Grade Inflation: An Ahistorical Narrative

A decade ago, an esteemed professor delivered a lecture upon receiving a university award for a “significant contribution to the learning environment.” After the lecture, he took questions from the audience.

“What is the biggest change you’ve noticed in the 56 years you’ve been doing this?” asked a participant.

“Students feel like they deserve to get A’s without really working,” responded the award-winning professor. But in the late 1950s, he said, students “didn’t feel entitled to an A.”

Although this professor’s uncommonly long tenure lent gravitas to his remarks, he was engaging a narrative that faculty with any amount of experience typically affirm. The narrative is ready at hand to explain frustration over a student’s last-ditch request for a grade change or disappointment with students’ gaps in knowledge as they enter your classroom. It is the grade inflation narrative.

When a narrative is as pervasive as grade inflation, untangling its lines of reasoning and discerning its key components can be challenging. Those who trade in the narrative can safely assume that their audiences agree with their premises; as a result, the storytellers don’t need to defend their assumptions, explain their logic or justify their conclusions. Circumstantial evidence is sufficient.

Thoughtful critiques of the dominant narrative exist. These label grade inflation a myth and dispute the methodology used to garner evidence for it. Yet the prevailing notion is that grade inflation is real and empirically verified. Perhaps as importantly, grade inflation aligns with instructors’ feelings and intuitions.

The dominant narrative is not simply “students have a higher GPA today than they did a generation ago” or “students receive more A’s now than when I was in college.” That topic would be framed as grade increase rather than grade inflation. Borrowing from economics, inflation suggests a quantitative increase without a corresponding value increase. As seen in the way our award-winning professor invoked work ethic and student entitlement, the dominant grade inflation narrative is fundamentally a moral claim. The scholarly and popular treatments of grade inflation describe it in catastrophizing terms: Grade inflation is a “pernicious scandal,” a “dilemma,” an “epidemic,” a “crisis,” an “evil” and “significant problem” that “runs rampant”; it is a “troubling” phenomenon that “threatens” institutional integrity; it is an “undesirable practice … [that] calls into question central values of academic life,” for which we must look for “culprits” and “offenders” to “blame.” Google “grade inflation,” and it seems academia’s apocalypse is nigh.

The hysterical register is a symptom of the irony of the grade inflation narrative. Fundamentally, any discussion of grade inflation is a discussion of change over time (e.g., students getting more A’s). In other words, grade inflation is an inherently historical topic. Yet, led by economists and statisticians, the discussion conspicuously lacks historical orientation.

As historians, we note three problematic habits in the dominant narrative. Not all proponents exhibit all these tendencies. But like a three-legged stool, the dominant narrative would have trouble standing if any one of these features were removed. Our intent is not to dispute or relitigate the data supporting the dominant narrative. Rather, we want to identify the structural elements of this discourse in order to separate the scholarship from the moralizing and open space for more fruitful and nuanced questions than “who’s to blame?” or “how do we fix this?”

First, the dominant narrative lacks the long view (what historians call longue durée). Grades as we know them did not exist until the last decade of the 19th century, and they did not become ubiquitous until the middle of the 20th century. Writers who address the historical trends of grades tend to start the narrative in the 1960s. Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, two of the most publicized scholars of grade inflation, are ambitious by comparison, stretching their analysis back to 1940. These writers seem unattuned to the fact that what they have put under the microscope (rising grades) is an episode of a phenomenon (grading) that has only existed for about a tenth of the history of Western higher education (and a vastly smaller percentage when considering the whole sweep of formal education). Ken Bain reminds us that “the modern system of grades is a relatively recent development of human history.” From this long perspective, grades “inflated” as soon as they became standard and widespread.

Second, the dominant narrative treats statistical data on grades as if it’s insulated from cultural contexts. In other words, it assumes that grades have (or at least should have) stable, inherent and obvious meanings. As Jeremy Freese and colleagues argue, the “gentleman’s C,” so often invoked in the grade inflation conversation, rides on unarticulated assumptions about the nature of “average” performance. For the dominant narrative, grade increases signal a lowering of academic standards and therefore educational quality. But for this to be true, grades must accurately measure the learning instructors value. David Basinger offers a minority report:

I am willing to grant that grading in the past was more rigorous in the sense that it was more difficult to receive a high grade. But was such grading more accurate or fair? Was it in fact a better measure of mastery of the material or processes?”

As Basinger points out, grades may have been lower in the past for any number of reasons, but these reasons may be unrelated to things we value today, such as the accuracy of evaluation and students’ attainment of learning. For instance, he writes, grading on “the curve,” which is not inherently or directly related to learning, seems to have been more common in times past. Some instructors likely made it more difficult for students to earn high grades by requiring memorization of mountains of trivia or concealing assessment standards from students. In short, decriers of grade inflation are beating the air, complaining about the basic historical maxim that terms and concepts aren’t static over time. They fail to realize that even their own idealistic view of grades emerged from complex historical processes.

Third, the dominant narrative takes for granted that summatively assessing students for the benefit of external parties (e.g., government, other schools, potential employers) is a natural and essential part of an instructor’s job. Beyond the apparent objectivity of the data showing increases in grades over time, the dominant narrative gains its presumption of moral authority via the dubious notion that grades are “a valuable selection tool” for third parties. In this view, grades are a sacred object, the purity of which must be protected for the well-being of society. As a 2002 American Academy of Arts and Sciences report puts it, external parties are “entitled to information about students” in the form of accurate grades. But as Howard S. Becker and colleagues commented decades ago, colleges and universities have shouldered the burden of generating information that these external parties, having a vested interest, can create themselves—and can probably do so in ways more attuned to their particular concerns. The commitment to third-party reporting is why the dominant narrative is persistent in assessing blame and—even in its more judicious incarnations—finding “solutions”; it cannot fathom a functioning higher education system without grades, even if they don’t work.

The increase of grades over time is a historical phenomenon. Historians’ reluctance to seriously study not only grade increase but grades themselves confirms the strength of the dominant ahistorical narrative of grade inflation. It is as if economists and statisticians have done the historians’ work for them. Although grades determine much of college students’ experiences, historical surveys of American higher education barely mention them. The topic receives scant treatment in books on the history of college teaching and even evaluation in higher education. These books add little to the conversation on grade increase; in fact, they tend to parrot the dominant narrative.

Without a historical orientation, our imagination regarding grades and their perceived problems will continue to be limited. Historians don’t just chart change over time. They put change in long historical context. They interrogate the meanings humans attach to symbols. By documenting and interpreting the ways humans have lived in the past, they question—even if implicitly—whether the way things are done now is the way they must be done. When the dominant narrative no longer dominates, scholars will ask more nuanced questions of causation, experience, agency and meaning related to grades. In our study of the history of grading at Baylor University from roughly 1860 to 1960 (forthcoming in the American Educational History Journal), we uncovered an ambiguous and complicated story. We found grades shaped by professors’ sexism, instances of outside pressure to lower students’ grades absent any assessment of their merits and cases of faculty rejecting the grading curve for the sake of student learning. We found students raising thoughtful critiques of grades that resonate with modern educational scholarship, particularly regarding transparency, the relation of grades to learning and cheating.

With the ahistorical tendencies of the dominant grade inflation narrative exposed, we can expand the questions we ask, the ways we collect evidence and (one can hope) the impact of scholarship on educational practice.