Implications

The implications of grade inflation aren’t hard to extrapolate out. While grades as isolated entities seem harmless enough, consider the deteriorating mental fitness of the American student body. Consider that students of essential disciplines, such as engineering and finance, are graduated into the world — at the very least having been done the harm of disinterest in excellence. At the extreme, imagine civil engineers improperly building skyscrapers, or chemists lacking the necessary inspiration to advance photovoltaics? Imagine doctors who lack creative capacities and measured cognition that excellent grades are supposed to be evidence of, or graduate students that aren’t really philosophers, but still soak up university funding — funding taxpayers provide.

That’s not to say that such a future will necessarily be ours, nor that it has to be. But in allowing the trend of grade inflation to continue, we simultaneously mortgage the future and dishonor the past. We compromise the principles on which American excellence has been constructed. To quote Neil deGrasse Tyson on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, “we may as well just slide back to the cave, ’cause that’s where we’re headed”.

The reality of the situation is well-stated by William Abbott, a writer for high education magazine Change: American students “still trust that the professor’s assessment has at least some basis in reality, even as professionals in other fields are trusted to give true assessments to their clients or patients,” and are so deceived in terms of their own abilities and material comprehension. With reading and writing abilities on the decline amongst college graduates, the problems faced by our society amount to more than post-college career problems — what about civic duties such as voting? Legislation can be complicated, and not only in terms of language, so how can we trust a voter to be “informed” when the literacy training that is being provided degrades by the day?

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The blame for grade inflation rests primarily on two parties: the university system, who claim revenue and retention rates as good incentives to make college easier, and American students, who from a young age are bred into expectation of praise. Vaunted individualism has taken a nasty turn in the era of overwhelmingly available post-secondary education, that has caused many students to expect effortless excellence. One research survey even found that 61.4% of undergraduates polled were willing to take a class to get a good grade, as compared with 25.4% who were willing to take a class to learn applicable skills or glean knowledge. Universities respond to this demand, and instructors are left in a tight spot. We’ve engaged in a social contract that will be exceedingly difficult to undo. If students and instructors make an effort to keep each other honest, colleges will respond in kind to maintain the integrity of the bachelor’s degree.