Lots of people moan about grade inflation, especially in graduate school. Some complaints take the form of, “People who don’t deserve an A are getting an A,” and pretty much end at that. Others defend the inflators with, “The grading system is so arbitrary and varies so radically across schools and from professor to professor that it is foolish to injure, however remotely, the chances of students to succeed in the future by actually trying to enforce a meaningful grading system in a class.” Then there is the issue of “performance relative to one’s classmates” vs. “performance relative to a particular standard of learning achieved.” The latter in turn leads to the question of, “Standard? Recognized by and established by who?”
I haven’t really given this or grade inflation in general too much thought. Nor have I read anything by anyone who has (links appreciated). I do know, however, that at Western Washington University, many of my classes had very tough grading practices. In some of my philosophy classes, in particular, it was very hard to get above a B+. The same went for a few of my history professors. In other classes, lower than a B was reserved for “punishment” for students who knew damn well what they did to get it. I was surprised when I discovered that at Columbia, during my masters degree, my grades in the majority of my classes (some notable exceptions) ballooned upwards irrespective of my actual mental investment in the class and in two cases totally irrespective of whether I had a clue or not of what was going on in the class. I assure you I didn’t suddenly get smarter when I entered graduate school and I’m also very sure I didn’t get smarter, more knowledgeable, or more harder working relative to my classmates.
A friend of mine in a masters program at Waseda University got his first “report card” back today. The program uses an A, B, C grading system as the US does in addition to the Japanese gradings 優、良、可. We discovered, however, that grade inflation, or rather, the complete lack of any meaningful differentiation in a student’s input of effort or output of work, is very much alive in his program as well. I was especially interested in a little sheet that came with his report card announcing a new grading system, beginning this semester, which saves professors the trouble and inflates things for them:
90-100% = A+ (formerly A) = 優
80-89 = A (formerly B) = 優
70-79 = B (formerly C) = 良
60-69 = C (formerly D) = 可
0-59 = F
What can we make of this sort of thing? Obviously I should ask the administration directly before making any judgments but my suspicion is that, like many schools, their eye is on how the students will be using these little markings on paper after they leave the school and take the next step. In this case, there is always the chance that students go on to study in the US. I apologize if I’m stating the obvious here, but the assumption seems to be that grades are a form of communication not from instructor to student, or instructor to school about student, but from instructor to everyone in the student’s future. If this is the case, as that old movie quote goes, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
When I finished high school with a 2.6 GPA, about the only positive thing I could have said about my performance in those years was that I showed an amazing respect for “grade diversity.” Finishing at nearly the bottom of my class, I consider myself lucky I got into college at all. I can’t shake the nudging feeling that the whole academic grading thing is a joke of near cosmic proportions, but that we are all prevented from laughing.
