitimate beef, but it’s much harder to point and say: “You got this exactly wrong.”
For a required course, the impetus to grade easy so that you get more students isn’t important. And so to the extent that there’s a correlation between required courses and the quantitative, relatively easier-to-grade courses that we were talking about before, you can grade hard because the courses are required, you can grade hard because the courses are more objectively assessable, and so the forces that lead to grade inflation are weaker in those courses.
Why do you think students are so worried about their grades?
This is very speculative; I’m just going to sound like an old, curmudgeonly college professor, which I am. I think that the emphasis that we now place on getting into a good school and doing well leads to a habit of thinking a lot about grades and what their consequences might be. And so students from the get go, from junior high school — especially students who are going to good colleges in the end — are thinking about: “How do I get a good position? How do I get into a good school?” And “How do I get good grades?” is definitely a piece of getting into a good school.
I won’t say anything about bribing the rowing coach. A world in which people are bribing coaches in order to get their kids into school? It’s not at all surprising that those kids have internalized the idea that getting into school is important, and that grades therefore matter a lot.
What should colleges do about this?
The thing that I would think would be worth trying would be conveying information of two kinds. One would be to have a lot more information on the transcript about the course. I got a B minus in Biology 203. So what is the average for Biology 203? Then, of the people who took Biology 203, what does their average look like across other fields? So basically can I add more information to calibrate what these grades mean.
On the other side, I still would very much like us to go to the law schools, go to the employers, and find out how the grades are actually used. It would be extremely useful if we could convey more information to the students and to the faculty about what grades actually do in people’s lives, before we give in and spend so much energy trying to get good grade-point averages.
