On The Press And Grade Inflation

Someone sent me an article from a few days ago about grade inflation at UNC-Chapel Hill. There's a follow up blog post by the author of the article here. It looked more or less fine, but I do have some problems with it. Let me explain myself when I say I have problems. Journalists are always trying to show balance in their stories. That works with political issues. But data are data. And when data show something concrete, journalists still seem to try to find "the other side."

I've seen journalists do this with two issues where I have some interest: global warming and nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain, NV. In both cases, the preponderance of data and scientists say one thing. But you can always find one or two people with odd data who say something else entirely. The tendency for journalists is to find those outliers to achieve "balance" and then end up creating the illusion of controversy. The end result is really a false story. In my opinion, journalists in their search for "balance" set back political efforts to reverse global warming by ten years. With regard to nuclear waste storage, the effort at balance has set back policy at least 30 years if not longer.

The controversy in global warming is not whether it exists. No, the question worth debating is whether we should do something about it. The controversy at Yucca Mountain is not whether it's a good site for nuclear waste storage. The question is whether "good" is good enough given mismanagement of the issue by DOE and overwhelming political objections by Nevada residents and politicians.

Grade inflation is much the same as those two issues. Grades are rising almost everywhere across the country. The data are undeniable. But journalists if they want can probably find someone who will deny that this rise exists (just like they can find one or two credentialed scientists who will say global warming doesn't exist). Alfie Kohn and Clifford Adelman in the past have tried to make claims that grades have not been rising. Those claims ignore data and are without merit.*

Journalists can also find professors - typically in the humanities where data and numbers seem to be obtuse things - to make the claim that students are better or are working harder. There is no evidence that students are better across the country. Data indicate that literacy for college graduates has declined and that college students are studying about 10 hours a week less than they did in the 1960s. These claims of better students nationally are without basis.

Like those who try to refute global warming with isolated exceptions, you can of course, find isolated institutions where student quality has improved and make the false claim that this refutes all of grade inflation. It goes something like this. A. Grades are rising nationwide. B. Students are getting smarter in the Ivy League (or at my college). Because of A and B, it must be true that grades are rising nationwide simply because students are getting smarter nationwide. Um. No. It isn't even true that because of A and B (and B is a debatable point), that grades are rising in the Ivy League simply because students are getting smarter.

Harry Brighouse has tried to play the devil's advocate on this issue of student quality; he admits to being skeptical and grumpy. That's fine; he just shouldn't ignore data. Professor Brighouse feels that grades have limited utility. The value of grades is a debatable issue, I'll agree. At least Brighouse isn't trying to deny that grades are rising.** If somehow someone can show me that students: 1) were static in quality from the 1930s to the 1960s; 2) suddenly got better during the Vietnam era; 3) then plateaued in quality from the 1970s to the mid-1980s; and 4) in a grande finale display of intelligence and aptitude, got better and better from the 1980s to the present while studying less, suffering from declining literacy and producing at best static SAT scores, I'll gladly accept the thesis that grade inflation isn't real. The odds of that happening are even less than the odds of me writing a sentence in the next month that is as long as the one I just wrote. Whew.

Less often stated in the press is the "professors are better than ever theory" for rising grades. The argument here goes something like this. Getting a professorship is harder than ever. Therefore professors must be better teachers than those in the past. This argument assumes that universities select professors on the basis of their teaching ability. They don't.

A journalist could also quote parents who make the claim that their children deserve As because they're so good. I'm sure those parents would also say that their children are beautiful in addition to being brilliant. Parents are not impartial judges. Just start to ask me about my beautiful, brilliant kid! A journalist, on the basis of parental interviews, could write the article "Students Are Getting Smarter and Better Looking Every Year." OK, I'm digressing here.

But you get my point. Grade inflation is a cut and dried issue. Grade are going up. Workloads are going down. At some schools, a part of grade inflation is indeed due to better students, but like global warming, the rise in grades is so large that its main cause is due to something other than "natural factors" like better students. Professors are giving As instead of Bs, and have largely given up on Cs, Ds, and Fs altogether. Many professors won't admit that they have lowered their standards, but the data show otherwise. No one likes to admit that they are doing something bad by the way. It's novel when they do make such an admission. Some professors will at least admit they are grading easier, but are loathe to admit that they have dumbed-down material or reduced workloads. This is the "I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy" defense.

Even those willing to admit that students don't work as hard as they once did like Orlando Patterson from Harvard can, if you want to put a positive spin on it, try and find a silver lining. "They go out of here and they do pretty well. The society and economy can hardly complain that it's being ill-served by the students we're producing." I probably shouldn't make too much of this quote, but to me it sounds like apathy mixed with an implicit discounting of the value of higher education. It comes from 1998 when, like where I taught, Harvard was sending herds of its wanly educated to Wall Street to make millions. They were never asked to think hard. They had developed few analytical skills. I used to wonder how on Earth such undisciplined and unthinking people (who we had essentially infantilized over four years) could do a reasonable job at being financial titans. Fast forward to 2008 and the implications of creating a poorly educated Wall Street work force became widely apparent. We put garbage in. It was only a matter of time before garbage came out.

The controversy is not whether grade inflation exists. The controversy is whether or not, like global warming, we should do something about it. If you're a parent, you'd likely say, like someone in Wyoming wishing for global warming, I want more of it. If you are a professor or higher education policy person who doesn't like grades in the first place, you want more grade inflation as well. But if you are a professor or university leader who believes grades have value, then you want to reverse it. That's the balance in this story: whether we should do something about grade inflation or not. That's actually an interesting debate and I'd be happy to debate someone on that issue.

But the answer to the question does grade inflation exist is about as murky as whether the earth is flat or round. I'm sure a journalist can find some flat earth people to quote as well. But they wouldn't be credible would they?

I'm not trying to pick on the North Carolina reporter who wrote this recent article by the way. I thought it was actually pretty good. In contrast, The New York Times ran a "find the balance" and "show a controversy" article on grade inflation a few years ago that was downright silly.

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*I should note that before I started looking at grade inflation data, I read an article about Clifford Adelman's work showing no grade inflation. I'm prone to liking counterintuitive results and I thought, "This is pretty neat." It's only after I started looking at the data myself that it became clear that his results were not counterintuitive, but just plain wrong. Adelman says that my data consist of "self-selected fragments," the implication being that I ignore schools and fragments that don't show any indication of a grade rise. Nothing could be further from the truth. I simply look and ask for data. If they show no grade rise or a grade drop, so be it. Nothing is being hidden.

Adelman claims that "less than thirty" of the institutions represented in my database (as of July 2005) contain information from an "unassailable source." This is simply not true. If I use the criteria of yearly data 10 years or longer in length that either come from university publications (not student newspapers), university offices, faculty, or data from student newspapers that has been confirmed by university offices (Pomona and Kenyon), the following institutions were represented in the database as of 2003: Alabama, Auburn, UC-Irvine, CSU-East Bay, CSU-Sacramento, CSU-San Bernadino, Carleton, Dixie State, Duke, Florida, Georgia Tech, Hampden Sydney, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Kent State, Kenyon, LSU, Minnesota, Montana State, University of Nebraska - Kearney, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Northern Iowa, Northern Michigan, Pomona, Princeton, Purdue, Southern Illinois, Stanford, Texas, Utah, University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Washington, Western Washington, Wheaton, Williams, and Winthrop.

If I include more widely spaced data from university offices and university sanctioned publications (again not student newspapers), I can add Colby, Miami, University of North Carolina - Greensboro, Northwestern, and Rice. Adelman criticizes the inclusion of University of Chicago information because it comes from the University of Miami or as he puts it, "a report from school A that tattles on school B." This is beyond silly in terms of criticism.

Adelman may not like my data because they refute his work, but the data are real and they are extensive. I now have more data, which I will add to gradeinflation.com by the end of February. Adelman not only has to ignore my dataset, but data collected by others who have examined national grading trends in American colleges and universities. He also has to refute an official publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In terms of data analysis on national trends in college grading, Clifford Adelman stands all by himself.

This has been going on for years now. No one can reproduce Adelman's work. To try to justify his idiosyncratic results, Adelman has to make claims that he is the only one who possesses valid data worthy of analysis. The act has gotten old, so old that it simply isn't believable. Rather than continuing to point fingers, Adelman has to face the likely reality that there are serious errors in either his data or his analysis.

**Brighouse invokes the legacy admission of George W. Bush in his skepticism about grade inflation being real. According to Brighouse, rising grades may simply reflect increasing student talent and it would be "hard to imagine" legacy students as weak as George W. Bush being admitted today in elite colleges. The impact of legacies on overall university GPAs is tiny, but not only can I imagine weak legacies, I advised them. I occasionally advised legacy/wealthy family students with high school GPAs of 3.2 and SAT scores of 1100, SAT numbers well below those of Bush. Bush isn't stupid; he's just not intellectually curious.

Bush-like legacies are still present at elite colleges; for what it's worth, my less than illustrious advisees had GPAs in the 3.1 to 3.2 range as first year and second year students, which means they would likely graduate with 3.2 to 3.3 GPAs. Bush's gentleman's C is now a gentleman's (and gentle lady's) B+. Please don't tell me that they are smarter than George W. Bush. As bad a president as Bush was (the worst in my lifetime), I can assure you that should any of these advisees of my past occupy the White House, the world as we know it will end. OK, that was a joke. Kind of.

Brighouse does admit that, like me, he has graded more generously over time and says, "In an environment where you believe students are awarded higher grades than they should be, it can be morally appropriate to do the same onself...." I agree, but it is strange that a skeptic of grade inflation admits to inflating his grades.

The Brighouse quotes as do the Adelman quotes come from a book edited by Lester Hunt, "Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education." The book is based on a conference that I did not attend; I was invited to that conference one week before it began by a dean at the school where it was hosted. The dean is an old and dear friend. He apologized about the shortness of notice. By the way, this post is already too long by a factor of two. That's what happens when I start to talk about academe. Good night.