Phony grades, “Counterfeit[ing] execellence”
Are grades inflating and academic quality deflating?
CHRISTINE LEONG STAFF
It’s unfair — surely you deserved a higher grade. Like many students, you’ve probably received a grade lower than you think you deserved. But isn’t it just as unfair to receive a higher-than-deserved grade for your work? Experts have debated whether grade inflation exists in Canadian universities and high schools for decades, but it remains difficult to measure; most of the evidence that grades are getting higher is anecdotal.
“Grade inflation, when it bumps up too closely to the top of the grading scale, undermines the value of the transcript as a piece of information about a student’s work,” noted Bryson Brown, chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Lethbridge. “If inflation undermines the value of the degree, (i.e. if students who really haven’t learned much end up with degrees), then it’s a much bigger threat.”
I'll take an A, please
Robert Runte, of the faculty of education at the University of Lethbridge, developed a report in 2005 outlining the issues related to grade inflation. Runte said grade inflation is often “oversold as an issue” because the grading scale changes over time making comparisons “meaningless.” He also noted “grade compression is the bigger issue.”
“Grade compression is where the actual distribution of grades changes,” explained Runte. “If everybody’s getting Bs and there is no distribution of marks, that’s a problem. It’s unfair to the people who have worked hard and deserves better.”
Yet when it comes to comparing institutions and students based on their average marks, jurisdictions can get competitive and grade inflation may be the outcome.
Brown said that grade inflation in Ontario high schools harms Alberta universities’ performance in the Maclean’s rankings — “our universities have been ‘marked down’ for this despite Alberta students’ standing at the top of national testing results,” Brown said. Entrance grades are worth 11 per cent of a university’s overall Maclean’s ranking.
But no matter the grades students get into universities with, “Whether they get out with a 90 is a different story,” asserted Louis Visentin, president of Brandon University. Visentin said entrance grades do not “have anything to do with quality in a university.”
“Whether they have learned anything is a different story. And how you measure that is questionable,” he added.
To what extent grade inflation even exists to contribute to graduation rates and even retention rates is unknown.
“Universities go out of the way to not make that info available because it’s embarrassing,” said Runte. “The trick is to get your grades as high up as you can so that your school gets the scholarship money but not so high that it becomes obvious you’ve inflated the grades at which point the scholarship downgrades wards your grades from your campus. There’s a lot of jockeying that occurs behind the scene.”
Despite the lack of strong statistical evidence, grade inflation is still a concern.
“I know it exists and it certainly exists in [faculties of] science,” held Visentin.
Causes of grade inflation
Grade inflation has been looked at closely in the United States. Ivy League schools have been suspected of inflating grades after experts looked at the proportion of A’s distributed to students in a 20-year span, according to an article titled “Deflating Grade Inflation” in the National Review online. In 1966, 22 per cent of Harvard students received an A-. In 2005, about half the students in Harvard received an A-.
Students worry that low grades will hinder their academic careers, noted Don Klinger, an assistant professor in the faculty of education at Queen’s University. The result? “Increase[d] pressure to provide grades to students that enable them to be competitive,” he said.
Margaret Winzer of the faculty of education at the University of Lethbridge conducted a literature review on the issue of grade inflation in Canada. The report outlined the possible concerns of maintaining admissions, retention rates, graduation rates, and student achievement.
Instructor workload was also identified as a factor that could contribute to grade inflation.
“When classes are extensively large, or a faculty member has teaching, service and scholarly commitments, the time spent on the evaluation of students’ performance may be compromised,” the report pointed out. According to the U of M accountability webpage, the student-to-faculty ratio at the U of M increased from 16.6 per cent in 2001-02 to 17.4 per cent in 2003-04.
The report noted that the reasons for grade inflation are highly variable, depending on demographics, grading policy and faculty behaviour.
Students can negotiate their way to good grades, the report said — the idea that “the customer is always right has permeated academe.”
There are also departmental differences. “Low grading departments might be inflating grades in order to recruit and retain majors,” the report said.
But Winzer’s report also mentioned that students could simply be better prepared today and the quality of teaching might be improving.
Furthermore, grading practices have changed. Instead of a normal curve distribution, some professors use student input to set grading standards.
The variability of grading standards between institutions is another concern. For instance, the amount of workload spent for the same degree varied significantly between English institutions in the U.K. — between 29 to 45 hours of studying per week for medical and dental students, and 16 to 37 hours a week for language students, according to “The academic experience in British Universities.” The authors reported, however, that the number of hours spent is not necessarily an indicator of quality education.
In the book Petrified Campus, authors Bercuson, Bothwell and Granatstein argued that universities may try to increase accessibility by lowering standards. They also note that cuts in educational funding while trying to accommodate the needs of different students, including those for which English is a second language, adds more burden to the faculty.
“Critics argue that public schools have lowered standards, expect less, and work to allay student anxieties and create interest rather than achievement,” Winzer wrote. “Moreover, a sense of entitlement to good grades begin early with the enhanced expectations of parents and students as a result of grade inflation at the high school level.”
High-school trends
When considering the root of grade inflation in university and high school, many turn to the quality of secondary education. How well highschool students are prepared for post-secondary education is questionable, at best.
“I don’t think many students get any editorial correction on their writing skills anymore. Quite good students can’t tell ‘there’ from ‘their’ . . . Clumsy, space-filling boilerplate is commonplace and students are surprised to find how little I (and other profs) like it,” Brown said.
Critics have argued that students are not prepared for university, especially in terms of English and math skills. As of this fall, the University of Waterloo is only accepting firstyear students who pass an English-language proficiency exam. Simon Fraser University is only accepting students with at least an 80 per cent in grade 12 English and 70 per cent in grade 11 or 12 math.
In Manitoba, grade 12 students take “standards” tests as opposed to the American “standardized” tests to evaluate their academic performance in language arts and mathematics. The material is based on provincial standards that teachers used in the curriculum. Such provincespecific tests are also administered in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia.
“Standardized tests do serve a useful purpose in preventing inappropriate grade inflation in high schools,” commented Runte, who studied these exams in Alberta. “They are very different than the ones made in the United States. In the United States, they are produced by publishers so they may not relate to the curriculum at all.”
Before standard exams took place in Alberta, there were concerns that a school “was deliberately inflating its grades in order to attract students, or to tell parents, ‘[you can] get your kids through university entrance if you send them here,’” added Runte.
But Runte maintained optimistic about high-school students’ aptitude.
“My experience is that students coming in today are at least as well prepared as they used to be,” said Runte.
“Their ability and willingness to do sustained argument is undermined to some extent, but that’s compensated for a much better visual vocabulary than students 20 years ago.”
“Are they better or worse? Well they are different and it’s not necessarily easy to say,” said Runte.
The Learning Assistance Centre (LAC) at the University of Manitoba provides a writing tutor service to help students develop their writing skills.
“Anecdotally, first-year students find the service valuable . . . students simply need to know what’s expected of them in writing an academic paper,” said Anita Ens, a learning specialist at the LAC.
In October 2006, 448 students used the writing tutor service — 167 first-year students, 43 second-year students, and 34 graduate students. This total increased from 189 students in 2004, but Ens noted this could be due to an increased in service hours available.
Runte said that students might not realize that a paper required for one course could be completely different from what is expected in another course. This can contribute to students’ inability to adapt to a university level of education.
“A lot of what they are missing are the metacognitions that aren’t specific to a particular topic,” noted Runte. “A lot of students are missing key ideas that make it difficult for them to succeed in university and nobody is teaching them these key ideas. It doesn’t really fall in the curriculum.”
Possible solutions
There are varying opinions on the effectiveness of standardized tests, the obvious control for grade inflation. But what works in high schools might not work in university.
“In university it is a completely different situation,” maintained Runte. “Standardized exams within universities are sort of antithetical to the way universities run so I am quite against them in that context.”
Runte cautioned that the usefulness of university exams is their relation to the curriculum of a class and major, adding that wellwritten exams, not standardized tests, are the best way to stop inflation.
Currently, standardized exams are not commonly used in Canadian universities except for admission purposes. Standardized admission exams are required to get into professional programs such as law, medicine and dentistry, and some graduate schools in Canada.
“High-quality standardized tests are expensive to produce, hence the presence of large testing companies in the USA whose role is to produce many of the standardized tests used for university programs (LSAT, GRE, MCAT, etc.),” said Don Klinger, a professor of education at Queen’s University. “These tests seem to meet their purposes very well. But there will always be real and/or perceived issues of fairness.”
Measuring grade inflation in Canadian institutions is very difficult, and it appears that many decision-makers, including the ministers of education in some provinces, do not believe grade inflation is a major concern, and that “accessibility and affordability” is of top priority.
But, as Winzer’s report noted, grade inflation harms students most of all.
“Grade inflation is damaging for students. Not only is students’ work today no longer being assessed appropriately but grade inflation disturbs students’ own view of their competence and achievement by promoting a ‘counterfeit excellence.’”
