For over 10 years, Clifford Adelman has made claims based on a longitudinal study of the college transcripts of tens of thousands of those who were high school twelfth graders as of 1972, 1982 and 1992 that grade inflation doesn't exist (or it exists only at elite schools) and that A's are not that easy to get in college. For the last several years, the GPAs from Adelman's work that keep being quoted to prove this are the average GPAs for the 1972, 1982, and 1992 cohorts, 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74, respectively. Those numbers are low. The trend in those numbers is essentially nonexistent. If you believe those numbers, you would indeed believe that C grades are very common and grade inflation doesn't exist. But, in fact, those numbers are unbelievable.
I decided to do a first order check on differences between my analysis (which more or less lines up with other people's analyses) of grade changes over time and Adelman's analysis (which doesn't line up with anyone else). By first order, I mean comparing averages of the populations of grades in the two data sets.
In my work, I've randomly sampled American colleges and universities with the significant qualifiers that I've certainly oversampled elite schools and my sample is weighted to other schools that have online data on grades. In contrast, only three percent of Adelman's schools are highly selective, so in order to make a better comparison with Adelman, I'm going to throw out all but one (which I've picked at random) selective college from my database. Here is my sample of schools to determine a mean equivalent GPA to compare with Adelman's transcript data: Alabama, Arizona, Auburn, Central Michigan, Clarion, Colby, Colorado, Colorado State, CSU-East Bay, CSU-Sacto, CSU-SB, Dixie State, Eastern Oregon, Florida, Georgia Tech, Hampden-Sydney, Houston, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, James Madison, Kent State, Kenyon, Lehigh, LSU, Miami, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana State, Nebraska-Kearney, Norfolk State, Northern Iowa, Northern Michigan, Ohio State, Old Dominion, Pacific Lutheran, Purdue, Sam Houston, Southern Cal, Southern Illinois, Southwest Missouri, Stetson, SUNY-Geneseo, SUNY-Oswego, Texas, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC SB, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Greensboro, Utah, UW Green Bay, UW LaCrosse, UW Madison, UW Oshkosh, Virginia, Washington, Washington State, Western Michigan, Western Washington, Westmont, Wheaton, William & Mary, and Winthrop. To my mind, that's a nice wide swath of American colleges and universities, 65 total, representing an enrollment of about one million students.
Above I show the distribution of the "latest" mean GPAs for these schools in my 2003 dataset. By "latest," I simply mean the most current data point reported for each school (almost always based on percent grade awarded data, which is essentially a huge transcript for each school), typically between 1998 and 2002. The mean is well off Adelman's means, more than one standard deviation off. There are only 10 schools that fall within the type of GPAs Adelman's transcripts are showing.
The bottom line is that if the means for Adelman's GPAs have low variance (and they do) there is no equivalency. Either the reported means are in error or Adelman isn't sampling anything close to the population I've sampled (or anyone else has sampled for that matter). It's a world of students with a lot of low GPAs that I'm rarely finding on a school level (and I'd love to find them). About 25 percent of all of Adelman's data come from community colleges, and my focus is on four year schools. But this difference at face value seems unlikely to create the dramatic difference in populations. Adelman's GPAs for community colleges are only about 0.1 less than his average GPAs. Perhaps, because he is looking at individual transcripts and many students do drop out, he is significantly oversampling data from first year students, who typically have GPAs a few tenths lower than seniors.
In my database, the average grade nationwide was 3.0 in about the year 2000 regardless as to whether I include or exclude elite private schools. If I limit the 2003 database only to schools with extensive data from 1991-2001, the number goes higher, up to 3.1 (which is the number shown on gradeinflation.com's last full update). Given the numbers of students represented in my dataset, I can say with complete certainty that whatever the numbers 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74 represent, they bear no relation to average GPAs of students at American colleges and universities. Instead about 1/3 of all grades are A's and about 3/4 of all grades are B- or better. Grading is easy in America.
I'm going to make another big assumption and look at the Adelman numbers again, this time for evidence of grade inflation. I'm going to assume that the numbers are off by a lot, but they are all off by the same amount, somewhere about 0.23. This yields GPAs of 2.93, 2.89 and 2.97 for the 1972, 1982, and 1992 high school graduates of Adelman's study, respectively. The first two numbers are actually believable. The first group of students would be sophomores and juniors at around 1975 and the second group at around 1985, a time period when GPAs were on average flat across America. So one half of the time period covered by Adleman's study happens to coincide with a time when grade inflation wasn't happening. On that Adelman and I can both agree. But then the agreement mostly ends. The 1992 data show a rise of 0.08, which is off by a factor of roughly two. Again, I don't know what the numbers 2.70, 2.66, and 2.74 represent, but they bear little relation to changing grading patterns in American colleges and universities from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.*
Adelman has made the claim that grade inflation is an elite school phenomenon and because those schools get so much attention in the media, it creates the illusion that grade inflation is widespread. This claim is not true. Here are some schools where GPAs rose significantly over the time period of Adelman's study and beyond that are not Harvard, Princeton, et al.:
Adelphi 1995-2004 3.05-3.22
Alabama 1991-2006 2.59-2.90
Central Florida 1984-2007 2.61-2.99
Central Michigan 1977-2006 2.77-2.94
CSU-San Bernardino 1975-2001 2.73-3.00
Florida 1989-2006 2.88-3.29
Furman 1984-2007 2.68-3.22
Georgia 1974-2004 2.74-3.24
Georgia Tech 1972-2007 2.45-2.93
Hampden-Sydney 1988-2007 2.52-2.71
Hope College 1975-2006 2.86-3.38
Houston 1989-2007 2.49-2.64
Kansas 1984-2004 2.94-3.16
Lehigh 1972-2003 2.60-3.04
Messiah 1990-2006 2.90-3.26
Missouri State 1997-2006 2.90-3.02
North Carolina-Chapel Hill 1975-2006 2.82-3.16
North Carolina-Greensboro 1988-2008 2.71-2.90
Northern Iowa 1985-1999 2.69-2.96
Ohio State 1980-2007 2.65-2.99
Ohio University 1986-1998 2.66-2.89
Penn State 1975-2006 2.86-3.07
Purdue University 1986-2006 2.66-2.81
Southern Illinois 1991-2001 2.88-3.08
Southwest Missouri 1979-2001 2.94-3.16
Texas 1986-2006 2.60-3.12
Texas A&M 1985-2008 2.70-2.98
UC-Berkeley 1986-2005 2.95-3.25
UC-Santa Barbara 1994-2006 2.84-3.02
Utah 1975-2007 2.65-3.07
Valdosta State 1994-2004 2.69-2.87
Westmont 1991-1999 3.04-3.24
William and Mary 1986-2005 2.86-3.23
Winthrop 1987-2005 2.49-2.93
Wisconsin-La Crosse 1977-2001 2.85-3.19
Wisconsin-Madison 1974-2007 2.90-3.20
The above schools, randomly found (except for curiosity about places like Madison, where I'm an alumnus, and Chapel Hill, where I lived), represent over 600,000 college students. It's true that rising grades cannot be found at all colleges and universities over the last 20 years. You can find schools that have held the line, but they are rare:
Auburn 1976-2006 2.71-2.73
Nebraska-Kearney 1990-2008 2.88-2.89**
These schools, randomly found, represent about 25,000 college students.
Here's the reality. Grades are up virtually everywhere. If I have a long record of data, on the order of 50 years, GPAs will be up about 0.7. If I have a short record, on the order of 10 years, GPAs will be up about 0.1. Below is a summary plot of all the data I have so far for my next update of gradeinflation.com. Over 70 schools are represented.*** Each data point is one school. The picture tells it all. The next person who tries to tell me that grade inflation is a myth has to be smoking something.
There is some good news, actually. Some colleges and universities have seen their rate of GPA increase significantly slow down or plateau over the last few years (as I'll talk about in my next full update of gradeinflation.com). At a few places that have seriously tried to curtail grade inflation, GPAs have actually dropped; but in the absence of those efforts, rising grades are the rule not the exception.
Grade inflation is so pervasive that in some ways - like with any epidemic - it's more interesting to examine those schools that seem to be immune rather than those that have been susceptible.
Getting back to apples and oranges, perception is the same as reality in the case of grading in America. The reason that there is a perception that grade inflation is widespread is that it is, in fact, widespread. Adelman has spent well over a decade promoting the idea that grade inflation is a myth. He has promoted that idea because that's what his database tells him. But if that is the case, his database bears no relation to the real world. He has warned people about this data that "in discussions of grades and grading in higher education, we ignore them at our own peril." My oh my. Now I'm really scared.
I am reminded of an old friend who absolutely can't find things. One day, he asked his wife as he was prowling around in the kitchen, "Honey, where do we keep the ice?" Adelman has been unable to find evidence of grade inflation, but it's so obvious where that evidence is - readily available in the online databases of university institutional research offices - that it's mind boggling that he hasn't found it yet.
You simply have to make the effort to go online, open some virtual doors and look at real data. It is common practice for scientists to make sure in advance of publication that results based on ensembles of indirect data - such as a database consisting of tens of thousands of individual college transcripts - can match real observations. With regard to the analyses performed by Adelman and his colleagues, that checking apparently was not done. The result has been the prominent display of misinformation and false assessment on the state of grading in American colleges and universities for over a decade.
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*It may be worth noting that Adelman's GPAs for college graduates are much higher and are believable. They are 2.94, 2.88 and 3.04 for 1972, 1982 and 1992 respectively. They are low, but not ridiculously low (college graduates should have GPAs higher than equivalent GPAs based on percent grade awarded data because the latter include grades from poor performing drop outs). They, in fact, suggest that beginning in the early to mid-1980s grade inflation took off after a ten year flat period. Why Adelman chooses not to emphasize this is anyone's guess. That said, Adelman's database time intervals do not line up well with the dominant time periods of grade inflation, the 1960s, and the mid-1980s to present. The absence of data in critical years, as a result, makes the database a suboptimal tool for identifying grade inflation.
**Addendum: You can add University of Wyoming and CSU-Fullerton to the list of grade inflation resistant schools. If you go back to the 1970s and include that data, you can move Purdue from the very modest inflaters to the grade resistant. You can add UCLA and Appalachian State to the list of grade inflaters.
***Below are all the schools for which I have current data that I'm going to post in my next full update of gradeinflation.com. I'm essentially done with data collection for the update, but if someone who reads this has more data, send it my way. I'd especially love to find someone, anyone, who can find schools where grades have been stable. They are, as I noted above, rare. And I do like rare things.
Adelphi
Alabama
Appalachian State
Auburn
Boston U
Brown
Carleton
Central Florida
Central Michigan
Colorado
Colorado State
Columbia
Columbia (Chicago)
Cornell
CSU-Fullerton
CSU-Sacramento
CSU-San Bernardino
Dartmouth
Florida
Furman
George Washington
Georgetown
Georgia
Georgia Tech
Grinnell
Hampden-Sydney
Harvard
Harvey Mudd
Hope
Houston
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa State
Kansas
Kenyon
Lehigh
Messiah
Middlebury
Minot State
Missouri S&T
Missouri State
Nebraska-Kearney
Norhern Michigan
North Dakota
Northern Iowa
Ohio State
Oregon
Oshkosh
Penn State
Pomona
Princeton
Sam Houston
SE LA
South FL
Southern CT
Southern Illinois
Stanford
Texas
Texas A&M
UC-Berkeley
UCLA
UC-Santa Barbara
UNC-Chapel Hill
UNC-Greensboro
UNC-Wilmington
Utah
UW-La Crosse
Valdosta State
Washington & Lee
Western Washington
Wheaton
William & Mary
Winthrop
Wisconsin
Wyoming
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