Voluntary Conscription: Enlisting the Children of Lake Wobegone in the Battle Against Grade Inflation

College Literature, Winter 2005 by King, Mark

As a teacher of composition at a public university, I sometimes feel that a sizable portion of my time goes to alerting students. Like a canary in a coalmine, my prime mission is to provide warning. For example, I warn my students about the dangers of plagiarism, the necessity of revision, and the over-reliance on electronic spellcheckers. Often, I apprise my students of the limits of using anecdotal evidence in formal academic arguments. "Anecdotal evidence," I counsel, "is always suspect." That concern not withstanding, I can't help begin this undertaking with a pair of stories.

One day during my first year of teaching, a student lost self-control in my office. As our meeting continued, gentle sobbing turned to uncontrollable wailing, and she berated me for her "horrible" grade. I let her vent for a while and, after a bit, she settled down. The only casualties from the incident were a once-full box of Kleenex tissues and a picture frame, but for a brief moment I was genuinely alarmed. What was the "horrible" grade that brought on these Niobe-like lamentations? An A minus.

Sometime later, as I prepared a conference version of this paper,1 I received the previous semesters student evaluations from the Department of Arts and Sciences. Here at Louisiana State University, student evaluation forms are in two parts. The first part of the form is composed of the familiar rate-on-a-scale-of-one-through-five style questions covering course content, instructor availability, required texts, etc. The second part of the LSU form is somewhat more specific; it allows instructors to tailor questions based on their own interests. I spend a great deal of time composing questions in this section and I usually find the student responses beneficial as I make changes in my courses from semester to semester. As I paged through the evaluations, one particular student comment stood out: in answer to a question I posed regarding the efficacy of small group peer review sessions compared to class-wide peer review sessions, the student ignored my query and simply scrawled the missive, "you grade to hard" [sic].

Perhaps what these two stories illustrate-other than, if anything, I grade to [sic] liberally-is that many undergraduates are unconditionally and unrealistically focused on grades. Some students view college as an accreditation process not unlike a Driver's Education course. If, under this line of thinking, completion of Driver's Ed results in a license to operate a motor vehicle, then completion of the undergraduate course of studies bestows economic security. This mindset is often at odds with the mindset of the student's instructors. Many instructors remember their own college years as quests for enlightenment and erudition in the tradition of Matthew Arnold-or at least in the tradition of the young scholars in the film Dead Poet's Society. Given this gap in perceptions, communication between instructor and student can become difficult. Any mention of education as a means to an inquisitive and critical mind or any reflection on the pure joy of learning by the instructor is met with a combination of eye-roll and sigh. It is a reaction with which any parent in North America is familiar. Many instructors are dumbfounded by the students' attitude of callous indifference. "What do they want?" the faculty members ask in bewildered exasperation.

The answer is simple: students want high grades. What is more, they seem to be getting them. To those who have followed the controversy, the facts are all too familiar: 82% of Harvard's graduating class of 2000 received some sort of honors (Israel 2001); 43% of all grades awarded at Brown in the 1999-2000 academic year were A's (Kudeisa 2001), as were 46% of all grades at Northwestern in the same year (Greer 2001). Newsweek reports that the "average" grade at Duke University now approaches an A minus (Pederson 1997, 64).

Despite the media's tendency to focus on the nation's most prestigious institutions and a nagging notion that grade inflation is only an Ivy League problem, the large state-run universities seem to be no better at holding the line on grades than are private institutions. For example, a recent independent study singled out the state-run University of Washington as an institution with particularly egregious grade inflation (Borchers 2003). Other state-run institutions face similar problems; in 2001, the Registrar's Office of University of Arizona reported a seven percent rise in the number of A's and B's since 1991 (Williamson 2002). Washington State University reports a rise in average undergraduate GPA from 2.84 in 1975 to 2.94 in 2002 (Ellison 2003) According to a recent Grade Distribution Report from the English Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, one section of an introductory first-year writing course in 2002 reported that an astonishing 94.1% of the participants received an A (Nardo 2002).

Despite these troubling figures, I do not wish to use this essay to rehash the same old statistics or to point an accusatory finger at any one institution or person. Rather, I would like to discuss some of the characteristics I have noticed in the conversation about grade inflation: its lack of historical sense, its sense of blame, its tendency to reduce all educational matters to mere dollars and cents, and its combative language. Then, having illustrated the tenor of the grade inflation debate, I would like to look at it as a local, classroom level problem. To that end, the second part of this essay will outline a classroom exercise designed to prepare both teacher and student to combat grade inflation. The classroom exercise upends some of those same features found in the grade inflation debate and uses students' inclinations to help them understand the scarcity of human excellence and why the evaluations students receive do not always meet their expectations.