If you were in school back in the middle of the 20th century, you will remember the rigid grading scales. Teachers and professors graded students on how well they’d done. Those who scored from 93 to 100 earned an A; those who scored below 60 earned their F. But in the ’70s and ’80s, things started to get touchy-feely, and students were often given higher grades than they’d earned. The term for that was grade inflation, and it has been going on steadily since then.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Rich Vedder looks at the reasons for grade inflation and its consequences.
He begins:
Higher education is suffering from many woes, and the federal government (and sometimes Donald Trump in particular) often gets much of the blame for them. But one factor that, in my judgment, is ultimately responsible for much contemporary collegiate angst probably cannot be primarily blamed on the feds: the effects of grade inflation.
I would submit that this affliction is the predominant single factor in the precipitous decline in student learning in American colleges and universities.
At many colleges and universities, especially the “elite” ones, A grades are now the norm, and a student almost has to try to get anything lower than a C. A Harvard report recently exposed that university’s grade inflation problem, and it made students upset.
Why has this happened? Vedder says that a main reason is money — unhappy students might leave. He writes, “The early years of grade inflation in the middle of the 20th century occurred when huge enrollment expansion meant that some students couldn’t meet the old standards of performance. Also, increasingly, enrollees were considered revenue-producing customers rather than simply students. Keeping them content and enrolled became more important than their educational gains.”
A very pernicious effect of grade inflation, according to Vedder, is that our colleges graduate lots of students who have tons of debt but little knowledge or skill, which makes them easy marks for socialist politicians like Mamdani.
Vedder concludes: “The premier rationale for going to college is to broaden one’s knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and grade inflation has detracted greatly from that objective.”