New Article in Teachers College Record on College Grading

You can download a copy from TCR (if you're a subscriber) here:

Here's the beginning of it. I'll put up the rest temporarily later. Pdf is available on request.

Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009

by Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy

Background/Context: College grades can influence a student’s graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of college grading.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Here we look at the evolution of grading over time and space at American colleges and universities over the last 70 years. Our data provide a means to examine how instructors’ assessments of excellence, mediocrity, and failure have changed in higher education.

Data Collection and Analysis: We have collected historical and contemporary data on A–F letter grades awarded from over 200 four-year colleges and universities. Our contemporary data on grades come from 135 schools, with a total enrollment of 1.5 million students.

Research Design: Through the use of averages over time and space as well as regression models, we examine how grading has changed temporally and how grading is a function of school selectivity, school type, and geographic region.

Findings/Results: Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Conclusions/Recommendations: As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.

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Unregulated and self-regulated organizations and professions commonly have problems maintaining standards and ensuring ethical behavior (DeMarzo, Fishman, & Hagerty, 2005; Frey, 2006). Without regulation, it is likely that many individuals will pursue local benefits even if their actions are detrimental to the global good. Grading of undergraduates at American colleges and universities incorporates a system of standards that is almost always unregulated. The A–F letter grade system of American higher education has been in wide use for roughly the last 100 years (e.g., Meyer, 1908) and gradually became the basis for the now ubiquitous 4.0 grade point average (GPA) scale. Implicit in the use of our grading system is the belief that it has value both as a motivator of students and as a tool for postgraduate schools and employers to identify the best and brightest. The assumption is that college instructors will individually regulate their grading practices out of a sense of personal integrity and because they realize that how they grade and teach influences the reputations of the institutions they represent.

Efforts at employing even soft external guidelines on grading practices are almost always rebuffed by both instructors and university leadership, and often equated with a lack of faith in the integrity of the faculty. A grade should reflect an instructor’s true view of student performance, but a college instructor may be at best ambivalent about the worth of grades (e.g., Battersby, 1973). Even if an instructor feels that grades have value and purpose, there are significant perceived incentives for that instructor to abandon any objective standard and award grades that are artificially high (e.g., Feldman, 1976; Johnson, 2003). In the absence of oversight, one might expect that grading standards at colleges and universities would degrade over time. A’s would become commonplace. Failing and substandard grades would become rare. The ability of grades to motivate or serve as an indicator of performance would be impaired.

Have universities and colleges managed to maintain academic standards in the absence of regulation? We have tried to answer that question by examining undergraduate grade distributions over the last 70 years using historical and contemporary data from over 200 American four-year schools (institutions are listed in the appendix). We measure changes in academic standards over time, examine the evolution of the divergence in grading practices between public and private schools, and look at the potential causes of those changes.

METHODOLOGY

We assembled our data on four-year school grades (grades given in terms of percent A–F for a given semester or academic year) from a variety of sources: books, research articles, random World Wide Web searching of college and university registrar and institutional research office Web sites, personal contacts with school administrators and leaders, and cold solicitations for data from 100 registrar and institutional research offices, selected randomly (20 of the institutions solicited agreed to provide contemporary data as long as the school’s grading practices would not be individually identified in our work).

The characteristics of the 135 institutions for which we have contemporary data are summarized in Table 1. In addition, we have historical data on grading practices from the 1930s onward for 173 institutions (93 of which also have contemporary data). Time series were constructed beginning in 1960 by averaging data from all institutions on an annual basis. For the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, data are sparse, so we averaged over 1936 to 1945 (data from 37 schools) and 1946 to 1955 (data from 13 schools) to estimate average grades in 1940 and 1950, respectively. For the early part of the 1960s, there are 11–13 schools represented by our annual averages. By the early part of the 1970s, the data become more plentiful, and 29–30 schools are averaged. Data quantity increases dramatically by the early 2000s with 82–83 schools included in our data set. Because our time series do not include the same schools every year, we smooth our annual estimates with a moving centered three-year average. It is worth noting that the same trends we detail here are also clearly visible in the unsmoothed data. They are also clearly visible if we reduce our database to the 14 schools for which we have mostly continuous data from the 1960s (or earlier) to the 2000s.