If colleges keep handing out meaningless grades, more testing could provide a better measure of what students have learned.
If colleges keep handing out meaningless grades, more testing could provide a better measure of what students have learned.
I n the 2004 Pixar movie The Incredibles, when Dash gets caught once again using his super speed to torment his elementary-school teacher, his mother admonishes him to try to fit in.
“Dad always said our powers are nothing to be ashamed of,” he says. “Our powers made us special.”
“Everyone is special, Dash,” his mother answers.
“Which is another way of saying no one is,” he complains.
Children born the year The Incredibles hit theaters are now graduating from colleges that have strictly adhered to the Mrs. Incredible philosophy. And at America’s top schools, the “everyone is special” ethos has swallowed meritocracy whole.
Recently, a study group at Harvard released a 25-page report detailing the grade inflation occurring at America’s most storied college. According to the report, over 60 percent of the grades handed out to Harvard undergraduates were A’s, up from only 25 percent just two decades ago. The report concluded that the current systems were “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and were “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
Harvard isn’t alone. A study from a couple of years ago showed that nearly 80 percent of the grades given at Yale were in the A range, rendering the grades meaningless. Liberty Vittert, a data science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has said that if she gives students the grade they actually deserve, she is often showered with whining, arguing, and, worse, accusations of bigotry against whatever minority group a particular student belongs to. And not just from the students but from their parents too.
Of course, colleges are supposed to be institutions where knowledge is created and problems are solved; yet many of the most prestigious schools have yet to devise a strategy to appease parents who are angry about their precious child receiving a C+ on a geography exam.
The damage that grade inflation inflicts on students is obvious. Out into the world they go, having unwittingly received a lower-quality education because the standards were lowered. They’re in for a rude awakening when employers don’t want to hire them; when they do get hired, they can’t keep up, and workplaces become less efficient to accommodate them. Grade inflation fosters a sense of entitlement in young people that bleeds into their post-degree lives, leading them to think they can bully their bosses into raises and promotions.
Obviously, getting into an Ivy League school is hardly determined strictly by merit; whether students receive a coveted acceptance letter often depends on how famous they are, whether their parents attended the school, whether they can dribble a basketball, or, in Harvard’s case, whether they are sufficiently non-Asian.
But once they get there, the evidence is mounting that they are learning very little and are being rewarded for it.
“Nearly all faculty expressed serious concern,” Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh wrote in the report. “They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work.”
These faculty members, à la the famous Tim Robinson sketch, were likely wearing hot dog costumes as they sought the identity of the man who crashed the wienermobile. Because it is the very “concerned” faculty members who are responsible for grade inflation.
You might be waiting for me to bemoan the lazy, entitled Gen Z students cruising through schools without any sort of academic rigor. But criticizing young people is America’s second-oldest profession. In 1749, Ben Franklin bemoaned the fact that students, as compared with their predecessors, were not of “equal ability.” In 1993, a Washington Post column famously called Generation X “boring,” counseling people of my age to “grow up, crybabies.”
None of the rampant grade inflation is the students’ fault, no matter how petulantly they might behave when they’ve been given a grade they don’t like. Every kid will take the grade the adults give them. When professors and administrators are intimidated by their students, it is the adults on campus who are both juvenile and delinquent.
The solutions to grade inflation aren’t obvious. No state or (gasp) federal law should reach in and dictate to professors how they decide to grade. One of my college English professors allowed students to answer “Elvis” to one question on every exam and have it marked correct, as he believed “Elvis is the answer to everything.” He was silly but not a criminal.
Nonetheless, if grades are meaningless, there are other ways to show what graduates know.
For instance, colleges could begin implementing exit exams. Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder has proposed a National College Exit Examination (NCEE), which would “examine the student’s basic knowledge in a variety of disciplines — things every college graduate should know.”
On the demand side, businesses could band together and set up some sort of private credentialing exam to discern which college students are likely to succeed as employees. This would create a national pool of job candidates.
Of course, postgraduate programs already have similar credentialing exams to separate the geniuses from the dullards. Potential medical school students take the MCAT, and aspiring lawyers take the LSAT. Other wannabe graduate students take the GRE. These exams don’t necessarily tell us who’s going to be a superior physician or attorney, but they at least signal who took their undergraduate studies seriously.
If grades mean nothing, employers need to get creative, as the incentives for college administrators to inflate students’ grades are all trending in the wrong direction. Many colleges, fueled by a large increase in federal student loans, have gone through building and hiring booms in the past decades, and they need to keep attracting students to pay for their expanding fiefdoms.
America works best as a meritocracy, but what happens when the measures of merit are broken? We’d be looking at an Idiocracy-style future in which airplane pilots need emotional-support dogs, surgeons need operating manuals, and economists are forced to explain tariffs through the timeless art of interpretive dance.