What’s Up With Grade Inflation?

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In this episode

Chances are you’ve met a straight-A college student. There are plenty of them around. And some people aren’t too happy about that. A new wave of “meritocracy” obsessives seem convinced that there are just too many good grades being given out. But what drives our nation’s periodic panic about grade inflation? And what does it tell us about what we want grades to mean?

Related Reading:

• What Does an A Really Mean?
• A Real Problem With Grade Inflation
• Who Needs an A? A Lot of Folks on Campus Do

Guest: Beckie Supiano, Senior Writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Beckie Supiano We know that when students are really fixated on grades, it can make them risk averse, right? Instead of writing a paper that could be really challenging, you write you know you can do a slam dunk job on. Instead of taking a course where you don’t have as much background experience as your classmates, you’re going to not register for that because it could bring down your GPA.

Jack Stripling Once in a while, there’s a collective national panic about grade inflation. In late 2023, plenty of folks got worked into a lather about a report from a Yale University economist on the subject. According to the analysis, nearly 80% of all grades awarded to undergraduates at Yale during the prior academic year were A’s or A minuses. How could this be? Surely there aren’t that many perfect pupils even in the Ivy League. Anxiety about grade inflation, old as it may be, feels supercharged right now. Maybe that’s because meritocracy is having a cultural moment. Debates over affirmative action in admissions, college hiring practices and even student cheating all hinge on the idea that higher education rewards the undeserving to the detriment of the hardworking. If good grades — the gold stars of the academy — aren’t as valuable or meaningful as we think they are, well, that’s just more evidence that something is deeply broken, right? To unpack all of this, I’ve invited to the show one of the nation’s top journalists covering teaching and learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s own Beckie Supiano. Beckie, welcome to College Matters from The Chronicle.

Beckie Supiano Thanks, Jack. Glad to be here.

Jack Stripling Great. So why are people so panicked about grade inflation?

Beckie Supiano Great question. This is not a new concern. We’ve seen sort of periodic waves of freaking out about the prospect of grade inflation. This new wave does seem to be in part about the Yale report you referenced. People pay a lot of attention to the Ivy League. I don’t have to explain that to you, but I think another thing that’s going on right now is that coming out of the pandemic teaching times, there’s a recalibration in what sort of balance of challenge and support college students need. I think that colleges, individual faculty members are still really trying to figure out how to sort of support students but support them so that they can do challenging work at a high level. And this worry that grades are going up and that perhaps that means grades are being given too leniently is tied to that. I think, bigger picture, and why this worry comes up again and again and again, is that all of us who are not on a college campus look to colleges and universities to sort out top performers to take leadership roles in industries and government and other forms of positions of power in our country and our world. And so the suggestion that maybe they’re not doing that effectively is really unsettling for a lot of people.

Jack Stripling So we know during the pandemic, there were colleges that moved to things like pass-fail classes. Maybe there’s a sense that colleges sort of took their foot off the gas during the pandemic, that they sort of went easy on students.But I’m curious, do we have evidence that grades are going up?

Beckie Supiano There is some data out there I can talk about. Most of the news articles that focus on grade inflation nationally, rather than looking at trends at one specific college, point to gradeinflation.com. This is a project from a former Duke professor, Stuart Rojstaczer. For a while he was working with a collaborator, Christopher Healy, who was at Furman. If you look at this website, you’ll find that they’ve tracked grades over time from about 400 colleges. And what they show is that grades have been rising since the 1980s. This information is a little old, though. It hasn’t been updated in almost a decade, so it doesn’t cover the pandemic teaching period we’re interested in now. But I called up Rojstaczer recently, and he told me that he and his nephew are now working on an update.

Jack Stripling So it’s a couple of dudes with a website? That’s really the definitive source on this?

Beckie Supiano I mean, it is kind of surprising, right, that there doesn’t seem to be any more, you know, national comprehensive look at this. But I think it kind of speaks to this issue that grades are a measure that are used by individual professors in college courses that then get taken up and used for all these other purposes that maybe they weren’t designed for. And the fact that there isn’t some like national repository of college grades is maybe because, like, why would you have that? But we all have kind of accepted that these letters that professors are giving out tell us lots of other things that maybe they don’t.

Jack Stripling So what does gradeinflation.com tell us? What have they seen in terms of the trend lines?

Beckie Supiano Sure. Their data show that grades have been going up really since the 1980s, that average GPAs have gone up and that A’s have become more common.

Jack Stripling I see. So to the extent that they are the national repository for this issue, they’re seeing a trend line that comports with what people kind of feel in their gut is happening, it sounds like.

Beckie Supiano Yeah, that’s right. And when you read articles about grade inflation writ large, this is the data that those usually point back to.

Jack Stripling So what are the theories about why this might be happening? You mentioned the researchers think that maybe grading is getting easier. But are there other possibilities?

Beckie Supiano I mean, if you really think about it, a lot has changed in the last 40 years in terms of who’s going to college, what courses they’re taking and how they’re being taught. So I don’t think many people would seriously say there’s like one clear reason that this is happening. The worry, right, is that professors feel pressured to give higher grades than I think students really ought to be getting. I think that’s what a lot of the concern is based in. But there are other things that could be going on here. Rojstaczer from gradeinflation.com will say that at the very high-end selective colleges, places like Yale, it does make sense that part — he doesn’t think all — but part of what’s going on could be that students are coming in more highly prepared than in the past. I mean, if you think about what those colleges are able to do in terms of admissions, they’re getting, you know, top performing high school students from all over the world, and they’re taking a tiny fraction of them. So you would expect these students to do pretty well, probably in their college courses. That’s not true at every college by any stretch, but there are other ideas about what could be going on. There was a recent book out called Failing Our Future about grades and their meaning and some of the problems with them, written by Josh Eyler, who runs the teaching center at the University of Mississippi. And he talks about how he thinks grade inflation maybe isn’t the best way to look at this trend to the extent that we know we’re looking at one. He talks about it instead as grade compression, that professors are awarding grades on a narrower set of the grading scale, like they’re not giving as many low end grades as before, but that it isn’t clear why that’s happening.

Jack Stripling So we have a few theories out there. One is that professors are feeling pressure to give higher grades. Another is that, particularly at highly selective colleges, students are coming in better prepared. And another is that, for reasons we don’t entirely understand, professors are giving fewer low end grades, like D’s and F’s. What about teaching? How does that factor into what may be happening?

Beckie Supiano This is another thing that Josh Eyler at Mississippi has talked about. He thinks that part of what may be going on is that teaching has gotten better. If teachers are more engaging, instead of just reading from a PowerPoint, students will pay more attention, they’ll perform better. And this isn’t surprising, it’s really what you want to see. And there’s a lot of good evidence out there that the way professors teach can in fact improve student performance.

Jack Stripling Wow. Yeah. You know, we hear a lot about bad teaching, but I’m sure there’s good teaching going on, too. And maybe that’s part of it. There’s, I guess, a more sinister possibility that there’s more cheating going on. Do you hear that floated as a theory?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the challenges is that no one really knows the extent of cheating, but many professors are worried that that’s part of what’s going on here. Certainly during emergency online instruction, it was easier for students to cheat using things like Chegg. And then, you know, here comes generative AI, it just got a whole lot easier for students to turn in work that they didn’t do any of themselves. And so, yes, that could very easily be part of what’s going on. That’s definitely a concern.

Jack Stripling You mentioned professors are feeling some pressure to give higher grades. Where is that coming from?

Beckie Supiano Yes, we definitely hear that from professors and it’s coming from a couple of directions. Part of it could be coming from college leaders, right? From administrators who are trying to move the needle on student success, who want to see retention and graduation rates getting better. There can be, you know, this sense that professors are expected to pass students on whether or not they really ought to be passed on. That’s certainly concerning. Another form of pressure comes from students, right? Students have gotten to college in most cases on the strength of their GPAs, and they continue to care about those. And I think it’s rare to find a professor who’s never been asked to bump a student’s grade up for whatever reason. And, you know, professors care about this in part because students evaluate their professors on teaching in courses. In most colleges, this is a part of how faculty advance in their own careers. And for the majority of people teaching college students who are adjuncts, this is the measure of whether or not they’re doing a good job that will determine if they continue to have a job. And so I think it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t any pressure on professors to give students higher grades. And the way professors respond to that will vary. But I can absolutely see where that concern is coming from.

Jack Stripling I like this professor. He sees my brilliance. Right.

Beckie Supiano Yeah. I mean, there is little way around the idea that there’s a connection between, you know, how students are doing in a course and how they feel about if it’s a good course or not.

Jack Stripling So, we should probably define terms here a little bit, Beckie. I’ve been throwing around the phrase grade inflation. But does grades going up necessarily mean we have grade inflation?

Beckie Supiano So it depends on who you ask. The researchers who put together gradeinflation.com definitely are using that term and think any, you know, quibble with it’s just a semantic issue. Josh Eyler, who wrote this book about grades, will say, hey it’s not really the right term because it sort of suggests when you say inflation that grades are going up in an artificial way or that an A is now less valuable than it was in the past. And is that really what we’re trying to say? I mean, I think the horse is out of the gate. Everyone calls this grade inflation, whether they’ve thought hard about it or not.

Jack Stripling So is there evidence that grade inflation is happening across all universities, or is this confined to a particular sector?

Beckie Supiano So the data that they have at gradeinflation.com does show that this is a sector wide issue. They’re not looking at every single college, but they’re looking at hundreds. So you can, you know, say that it’s not just the very selective ones. They’re covering public and private colleges and also community colleges. That said, this does seem to be a particular concern when you’re looking at very selective places. Another instance that got a lot of attention a while ago now was Princeton, which had done an analysis kind of similar to Yale’s looking at, oh wow, we’re giving out just a ton of grades that are an A. And they actually made a decision to fight back against this and limit the number of A’s that were given out. And then they did another analysis about what happened. And shockingly, they found that there were fewer A’s given out and more B’s, right? So they pushed it down a bit. But people were really unhappy about this. There was a sense that this was a problem for the admissions office, for the recruitment of athletes, for ROTC members. And students were worried that they would look worse compared to their peers at other Ivy League institutions on the job market. And so this was like a failed experiment in ramping down grade inflation.

Jack Stripling So if I got a B because of some arbitrary cap on A’s, I’m probably not too happy about that.

Beckie Supiano Yeah. Students were not a fan of the idea that they were being graded more harshly. I mean, the report that Princeton put out is a little bit funny. I mean, it talks about like, you know, maybe a different group of Princeton graduates would have gotten jobs at Goldman Sachs, but probably not a larger number of them if they had been graded differently just because of how recruitment works.

Jack Stripling Oh, the humanity.

Beckie Supiano Right. But I mean, that’s the kind of thing that folks are concerned about here. And I think, again, it shows this challenge, right, that grades are not just telling you, Jack, what your professor thinks is going on in your understanding in your chemistry class, that grade is something you’re carrying with you forward in time that signals something to other people, and that’s where it gets really hard.

Jack Stripling I think one of the reasons that people want to see if we can limit the number of A’s is there’s a sense that if everyone gets one, then an A isn’t as valuable, it loses its meaning. Do professors agree on what it means to get an A?

Beckie Supiano I don’t think that they do. I did a story a while ago where I just asked a bunch of people, including professors, but also some students, counselors, other folks, what an A means. And not only did they give me different answers, but they kind of answered different questions. Some people talked about what an A means when they’re grading students in their own course. And none of those answers are shocking, I mean professors vary a bit in, does an A mean excellent work or does that mean like you did all the things that you were supposed to do? But it’s you know, you’ve done the work of the course in a successful manner and we have evidence to support that. But an A means different things to lots of other audiences right, there are students who really define themselves by the grades they get kind of on to who I am as a person level. They’ve been socially conditioned to see themselves that way, in a lot of cases. I think it’s easy to blame them, but I can see where that’s coming from. And then, you know, there’s a question of what grades mean within a course, right? Where a professor is writing down a grading policy and communicating that to students and then communicating grades under that umbrella. But again, you know, grades get carried out into the broader world. And what do they mean there? I mean, the fact that you got an A in this history course at this college this semester doesn’t really mean you would have gotten an A if you’d taken a different professor’s version of that course or if you’d taken it at a different college or university. But we all kind of pretend that that’s what’s going on. I mean, that’s sort of how the system operates. But, you know, grades are a little bit subjective and context specific.

Jack Stripling Professors do, though, usually put out some kind of rubric, right, that tells you what’s required to get an A in a course?

Beckie Supiano Sure, Sure. But part of the issue is that they’re not all looking at the same stuff. I mean, I think if you just ask like, what do grades tell you about a student, people sometimes say like, oh, they tell you what a student has learned. But if you really think about that, I mean, not necessarily, right, because let’s take an example and say it’s your introductory biology class, first semester of college, and you have a couple of students in the room. One took AP biology the spring before this at their high school, you know, the year before. And another student did take biology in high school, but they didn’t really have a science teacher per se or a lab. And there was some pressure where they lived not to learn evolution at all. And so these students come in with really different preparation in the subject matter. And for one of them, the course is largely review. And for the other one, it’s largely not. And it’s possible that the student who took the AP course will perform better in this college version. We would expect that to happen. But that doesn’t mean that student learned more, right? The other student very well might have learned more. So grades aren’t really measuring learning. They’re measuring academic performance. But what does that mean? I mean, some professors would say academic performance means this: Grades should tell you what students know and what they can do. So it doesn’t really matter if you learned it in AP or if you learned it here, you know this and you can do that with it. That’s what I’m sort of certifying with this grade. But many professors grade students on things that aren’t directly related to what they know and can do. Some professors will give you points for attendance or participation or extra credit, and they might have really good reasons for that, right? When professors give points for attendance and participation, they’re probably doing it because they know that coming to class and being engaged in it supports students’ learning — not only your own learning, but that of your classmates, right? It makes for a better learning environment if all the students show up and try to spend time doing the work of the course together, that’s the whole idea. So that kind of makes sense. But if someone’s getting a higher grade because their professor counted participation and attendance, that doesn’t mean they know and can do more than someone who’s professor didn’t who got a lower grade.

Jack Stripling Beckie, are we overcomplicating this?

Beckie Supiano: Probably.

Jack Stripling: I thought an A meant he knows this stuff. Am I wrong about that?

Beckie Supiano In general, an A is supposed to mean you know stuff. But when you get under the hood, right? Like what does that really look like and mean? I mean, it is more complicated than I think we act like it is a lot of the time.

Jack Stripling Well, I don’t know how much currency an individual grade has in the post-graduate world. I guess it depends. I mean, maybe Goldman Sachs does look at what you made in a business course or looks at the GPA, and certainly grad schools look at this sort of thing. But again, I mean, I think you mentioned this. I’m not positive that those audiences care too much, whether, again, you learned it in high school and aced it in college or not. They want to know whether you mastered the skill. Does that not have a value?

Beckie Supiano I’m not going to say it doesn’t have a value. I just think we’re kind of kidding ourselves if we think we can look at two GPAs and say, you know, the student with a higher GPA knows more and can do more. Because if your goal as a student were to get a higher GPA, there are things you could do like take easier classes, take fewer of them at a time, spread them out over the summer, find the professor who seems to be a little bit easier. I mean, there are lots of things you could do if your goal was to boost your GPA.

Jack Stripling And presumably in life, you’re going to someday encounter a problem you haven’t encountered before. And we would like to see how you evaluated that.

Beckie Supiano Sure. I mean, grades are a proxy for something to employers. And they might not all be looking for a proxy of the same thing, right? Like, what do people want in an employee? They want someone who can learn more things in the future, right? College is supposed to teach you how to be a lifelong learner. So going to college is supposed to suggest you know how to do that. That’s a skill. You’re supposed to know and be able to do certain things, right? And your major is another signal of kind of what those things might be. I think there’s an argument when professors do care about things like grammar and punctuation and hitting deadlines. I mean, professors who judge those things will say like, your employer is going to care about those things, too. And then it becomes this running joke with faculty who are always behind on all of their own work, but sometimes expect students to turn everything in on time.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling Beckie, we’ve been talking about why grades may be going up. But you’re making me think there’s a more interesting question underneath that, which is: Who are grades for? If a professor gives a student an A or — god forbid, something lower — who is the intended audience for that information?

Beckie Supiano That’s a great question. The first audience is the student, right? And I think there’s this initial idea that grades are a form of feedback. They’re a form of feedback that tells students how they did. But also in the midst of, of course, how they’re doing, right? What they need to work on, how to improve, where they need to kind of shore up their understanding and practice. So that kind of makes sense. Although there is some evidence suggesting that other forms of feedback are more helpful to students than grades, because students kind of focus on the grade as its own entity instead of what it can tell them. I think many professors can tell you about instances where they’ve written detailed comments on student work, and all the student looks at is the grade at the top, right? And that can be very frustrating. But grades are not just being communicated to that student. I mean, if you’re in some sort of sequence where one course builds to the next, you have to pass a course to move on to the next one. So on some basic level, you know, you have to at least pass to keep going forward. And then, right, your GPA does have bearing on other things like can you get into the honors program; do you get Latin honors; can you keep your scholarship, which for a number of students is really important. And students need to get good enough grades to continue forward in college at all, right? So they do matter for, can you keep being a student, can you graduate. And then at the end, you know, GPA does matter in the entry-level job market for some employers and certainly for graduate school. Another audience for grades is actually the person teaching the course. There are some professors who are really concerned with student performance across demographic characteristics. And one way to look at whether students coming in from different backgrounds are faring well in your course is to actually analyze the data on their performance as measured by grades and see are students succeeding at sort of similar levels depending on their demographic characteristics. Or do you seem to have some equity gaps that maybe you want to address in your teaching?

Jack Stripling So we can’t tell whether men and women are performing differently or people from different socioeconomic backgrounds or races are performing differently if we don’t have grades to sort of stand on.

Beckie Supiano Right. That is the measure that the people who research this would want to look at.

Jack Stripling So, I think the reason I asked this is you’re kind of flagging things for which there might be some competition around which what grade you get matters. And so there’s only so much scholarship money, there’s only so many grad school slots. If people are getting A’s who don’t deserve them, that strikes at people’s inherent sense of fairness, does it not?

Beckie Supiano Right. Right. And I think this gets to a question of, you know, whether grades signify that students have met some kind of bar. They’ve cleared, you know, some standard. If an A says you’ve successfully accomplished the work of the course, maybe it doesn’t matter how many people have done that. But we’re also looking to colleges to do what you just described, to sort students, to figure out, you know, who’s better than who and who gets to go on to the next thing.

Jack Stripling And who gets to operate on me!

Beckie Supiano Right, right. That’s where the idea that your performance matters relative to other people’s really comes through. And I think, you know, so much of the pressure students are feeling is about that, right? Like, if you can imagine a Yale where students didn’t feel like they were competing with each other, maybe it wouldn’t matter if they all got A’s, right? But that’s not the Yale that exists.

Jack Stripling But we have a creeping feeling that maybe we can’t trust these A’s if there’s so many of them, right?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I do think that’s right. And I think it’s worth asking why, right? I mean, there seems to be this notion that higher education is figuring out who deserves to land well. And there are only so many paths and places to do that. And not all of us are going to get to have them. And we want the right people to get there. And I think some professors feel pretty good about that. There are people teaching science courses who do think part of their job is to figure out who gets to operate on Jack. But there’s another way of looking at it, which is like, well, you know, shouldn’t we be able to see all of our students succeed? Like we’re taking their tuition dollars and they’ve gone to all the trouble to become, you know, a student who got admitted to our college. Shouldn’t they all be able to do well, and maybe couldn’t they all be successful if we thought that meant, you know, more than half a dozen different things you could do?

Jack Stripling Yeah. If we’re a factory that produces educated citizens, and we’re producing a lot of them, yay, right?

Beckie Supiano Sure, sure. If you think, like, the idea here is, like, good for democracy, then you would want this to work for most people.

Jack Stripling I think we’ve established that I’m concerned about surgery here. But I am wondering whether I should be concerned about Yale. Should I care if everybody at Yale gets an A?

Beckie Supiano There is this just insatiable interest in what’s going on at Ivy League colleges. I mean, we experience this all the time at The Chronicle, right? And I’m not sure that if I’m looking out at all of the problems facing higher education or even facing college teaching that what are the grade distributions like at Yale would be high on the list of those. At the same time, I do see why this is a concern if you are Yale, right? I mean, to me, the part of this that’s the most tricky is that we’re hearing students at these very selective colleges with very large numbers of A’s going around saying that because they cannot distinguish themselves from each other academically, they’re doing it somewhere else, right. It puts that much more pressure on getting the right internship so you can get that, you know, great job after graduation. And it puts more pressure on demonstrating leadership through extracurriculars. And students will prioritize those sorts of opportunities and not spend a lot of time on their academic work. And look, I mean, I don’t know if trying to beat out the other students in your undergrad class is the best form of education. But I’m also pretty confident that like downplaying school and kind of back burnering it, so you can focus on building your resume in other ways, like that doesn’t sound like you’re getting a great education either. And I do think it makes sense for these institutions to think about what they could do to sort of change that culture of the course mattering just as a means to an end to get that grade on your transcript.

Jack Stripling There are some colleges that do a lot to deemphasize grades. I’m thinking of Reed College, for example. Students there don’t see their grades unless they’re doing poorly or they request to see them. New College of Florida is kind of similar in this regard. They emphasize narrative evaluations, and student performance is designated as “satisfactory,” “unsatisfactory,” or “incomplete. What is the argument for doing away with grades?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I mean, not to sound like too much of an idealist, but the idea of not giving traditional grades is to give students the freedom to center learning instead of performance. We know that when students are really fixated on grades, it can make them risk averse, right? Instead of writing a paper that could be really challenging, you write you know you can do a slam dunk job on. Instead of taking a course where you don’t have as much background experience as your classmates, you’re going to not register for that because it could bring down your GPA. So the idea of grading differently or de-emphasizing grades or just not having them at all is that you can create conditions where students are more able to pursue education and knowledge for their own sake. Crazy idea.

Jack Stripling Yeah. Right, Right. You know, I am curious, Beckie, you talked to a lot of professors through the course of your reporting. Is this something you sense that they worry about much?

Beckie Supiano It depends on the professor, right? And these pressures look different in different settings. I think professors who teach students who are overwhelmingly worried about their grades do feel frustrated sometimes that that’s what the conversation is about, and they have kind of less maneuverability to get students to take a risk or, you know, challenge themselves. There are lots of other college classes where there’s concern about like getting enough students through, right? Like, can enough students pass this course successfully. And that’s where a lot of the concern about grading is. It’s a different concern, but still kind of figuring out what it means to do, you know, sufficient work in the course. I mean, that’s a live issue, I think, for a lot of people teaching college, certainly. And then, you know, there’s some professors who’ve been thinking for many, many years about what grades really mean and what if we went about this in a different way? I think for many other professors, this might not have been something they thought about until pretty recently, right? I mean, if you think about who becomes a professor, generally speaking, we’re looking at a set of people who did well in school themselves, who probably got good grades and probably were kind of invested in those. And so that would kind of push against you really questioning if this makes sense, right? Because you’re kind of moving forward successfully in a system that says you’re doing well. I think for a lot of folks, the pandemic did push on this, right? When colleges went to pass-fail, I talked to some professors who looked at their own grading system, which maybe was handed to them by the person teaching the course before when they arrived on campus as a baby assistant professor. And they thought, like maybe I could do this differently. Maybe I could think about this in a different way and kind of freed some people up to consider other possibilities. Now, look, I mean, professors are human and a lot of folks have just kind of gone back to what they were doing before with varying degrees of success. But I think there has been more openness to the idea that you could do something else.

Jack Stripling Was there something appealing about the pass-fail system from the point of view of professors?

Beckie Supiano I mean, I think it was like an under duress move. But there are ways in which pass-fail can be nice, right? Like there are times when colleges use it because it takes pressure off of students. Like sometimes there are, you know, first year college seminars that are graded pass fail. And it’s supposed to just sort of take that anxiety away and kind of like this question of, you know, how much challenge and how much support should students have, like how much anxiety should they have and should it be about grades or something else? Right? There’s certainly an argument that, you know, you should care a little bit, like maybe you should care enough that you study for your test and like actually write that paper. But if it all comes down to like, the difference between an A and an A- feels life-defining, I mean, that might not be providing the best incentives for students.

Jack Stripling You know, when you talk about the anxiety of grades, I’ve been thinking about this, Beckie, like putting myself back in college and grad school. Nothing affects you like a grade. You know, a good grade makes you feel good. A bad grade makes you feel horrible. As somebody who writes about teaching and learning, do you have a thought on why that is?

Beckie Supiano I know that there are a lot of folks like high school counselors, right, if you happened to get a good one, we know there aren’t enough of those to go around in American high schools. But there is an effort to separate performance from your value as a person. But students really, really, really struggle with this. I mean, and I think it can be hard for professors to remember how much, right? When you’re looking at students who’ve always done well in school and then they get to college and now it’s suddenly harder, I mean, lots of students have that experience in college and arguably they should. There’s this old idea that in high school you absorb knowledge, and in college you create it. Getting over that jump is supposed to stretch you, right? I mean, that’s part of the excitement of being a college student in this ideal vision of the world in my imagination. But students do care a lot and they do have something to lose if their grades aren’t good enough, right? We’re not just talking about the difference between an A and an A-. They’re students who, you know, can’t get their financial aid if their grades aren’t high enough. And without that, they can’t afford college. There are students who need to keep their GPAs up so that they can keep playing the sport they were recruited to play in. I mean, there are lots of reasons this matters to students, and it’s hard to come out of a whole educational system that says be a really good college applicant and then turn that off once you get to college.

Jack Stripling You know, Beckie, part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation now was it did feel like it was part of a larger cultural moment that we’re going through. I mentioned this at the top of the show, that there’s just an obsession right now with meritocracy. And, you know, we can talk about whether that’s even a real word that has any meaning in life or society. But it makes me think that maybe the hair-on-fire reactions to all of this has something to do with some deeper human desire we have to be able to evaluate people definitively. That there’s got to be some way out here to decide who deserves to get into college. There’s got to be some way to determine who is the most qualified for this job. And I wonder what you think drives that?

Beckie Supiano I think you’re onto something. And I think these questions are operating underneath a lot of the things we cover at The Chronicle. I think there are two pieces of this. One is that for people who have achieved some level of success themselves, professionally and personally, if that achievement happened in part because they went to a certain kind of college and they were a high performing student, it’s really appealing to believe that you were on some objective, fair scale found to be worthy, right? People want to believe that they’ve gotten where they are through their own intelligence and effort and, you know, wonderful qualities — and not because they had a lot of advantages going in, and not because they got a lucky break or they graduated in a year where the job market was better, right? People want to think they are the reason they were successful. At the same time, a lot of people are very worried about the future and if their kids are going to be able to out achieve them, you know, as the American dream would suggest. And so trying to figure out how this all works and how to make sure that you’re not losing out, right, that you have an advantage or at least that you’re not at a detriment is a really driving concern for a lot of families.

Jack Stripling Yeah, it relates to so much of what we’ve talked about with other people in this space, Beckie, just about the enormous pressure and anxiety about coming into this world as it exists right now. Great anxiety about the affordability of homes, about the job market, the state of the world, climate change, you name it. And it seems like those issues are huge and grades are small, but maybe they’re connected in ways we haven’t thought about.

Beckie Supiano I think that’s right. I think that part of what’s going on here, right — it’s so easy to say like, you know, families need to kind of chill out about the prospects for their kids. But colleges have, in a lot of ways, positioned themselves as your ticket to a stable future. And if a stable future isn’t something you can sell tickets to, that’s really a problem for higher ed. And this other idea that like maybe learning has some value besides just the salary you can get with it, that’s really been de-emphasized, including by the colleges. And I think it’s kind of hard to resurrect.

Jack Stripling Do you see this conversation changing in any meaningful way? I know that we’ve mentioned that this is sort of a perennial panic. We have it every now and then. But where do you think this is all headed, Beckie?

Beckie Supiano Oh gosh. It’s so hard. It’s so hard. I mean, it’s hard to even know exactly what we’re looking at now, right, much less where things are going to go. Like, what would it take to de-escalate the concern about grades at places where they are such a huge concern? I mean, I’m not sure, right? I’m not sure that there’s some obvious way. I mean, you look at that illustration of Princeton dialing down the number of A’s that were awarded and then reverting back to what it had been doing before, right? It’s not some easy fix. And I’m not sure how you create this obstacle course that people start running through in preschool to get into the college they think they need to and then have them arrive and say, never mind; it’s all about learning. I mean, it’s not, it’s not an easy fix. I am seeing more experimentation on the part of individual faculty in how they grade students and how they talk about that. Maybe if enough of that happens, if enough students are in classrooms where this works differently, the students themselves will, you know, want something different, which would put some pressure on colleges. But I don’t know if that will happen or not.

Jack Stripling Yeah. And as you say, there are at least a couple dudes who are going to keep tracking this, so I guess we’ll figure out where it heads from here. Beckie, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you about this. Hey, you got an A+ on this conversation. I just want you to know.

Beckie Supiano I’m really glad and I’m going to take that and get a discount on my car insurance.

Jack Stripling Great. Well, I knew you were worried about it. Thanks so much, Beckie.

Beckie Supiano Sure thing.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.