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1. Abbott, W. “The Politics of Grade Inflation: A Case Study”. Change, January-February 2008. Print; accessed online. <http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/January-February%202008/full-politics-grade-inflation.html>.
William Abbott presents a number of objections to countering grade inflation. He argues (i) all students can excel, particularly in upper division topics courses; (ii) grade inflation reduction policies compromise academic freedoms of professors; (iii) grade inflation reduction policies cripple chances at post-college careers. He details his own fight with Fairfield University to instate policies that would adjust academic transcripts to reflect the average grade in every course, and to make these grades available to the university registrar at the end of every semester.
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2. Babcock, P. and M. Marks. “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence From Half a Century of Time Data Use”. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 15954. April 2010. Web. Accessed October 2012. <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15954>.
An investigation of a downward trend in total hours spent on college coursework, including class and homework hours. The conclusion is reached that there is no one specific educational factor contributing to the decline, which is documented from 1961 (average 40 hours/week) on to 2003 (average 27 hours/week). Babcock and Marks argue that there has been an extremely general change in “human capital production on college campuses”.
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3. Foderaro, L. “Type-A-Plus Students Chafe at Grade Deflation”. New York Times. January 2010. Web. Accessed October 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html>.
A news story covering student reactions to the grade deflation policy enacted at Princeton (<35% of all undergraduate course grades are to be A+ / A / A-). Princeton is the first school to do this, and has received both praise and criticism for doing so.
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4. Miley, W. and S. Gonsalves. “Grade Expectations: Redux”. College Student Journal Vol.38 (3). 2004.
A survey of students in upper-division psychology classes, with primary result being that a vast majority of students preferred grades as a measure of progress, rather than mastery of new material. Subsequently, these students preferred courses in which the promise of a good grade could be made easily.
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5. Rampell, C. “A History of College Grade Inflation”. New York Times Economix Blog. July 2011. Web. Accessed October 2012. <http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/>.
A brief account of the change in grade distribution over time, including a cursory comparison between private and public school grade inflation. An argument is constructed using data, concluding that the “disturbing” potential effects on the academic environment — abandoned excellence and an inability for graduate schools to gauge good, mediocre, and bad students by their grades — endangers our human capital.
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6. Rojstaczer, S. and C. Healy. “Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009”. Teachers College Record Vol. 114 (7), 2012. Web. Accessed October 2012. <http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2011grading.pdf>
Stuart Rojstaczer is a leading critic of grade inflation in the United States. This article concerns itself with data analytics and graphics, but also provides some useful conclusions on the future valuation of American college degrees.
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7. Singleton Jr., R. and E. R. Smith. “Does Grade Inflation Decrease the Reliability of Grades?” Journal of Educational Measurement Vol 15 (1), 1978. Print.
The article entails a brief statistical analysis of the same trend identified by Rojstaczer over a shorter period of time. The authors note that two qualitative conclusions can be drawn: firstly, that the ‘B’ had replaced the ‘C’ as an average grade, and secondly, that students with the same GPA in 1966 were “almost certainly better students” than those with the same GPA in 1976.
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