The Emperor's Good Grades

Every now and then, someone comes along, stands up, and says, "The emperor has no clothes." This courageous naysayer is about to come along in the form of the Duke University faculty; the emperor they are denouncing is the grading system of the academy.

It's pretty common knowledge that grades no longer reflect true student achievement, but rather the increasingly meaningless grading habits of individual professors. Arthur Levine, President of Teachers College at Columbia University, conducted a study a few years ago that proved as much. In 1969, 7% of college students had A or A- averages, whereas 25% had C averages. Today, those numbers are reversed: 26% of students have A or A- averages, and 9% have C averages. This does not reflect ineluctable enlightenment of America's youth.

At Duke, the situation is even worse, with the average GPA approaching A-. To combat this trend, Valen Johnson, a professor of statistics, has proposed a new system of evaluating Duke students. Johnson's proposal allows professors to continue grading on an A through F scale. Grades for each class then go through a statistical model that accounts for the stringency with which the professor assigns them, as well as the past performance levels of other students in the class. Thus, grade cutoffs are standardized over all classes, and one's GPA reflects true performance relative to all the students in one's graduating class.

Some examples may help here. If Joe takes Ec 10 and gets a B+ when the average grade is A-, then his achievement index (AI) would fall. If Sally takes "The Warren Court" and gets a B- when the average grade is C+, her AI would rise. Also, if Bill takes a philosophy seminar with fifteen students of much higher past performance than himself, his AI would not fall if he gets a slightly lower grade than his classmates. Similarly, if Jane outperforms other students in her seminar who have much lower past performances than herself, her AI will not rise.

In the end, the proposal "adjusts for both the grading policies of instructors and the quality of students enrolled in each class," explains Duke Professor of Physics Dan Gauthier. So, it does nothing but inject fairness and objectivity into a system that is patently unfair and subjective, right?

Wrong, according to Duke's student-government president, Takcus Nesbit, who claims that 70% of the student body opposes the reform. Nesbit, supposedly speaking for the students, fears that classes will become more competitive and cutthroat and that Duke students will suffer when it comes to graduate school admissions and job offers. These are the usual arguments for grade inflation, but they do not hold water at Duke or any other school. We hear them often at Harvard, where 80% of us are eligible for honors. Duke should expose this emperor and enact Johnson's proposal, and Harvard should follow suit.

Not only does grade inflation misrepresent one's achievements, it also makes one's academic record arbitrary. As long as we try to average grades that have nothing in common, we punish students who take intense classes with rigorous professors. This, of course, encourages students to forgo such classes, enrolling instead in facile and fatuous offerings. If grades are standardized across the entire college, students will no longer shop for the easiest classes and the most lax graders; rather, they can enroll in the classes that they find the most intellectually engaging.

The expectation that competition will increase under such a system is probably correct. So what? As Gauthier says, "We live in a competitive world." It is salutary to prepare students for what lies ahead of them.

As for the hair-pulling anxiety over lost seats in grad school, forget about it. Academia is a small and very insular community. The admissions committees of grad schools know what a grade at any given school represents. If they know that a school inflates grades, they must turn to other gauges, such as recommendations &emdash; where inflation is even worse. Eventually, as government professor Stephen Peter Rosen points out, admissions committees ultimately use nothing more than word-of-mouth descriptions of a student's ability. Thus, they essentially admit students based on their ability to personally befriend their teachers.

But what of those students who seek a continued career not in the ivory tower, but in the high-rise and high-dollar world of Manhattan? Won't they suffer mercilessly if Harvard "unilaterally disarms" and eliminates grade inflation? Hardly. Given the amount of time recruiters spend here, they should have intimate knowledge of our grading system. For those who are either too obtuse or too unattached to have this knowledge, we can again follow Duke's example and include an explanatory statement on transcripts.

Harvard should have stamped out this problem of grade inflation years ago. Since our administrators couldn't muster the nerve to do so then, maybe they can follow Duke's noble lead now.

Return to the Table of Contents