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September 6 - 10, 1998 |
70% of universities' grades are A's, B'sThe Arizona Daily Star The chime of the bell curve hasn't been heard in a long time at the state's three universities, where professors give A's more than any other grade, a study by The Arizona Daily Star shows. A's and B's together account for 70 percent of all grades awarded to undergraduates between 1993 and 1997, while students receive D's and E's only 10 percent of the time. As far as C's go, they can take a seat. Although university policies define it as ``average,'' the middleman of the grading scale is given out only 20 percent of the time at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. The Star determined this through a computer-assisted analysis of grade data obtained through the state public records law. The numbers show the UA has good students who work hard, said Michael Gottfredson, the school's vice president for undergraduate education. But some members of the Arizona Board of Regents, the university system's governing body, question the distribution.
That may have been the case in the past but it's not anymore, administrators said. Although the Star's analysis found that students receive A's more than any other grade, administrators maintained today's average grade is more likely a B. But they insisted that the high number of A's and B's does not mean that college has become easier or that students are skating through. A's are given 36 percent of the time and B's 33 percent. The university presidents acknowledge that there has been grade inflation, but say it either has been corrected or will be when it becomes a problem.
UA Numbers `pretty severe'An expert on grade inflation - the increase in grades at universities nationwide - called the Arizona system's proportion of A's and B's ``pretty severe.''``It's not Lake Wobegone. Everybody can't be above average,'' said Perry Zirkel, an education professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. ``You can't tell me that 70 percent of those students are . . . clearly above average.'' It's difficult to gauge exactly how much grades have risen within the Arizona university system because there is no regular tracking of the statistics. The only grade study in UA archives dates back to 1928. Other studies have been done since then, but weren't very comprehensive because of changes in the way data is kept. They also weren't saved, officials said. ``From time to time, I would ask a provost or a president about grade inflation because there would be articles in national media,'' said Judy Gignac, president of the Arizona Board of Regents. ``They would indicate to me that to the best of their knowledge, there hasn't been any grade inflation. But nobody's really done a study on it lately.'' There are, however, related studies that clearly show that grade averagess have increased. Among UA students who started college for the first time in the fall of 1982, the average freshman year grade point average was 2.42. Fourteen years later, it had jumped to 2.66. Between 1990 and 1997, the average graduating GPA swelled from 2.897 to 3.089.
A's ``surprisingly high''Don't look to UA President Peter Likins to defend the upturn. In fact, he has some trouble relating to it.``I guess the best that I can say is that, in my own teaching back in the '60s and '70s, it was more like 15 percent (A's),'' he said. ``In terms of my personal grading habits from another decade, 35 (percent A's) is a surprisingly high number. That's not to say that I condemn that outcome, but I do ask how you differentiate the highest quality students from those of more modest quality.'' Grades began to climb about 30 years ago because students were under incredible pressure to perform and were becoming overly competitive, Likins said. ``One of the lessons of the late '60s was to be more compassionate and more accommodating of student differences and more encouraging and more motivating and more nurturing. And all those words manifested themselves, I think, in a gradual relaxation of grades,'' he added. It happened nationwide and today it is known as grade inflation, said Zirkel, who has spent the last few years studying the trend at high schools, universities and graduate programs across the country. Zirkel's university is the one Likins left to head the UA. Overall, grade inflation has made grades higher by 15 percent to 20 percent, making a 2.5 GPA 20 years ago a 2.8 or 2.9 today, he said. What universities gain from grade inflation is simple: a happy illusion of smart students and good professors, he said. ``When you look closely at it, it turns out it really seems to pervade every kind of institution,'' Zirkel said. ``Private, public. From the highest quality to the lowest.''
To bolster their argument that incoming students have improved, they point to statistics showing that Scholastic Achievement Test scores rose from 1082 for freshmen who entered the UA in fall 1992 to 1094 for those who entered last fall. During that same period, the high school GPAs of incoming freshmen rose from 3.18 to 3.31. But the GPAs don't mean as much, Zirkel said, because high school grades are also inflated. Between 1987 and 1997, the proportion of SAT-takers nationally with A-averages in high school increased from 28 percent to 37 percent, but SAT scores fell an average of 14 points, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported about a year ago. It's the very mark of grade inflation: schools giving higher grades but students doing worse on achievement tests, Zirkel said. ``It would be great to think that every young adult is that much above average,'' said Gov. Jane Hull, a former teacher. ``But I think the school of hard knocks is that you work hard for your grades.'' The grading distributions at the universities make her question whether that's happening, she said. They also make her worry about the damage they could do to students in the long run. ``I don't like to see young adults given the perspective that they're doing very, very well, graduate from college and find out that, no, indeed they really weren't.''
``There are some departments or faculty members who are so committed to the success of the student, that they believe - without lowering standards - that whatever it takes to bring that student up to success - and a C to them is not a statement of success - they will do,'' he said. While professors primarily give students what they earned, some give slightly higher grades as an incentive to do better in the future, Gottfredson said. The practice, he said, follows from the days when report cards had grades for both achievement and effort. Gottfredson calls it grading for ``utilitarian purposes.'' ``We don't grade achievement and effort anymore and so they're kind of wrapped up together,'' he said. That appalled Herstam, who said using grades to reward effort has no place in higher education. ``I would be comfortable with that at the elementary school level. But I'm not sure that rewarding effort is appropriate in the university system,'' he said. ``I think academic achievement should rule. ``If you downgrade the standards of academic achievement in the university system, then you are downgrading the value of a diploma.''
Herstam also was concerned about another reason universities gave for high grades: the apparent abandonment of ranking students by their GPAs.
Unlike 20 years ago, today's students are much more diverse in many aspects, including academic preparation and learning style, she said. In general, she said, universities ``have moved away from comparing students in the same class to one another and grading on that basis and more to something like looking for demonstrated competency.'' Hull was surprised to hear that, describing herself as ``an old-fashioned bell curve-type person.'' ``If we're going to have a new grading system, then I certainly hope that's explained to everybody because that's kind of new to me,'' she said. Herstam felt the same. ``What they are describing basically is a pass/fail system. If it's simply a question of mastering coursework and there is no longer a real definition of what's average, then why even have a grading system? he said. ``Obviously, these grade point averages are meaningless.'' Zirkel agreed, saying universities shouldn't use an A through E grading system to describe a grading process that doesn't compare students with each other. ``Don't use A's, because who's to say that when someone's achieved mastery, that that's an A. Maybe that's a B. Maybe that's a C,'' he said.
`` `Why?' would be my question,'' Herstam said. ``I think the public - as well as this new regent - feels that A is superior work, B is above average work, C is average work, D is below average work and F is failure,'' he said. ``I find it interesting that the universities have redefined the grades, have redefined the terminology for the grade levels and I'd be interested in hearing further explanations from them.'' Regent Jack Jewett of Tucson also was concerned about the grading patterns at the universities. Both he and Herstam indicated that they intend to pursue the matter with university officials. Jewett said that when he attended the UA 30 years ago, C ``was a very average grade'' and ``A, indeed, was a high honor.'' ``Certainly that's the way I continue to look at it. And I would be very eager to learn how these values have shifted.'' Being very average at Arizona's universities wouldn't be enough for a diploma, Gottfredson noted. ``If we saw C as being the middle of the grade distribution, there'd be an awful lot of students who wouldn't be graduating. They'd be out of luck,'' Gottfredson said. A student who earned straight C's in college would compile a 2.0 grade point average - well below the 2.5 required to graduate. The definitions for each letter grade apparently have been blurred, and the public most likely is unaware of that, said regent Gignac, who lives in Sierra Vista. ``It's going to be very disconcerting to parents in particular. Those parents who pay the bills for education and want to know how their child ranks with everybody else. And how do I know that if my kid doesn't get a letter grade that I can compare with the rest of the class?''
But trying to change grade distributions would be a monumental task, Likins said. ``If you were to decide as a dean or as a department chairman that, gee, we're getting too lax in our grading, we need to increase the difficulty in getting A's, or B's, there is no operational way to do that,'' Likins said. ``You can have a little chat with your faculty, you can encourage,'' but it's unlikely a department would create a rule requiring that the average grade be a C, he said. University department heads and presidents can't do much about grade inflation, Zirkel said. They cannot mandate change among faculty - because grading is understood as the faculty's domain and because professors are protected by tenure - and don't have the will to fight a practice that has become entrenched on campuses across the country, he said. Change would come more easily if the university as a whole recognized a problem, Likins said.
``If we find that we are giving grades so generously that we are unable to determine and differentiate the very best students, unable to determine who gets into graduate school or medical school, then we will gradually change,'' he said. ASU's Coor said he thinks grade inflation already has been stemmed. ``In my own view, that phenomenon has either slowed substantially or even in some instances kind of been altered substantially,'' Coor said. Statistics show that much of the rise in grades occurred in the '80s and has leveled off since then, said Rick Kroc, director of the UA Student Research Office. But saying that grade inflation happened in the past and has stabilized is no justification if grades remain high, Zirkel said. ``It's not as bad as (if it were) happening right now, but in another way it doesn't really matter when it happened. The point is, you've got it now,'' he said. ``The real question is, what are you going to do about it. And it's no excuse to just simply say, `Well, it happened in the '80s and we've sort of solved the problem by leveling it off.' '' Grade inflation levels off naturally anyway, he said. ``Grade inflation has to stop at 4.0,'' he said. ``The fact that 70 percent of (the grades are) A's and B's, well, it's not really to the university's credit . . . because how much higher can it get?''
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``I am surprised that the percentage of C's is not higher when you consider that that is a so-called average grade,'' said Chris Herstam, a Phoenix lobbyist and former legislator recently appointed to the board.
