Opinion | Grade Inflation at Yale and Beyond: The Causes and Effects
To the Editor:
Re “Excellence at Yale Doubted as Nearly Everyone Gets A’s” (news article, Dec. 6):
The recent article about grade inflation at Yale was quite interesting but underplayed the role that students play. Students are as responsible for grade inflation as are college professors.
In the mid-2000s I taught a couple of journalism classes on new media at Brandeis. I had about 30 students in my classes, and only one really knew how to use the English language properly. I kept asking myself, “These kids want to go into journalism?” I have always believed that A’s should be awarded infrequently.
However, after I passed out my first set of grades, almost every single student asked me, often tearfully begging me, to give them an A in the course. I heard every excuse: My parents will be furious with me, I will lose my scholarship, I won’t get the job I wanted, etc. One student even threatened to sue me when I refused to change the grade.
A couple of the students had reasonable excuses, so I asked them to do one more project, and if it met what I considered reasonable criteria, I would give them an A. However, most of the students received a B-minus or a C.
While I enjoyed teaching, I decided not to pursue it, because who wants to spend all their time defending the grades they’ve awarded? I can only imagine that in the 20 years since I stopped teaching, the demands for A’s have grown louder.
Walter Regan
Coquitlam, British Columbia
To the Editor:
The currency analogy in Amelia Nierenberg’s excellent article about grade inflation at Yale — and pretty much every other college and high school in the country — is a good one that should be taken further.
Not only do grades, like currency, undergo inflation, but they also undergo consequent devaluation. When I was a high school science department chair some years ago, I found it ironic that the same teachers who bemoaned the emphasis that colleges placed on standardized tests — “Don’t they realize that our assigned grades are more informed than some multiple choice test?” — happily participated in grade inflation and fought efforts to reverse it.
Of course, as college admissions staff told us, that just meant the uniformly and thus indistinguishably high G.P.A.s were of ever less informational value to colleges, leaving them no choice but to place relatively more value on standardized tests in their admissions decisions.
Surely this devaluation of the teachers’ assessment of their students is not what teachers really want, nor what is best for their students, either academically or emotionally.
Jabe Blumenthal
Seattle
To the Editor:
Grade inflation is, of course, ridiculous, but it is very real. It is partly driven by the ubiquitous system of anonymous online reviews of professors by students. Why take a class from a professor who graded lower than everyone else?
While student course evaluations do have some utility, a pernicious side effect is that one will be evaluated more harshly if one grades more harshly. These evaluations are a factor in promotion decisions.
Also, instructors have to offer courses that students will take, or they will not get credit for teaching the classes. Except for the core classes all students must take, the system incentivizes instructors to use a grade range that is near what others are doing.
There is an obvious solution: Bring back the “curve,” universitywide mandated grade distribution. The problem is that in today’s politically correct world, where D.E.I. often counts above all else, it would recognize and demonstrate the fact that all students are not created equal.
Stephen R.S. Martin
Cave Creek, Ariz.
To the Editor:
Grade inflation has infected nearly every college across the country. Although student handbooks, for example, typically define a B as “good,” students widely consider a B to mean “bad.” Such thinking naturally puts pressure on professors to go easy, lest they put their students at a competitive disadvantage in seeking employment or applying to graduate school.
Rather than compare colleges for insight into grade inflation, however, we should compare countries. There is no grade inflation in Finland, I learned as a visiting professor there last year, or similar countries with strong social contracts. Setting aside that college in these countries is free, low income inequality and universal benefits (from substantial maternity/paternity leave to high-quality health care) shield students from the stress of gaining top grades to gain top jobs. With the stakes lower in these countries, grades can mean what they should.
The diminishment of excellence at American colleges appears to derive not from campus policies but from off-campus realities. It’s thus unlikely we can fix grade inflation until we address the economic conditions associated with it.
Samuel E. Abrams
New York
The writer is the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of “Education and the Commercial Mindset.”
An Ode to Winter
To the Editor:
Re “Love Letter to a Season I Never Liked Before,” by Margaret Renkl (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 9):
Maybe a natural part of aging is to move from being summer people, with all the zest and energy and bright new green that suggests, to a stint as winter people, drawn to slow walks on a coppery leaf bed — in tune with winter’s mildly melancholy spirit, which calls for reflection and rest, for quiet and stillness.
As Ms. Renkl tells us, winter holds as many treasures as the jauntier times of year. This is the season of the moon, transcendent. December’s sunlight has lost its warmth, gone pale and watery, but in the cold dry air, a winter moon illuminates and dapples the woods in shadow, as starkly as the sun at high noon in July.
After their dazzling offerings earlier on, the hardwoods are bare bones now, but stripped of their finery, it is easier to see how elegantly they carry themselves, how graceful are their uplifted arms.
The beeches manage to hang on here and there to a handful of dried leaves, fragile and feather-light. You can just hear them tapping each other. Shakespeare, as only he could, calls them “bare, ruin’d choirs.”
Best of all, the birds are back to feast at feeders in the backyards of their human friends and, with their inconstant leafier homes stripped bare but for a stubborn few wisps, to shelter in the ever loyal evergreens.
Margaret McGirr
Greenwich, Conn.
Religious Resistance Rises With Vaccines’ Success
To the Editor:
Re “Activists, Citing Religion, Aiming to Limit Child Vaccine Mandates” (front page, Dec. 4):
Seven decades ago, the nation mobilized for the mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine. The public at that time united to promote public health.
Today, we read reports of groups organizing to resist vaccination by advocating religious exemptions to public-health mandates. When the polio vaccine trials were going on, participation in organized religion was more widespread, and it posed no obstacle to the cause of eradicating polio. What changed?
The very success of vaccination has opened the door to these objectors. It has made a distant memory of diseases that used to be major causes of infant mortality.
As that knowledge disappears from public memory, individual resistance to the public-health measure of mandatory vaccination rises. It should not require a resurgence of polio, measles or mumps to renew the understanding that promotion of public health is a common good.
Richard W. Mark
New York
