Grades

I’ve been saving this piece on Grade Inflation over the last 50 years until I had a little spare time to dig up some old files. According to a new study:

Over the last 50 years, college grade-point averages have risen about 0.1 points per decade, with private schools fueling the most grade inflation, a recent study finds.

The study, by  Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, uses historical data from 80 four-year colleges and universities. It finds that G.P.A.’s have risen from a national average of 2.52 in the 1950s to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade.

This topic brings together a number of different threads of discussion we’ve been engaged with this semester, including transfer. Equivalence between courses (heck, between instructors) is such a mystery that it’s always bothered around grading time.

The article goes on to say this:

For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s,  grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.

In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more.

It’s hard enough to figure out, with some sense of fairness and accuracy, who has met your standards (and whether that merits a B or a C) and who has exceeded them, without taking into consideration the idea that pervasive bias against community colleges, and maybe city colleges in particular (slowly changing, I think, but still out there) means that there will be a prepositional phrase attached in the case of most students (“Ah, I see she got an A in Chemistry at HWC” instead of just “She got an A in Chemistry” Same for C’s. Sometimes I wonder if a C is really like a Grad School B–essentially an F for institutional evaluative purposes). All of which makes me wonder about grading, its fairness, its purpose, and its goals (in connection with and contrast to my own goals for my students), and I wonder all of these things even as I do it.

There’s more, too, about the relative differences between disciplines (science grades are the lowest, humanities the highest; who knew?). Anyway, all of it got me thinking about grading at HWC and so I wanted to dig up some data from some old reports and compare us to the national averages.

In 1996-1997, the national average GPA for public schools was 2.90 (it was 2.99 for all schools).

In the Spring Big term of 1997 (as old as my data gets), HW numbers were as follows:

There were also 2.8 students who received incompletes, but their final grades can’t be determined from this data so I’m leaving those out, which gives us a nice round 80% number. 80% of our students who made it to the Stat date received a grade. Now, I don’t have the total number of credit hours so I can’t calculate the GPA, but I can calculate an average grade of 2.515.

Compare those numbers to the Fall Big term of 2006 (the Spring term had a weird jump in Incompletes):

There are a few big differences. First, an extra 6400 students. Then, we retained an extra 5.8% through the Stat Date. The percentage of incompletes dropped a little to 1.5%, and an additional 3.8% passed their classes. The average grade rose to 2.877.

The national average for 1996-1997 also went up, rising to 2.97 for public schools and 3.07 for all schools.

So, while it isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, the national public college and universities GPA went up .07, while the average grade earned at HW went up .3, which is about 4x the rate of rise in the national GPA. I don’t have any idea what any of this means, but maybe someone who is smarter than me can say (or at least check my math).

One thing that doesn’t surprise me, actually, is the finding that we are much closer now to the national average. That seems right. We have about six years worth of assessment data (at least two of which were normed nationally to four year schools) and it consistently shows that HW students score about the same as students at four year schools in various areas (critical thinking and informational literacy are a couple), and while I recognize that there are a variety of variables in play, I can say unequivocally, that I am doing things with my classes now that I could not have done successfully with some of the groups I taught in 2000, at least not without failing 90% of them.

Anyway, I think it’s all fascinating. Thought you might, too.