Instructors have a responsibility to ensure the integrity of the field to which they are devoted. While right now may be the darkest of times for many disciplines in the humanities and non-vocational studies, especially since many distribution requirements lie in these departments, it is still the purpose of the vanguard of the field to make their work relevant, exciting, and not to compromise as graders simply because a student “needs a class to graduate”.
The fix these professors are in is essential to understanding the trend in grade inflation. As students flood the halls of university campuses nationwide — many in an effort to become more marketable employees — new expectations have developed that put instructors and pupils at odds. A group of students working on a marketing thesis at the University of Ottawa highlight the problem concisely:
Furthermore, professors are pressured by many different actors to meet certain class averages in their lecture rooms. This often results in grade inflation. Problem here? Many of those students who are not ‘made out for university’ achieve decent marks, while putting no work in. University now is what high school was then, to our parents. It is a harsh, expensive reality that we all must accept and plan for. Higher enrollment rates matched with grade inflation trends mean more students acquire the BA, not because we are smarter, but because society, and especially post-secondary institutions, want us to pay the money to earn the ‘hallowed’ distinction.
Complicating the problem, the advent of unregulated sources of information such as RateMyProfessor.com have generated a discourse community that facilitates conversation by those who care little for the gravitas of an education, instead opting for ‘easiness’. So easy professors are praised, and so are recognized by the university as being a ‘good professor’, and the cycle continues. Equally, a ‘difficult’ professor is associated with being a ‘bad’ professor, and so when reviews are conducted by the university, this association can be reflected in more official channels. The quality of education, and of material, are continually compromised by this degenerative cycle. What’s worse, the implications of a compromised education are even more serious, depending on the field.
A cartoon I did for The Santa Clara in September of last year, that I think captures the crux of the problem.
To preserve the integrity of the subject, and of the student’s own view of their academic performance, some professors have begun to make students aware of the grade that is actually earned versus one that is factored into GPA, in the manner of Harvard instructor Harvey Mansfield. He doesn’t believe in the brilliance of every student (by which I think it is fair to say, he doesn’t believe that an ‘A’ is an average grade), so he gives them an official mark that is factored into the GPA, and an unofficial mark representative of the student’s true performance in his class. Ultimately, he states, his students care more about the unofficial mark; they are motivated by approval, in some ways. The advent of grade inflation has obscured approval and excellence, but Mansfield’s policy illustrates one way in which the integrity of the grading system can be maintained without destroying the career beyond college of a university student.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQa-gJ0bEdI