Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities | Hacker News Reader

Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

gradeinflation.com

55 pointsReedx61 comments

I don't live in the US and I didn't go to college in the US, so my experience is largely irrelevant to the topic.

But in my own country (Italy), even though grade inflation is a thing both in high schools and universities, I see something here that is in stark contrast with some statements in the article: italian students definitely study a lot, far more than in the 60s/70s/80s. In those times the university, although useful, was seen "just as a school", and very often students had a part-time job or worked at their parents' small business, learning "to have a real job" and they weren't chasing the best grades all the time, just a degree. On the contrary, nowadays you can meet a lot of students who are fully dedicated to their degrees, and strive for high grades in all classes. The perceived value of university is far higher, and students commit far more to it.

It may be more uncommon to fail an exam; but an high score won't be automatically granted.

That's because it used to be that <30% of high-school students would step foot inside a university, _i.e._ just getting a degree meant you were ahead of the pack and well-employable.

Nowadays, literally anyone can obtain a degree. You've got to have something more to show if you want to stand out. The "more" part is poorly defined by design, of course.

To add even more to this already dismal situation, education fees have gone through the roof to ensure that smart people of low extraction don't get too much leverage against people who are powerful by right of birth.

Education has become an industry just like any other. This decadence makes me extremely sad.

The education fees in Italy are that high?

Fees are rising directly or indirectly everywhere. In some places (Italy) it's just the beginning, in other places (USA) the situation is drawing to its finality: the complete destruction of the social ladder.

That makes "education fees have gone through the roof" not really true.

Ok, interesting opinion.

So compare someone from 30y ago enjoying truly free university attendance with the ability to have a part-time job on the side to a current student attending a low-fee uni that prevents its students from having jobs through presence checks and constant TAs.

Still not true? I agree that the situation outside of the US is much better, though. Just saying we're on the wrong path

See my post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157966

What education fees are you talking about? Everywhere in Europe universities are free with the exception of England.

No. University is not free everywhere in Europe. Fees are relatively low but there is a sustained push to increase them.

Additionally, even low fees are enough to deter the poorest since modern universities prevent you from having a real part-time job.

if you are actually the poorest the only fees in France for instance are 15€ a year (and you get state scholarship every month) - the criterion currently is your parents making less than 33k€). If not it's 300€ a year for university - it's more but not unachievable either when compared to the situation in the US.

Agreed. You also have to factor in that scholarships are far less widespread in Europe, though. The french left wing is quite strong and I doubt the situation is as good in many countries of the EU.

I freely admit that I am not an expert. Just my 2c.

Germany introduced fees a while ago but then rolled them back.

To give you an order of magnitude public University taxes in Italy (it may vary on the specific university and region) are some 160 Euro year fixed + a "contribution" that can be between 0 and up to 3000 Euro per year, they vary on the family income examples:

https://www.unifi.it/p10166.html

https://www.unifi.it/p11206.html

https://www.unifi.it/p11207.html

I would add a few considerations (related to Italy), however.

1) there has been a multiplication of faculties/courses, some of which are almost if not entirely "fluff" (when compared to the "classic" universities/courses).

2) the "initial" bar for entering the job market has been progressively raised (on essentially meaningless metrics such as the UNI career/grades), once (think of the 70's and 80's) there was a lot more jobs and very little amount of graduates, so having a degree was almost the same as having the possibility of a job guaranteed, now that there are so many graduates and so little jobs, having a degree is the very basic requirement[1], the degree grading starts to matter.

3) Additionally to the above, since the graduated cannot easily (or quickly enough) find a proper job, they continue studying and stages and masters are added to the curriculum, and age for a first job increases.

4) It is of course not the fault of the students, often good willing and what not but increasingly we have not-so-young people with a (largely unneeded) theorical knowledge that enter the job market too late and either with too many expectations (because they actually studied hard and for years) or with too little ones (because they "survived" on gig works or were underpaid for years).

About the level of education, there are however some serious problems IMHO (I perfectly know that I sound like an old grumpy bastard, but actually I am an old, grumpy bastard).

In my times there were simple "rules":

1) at the end of elementary school you should be able to make no grammar/spelling error when writing

2) at the end of middle school you should be able to additionally make no grammar/logic error when writing

3) you had all five years in high school to refine on the above two key points

4) when (if) you went to the university grammar, logical construction and more generally properly speaking, reading, understanding and writing in Italian were not a problem anymore.

Nowadays it is not so uncommon that people graduated from the university have difficulties in writing without some spelling errors (particularly accents and apostrophes), and in talking with verb conjugations and pronoums.

[1] There is also an economical - reversed - incentive. There is in practice very little cost difference for a firm between hiring a graduate from university and someone coming from a high school, even technical ones, so, for roughly the same cost (think of a difference for the firm Euro 100-200 more per month) the firm has all the interest in hiring someone which at least on paper has more knowledge and at least in theory is more mature.

There is not a lot of positive incentive for a school to be stringent on its own kids. Unless that school is private (for example), and has people willing to keep standards, think about the long term, and resist the relentless pressure to dumb them down. That's why independent assessment (unpopular as it may be) is the only way to keep it in check.

Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass.

Private schools dont have long term interest in giving worst grades. Both their long term and short term interests are in good grades for graduates. Giving easy reward or "unfair" good grade is less of risk then giving unfair bad grade.

Private schools sometimes give poor grades internally and then have good grades externally.

A friend of mine went to a high school where you got a grade which went on all your interim reports and such.

When it came time for report cards and transcripts, the grade was multiplied by somewhere between 1.06 and 1.2.

> Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools.

It is an obvious conflict of interest for the same entity to be responsible for both training and assessment. I'm surprised how little this is recognized.

> Another idea I've come across (this was in the UK) is that people sitting for oral exams, especially, are examined by professors from other schools. That way there's no pressure for the professors of that student to give an easy pass.

This approach is used for PhD thesis defences, although in that case I believe there's an additional force at play: it's not just that they want an examiner who is external and independent, it's that they want the awarded degree to appear legitimate to the rest of the academic world.

I had the opportunity to be an outside examiner for an honors exam at a private college. It was a fun experience for me; I got to ask probing questions and have them answered by a brilliant young person. I don't know if this was inflationary or not, but I voted to award honors.

I think this reaches down into high school as well.

https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/485787001

So, half the students are A students, but their SAT scores are going down? This sounds like the great fashion psychology trick of labeling large jeans as ‘small’ or larger shirts as ‘slim fit’.

SAT scores have been inflating recently too, actually.

Inflating has an implied value judgement which might not be warranted. Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training. That’s not inflation in the sense that the gains are legitimate rather than making the test easier but it’s probably an example of Goodhart’s law where we’re seeing a focus on maximizing performance on the test itself rather than the broader skills it’s supposed to be a proxy for.

> Because the SAT scores are useful to the applicant, there is a growing industry helping students perform better through practice and training.

Practice and training have negligible effect on SAT scores. The industry exists, but in the same way that fortune tellers exist.

This is too broad a rejection. The prep companies don’t appear to have a huge measured impact, probably on the order of 30-90 points, but it is certainly the case that experience with the format and time pressure is going to help a student, with disproportionate impact on the kids who would otherwise score lower due to those factors.

Remember: this isn’t malicious or cheating. It’s just saying that you get better at things you practice and every kid in the country has an incentive to practice these tests.

> So, half the students are A students, but their SAT scores are going down?

SATs were generally going up for years, there being a year or two when it went down a bit and then climbed again. That article was written at outlier year, basically.

Maybe we should not have grades at all.

Kids bullied and built a hierarchy based on grades. They would cry over simple tests or for a single mark since letter grading. They would ask other kids about it relentlessly comparing and noticing even a difference of 0.001%.

The teachers relied on those numbers to decide your punishment. The opportunities to participate in school events or represent it were determined by an unrelated grade.

The parents relied on grades for parenting. The outsiders taught them how to raise their kid through one of their reports.

Guess what? Grades aren't fair in any way. Not even in higher standards. I was in two schools that asked the teachers to modify the student's answer sheet since they had done nothing to give them passing grades (probably illegal?) and for higher standards, schools wouldn't handout a mark that could make them look bad in addition to board exams.

I did not seen a kid cry over grades nor my kids are reporting schoolmates crying over grades, so I think that there was something special about where you grew up.

I live in India so yes. It's illegal for schools to punish kids physically but it happens in practice frequently. If not school, then parents do it. There is also neighbor and public shaming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships. When I was in college, I had to get a certain grade or I wouldn't be able to afford to go to my college. I wonder if that knowledge ties into how professors grade? The other thing is that it would be interesting to see if the current generation is better test takers. So, even if they don't learn as much or are less literate, they're able to see through the test and answer the expected answer or write what the professor wants to see. Personally, I've grown up taking tons of tests and would argue I'm just a good test taker now. Same with my wife. She was a lot worse of student than I was, but was an amazing test taker. She could pass almost any test put in front of her, even if she didn't study. While I think the article has a lot of good points, I think we also have to bring some different perspectives into the conversation. The author seems to have a single focus as to why this is happening, and I think it would be interesting to see what other people think around this.

> I wonder if this also ties in with tying grades to scholarships

Absolutely. You add a financial incentive to bad behavior and you're going to see more bad behavior. Given the cost of college education in the US, a little bit of grade inflation, class-rank maneuvering, and occasional blatant cheating could save you $10k a year, or more.

I think part of the reason for this inflation involves modern academic faculty rejecting the traditional antiquated assessment-based educational system. In other words, they're of the opinion that "marks don't matter" - what you learn and what you can demonstrate does.

James Paul Gee from Arizona State University put it best when he said:

We take it as completely natural that you would be in an Algebra class for 12 weeks, and then I would give you a test on Algebra …. to see if you learned any Algebra. Let’s say a kid plays Halo on Hard …. and finishes Halo. Would you be tempted to give him a Halo test? No. Not at all. You’d say the game already tested him. So let’s think - Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class.

>We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo better than you trust the design and learning of that Algebra class.

I don't agree with that logic. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that people typically don't care about someone's halo skills the same way an employer might care about algebra skills. If that person wanted to become a professional halo player, they would certainly need to pass some form of test or prove their ability in additional ways.

Seems like a false equivalence. Playing Halo is itself the test. To have beaten the game is to have passed the test. If anything, that metaphor suggests students should be continuously tested to prove competence, and only by "beating" the test can they work on the next lesson. Which may be a good way to handle asynchronous learning, but doesn't work in a cohort.

> Why is it that we’re not tempted to give him a Halo test, but we are tempted to give that Algebra test and use that as a judgement? We’ll its because you actually trust the design and learning of Halo ...

Actually, it is because no one cares about whether the kid finished Halo. The kid could have leave Halo unfinished half way and it would be still same thing. There is no one who would be giving the kid the "proeficient in Halo" degree.

I agree also with other responses, in particular the one about Halo itself being the test. But even if Halo was not a test and allowed cheats, there still the aspect of no one caring whether kid learned Halo or not.

My father taught a freshman chemistry course at Yale for one semester, back in the '40s. Apparently he held the students to a high standard and decided not to grade on a curve. The result was that about half the students failed the course. The Dept. of Chemistry was not happy. That was the end of his teaching career at Yale.

I opened the article had a look at the graphs and closed it again. The y axis of the graph is deliberately chosen to make the effect look stronger and this sort of thing gets an immediate no from me. Yes if you want to highlight a small effect on a large number you can change the yaxis, usually you indicate this by an interruption in the axis. Bit that's not the case here GPAs go from 1 (or 0) to 4 and any significant effect would show on such a scale (it would not look as large however).

The other question is, how where the years chosen, is there a lot of fluctuations year to year?

Bottom line, there might very well be a significant effect, however the presentation sets of all sort of alarm bells.

Maybe the industry could popularize a 'normalized-grade' in applications where it simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school? Is that a bad idea?

If everyone has A, it still leads to A.

If you have a 4.0 but your school's average is a 5.0, your normalized gpa would be a 0.8 vs a 1.0. I didn't mean to imply that the divisions would use graded letters.

If everyone has 5.0, the average is 5.0. With even more pressure, since even smallest downgrade to someone has huge impact.

I did not meant to imply you would average letters, they are just the usual way to express the grade.

I think we have different priors because I definitely didn't have the best grades compared to my peers as a student. And as a teacher at a University my students have a huge range in their scores.

If a C is what the average should be, then the A's would all get normalized to a C.

The algorithm is supposed to be "simply asks for the student's grade divided by the average GPA at their school".

Yours would put students at schools with other good students at disadvantage against those who go to less competitive schools.

The assumption that students in different schools should have the same average is likely wrong.

If you divide by the average score at the school, it assumes professors grade on an absolute scale that matches across universities, that a 4.0 is the same anywhere. Since this is not the case, then there already is built-in bias to the 4.0 at a certain school. At least if it is normalized to a C average, you'd know how a student stands compared to his classmates. You can then scale by the approximate academic rigor of the institution. If you don't remove the DC offset to the grade, then you would need to know both the individual's GPA along with the average GPA anyway to understand the number. This normalizing to a C average saves a step.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out the R-score used by CEGEPs in Quebec. It takes into account how well you did relative to the average, what the standard deviation of that average was (the lower the standard deviation, the more significant your deviation from the average is), and then how strong the group of student that made up that average was (group strength is based on students results from standardized exams taken in grades 10 & 11). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_score

My objection to this is that it assumes cohorts are equivalent.

Also, you have now incentivized zero sum competition within the cohort or finding a weaker cohort to beat.

I think the world is more complex than that, people would still rather go to a good competitive school rather than a school of weak peers. It fosters higher scores and standards in global activities such as standardized tests and national awards, etc. If this wasn't true, bad schools (pre-college) would be much more popular since it is much easier to get a higher GPA.

The idea that the perceived value of something is equal to its actual value is far from reality.

I have met plenty of people that went to top 20 schools that just gave up once they got there yet, still managed to graduate and go to graduate school. I have met plenty of people from my undergrad (definitely not a top 20 school) who were absolutely relentless in their studies and managed to have far more lucrative careers than those slackers who went to top 20 schools.

I mean, I have nearly 3 degrees in EE, CS and Physics.

Physics is usually one of the hardest majors at any university and my homework assignments/tests weren't much different than MIT's homework assignments/tests; sometimes they were a lot easier and sometimes they were on par with their graduate classes. For my lectures where MIT had their OCW version online, they were near identical; the lectures where there wasn't a corresponding OCW lecture, the quality was around the same. Moreover, CS and EE weren't much easier than physics so I can't imagine top 20 universities had much higher quality there either.

(My university also deflated grades to the point where the average GPA was a 2.7 which made it that much more cut-throat (since a 3.0 was the cutoff for many engineering jobs))

(Also, from what I recall, UCSB was much harder to get into than my school yet, they were blacklisted at many engineering companies for having the earned reputation of being a party school; while, at my school, we had those companies consistently come to our career fairs)

If idiots manage to graduate top 20 schools and yet idiots of similar caliber can't graduate from schools that are far below the top 20, their grade inflation is completely unwarranted.

So Chem majors have their grades adjusted according, in part, to the the grades of Ed majors? I don't believe that is an improvement. I rather see that likely to result in grades shooting up as majors seek to beat the curve.

And if we adjust Chem majors according to the grades of Chem majors then small majors, with a high standard deviation, would have greatly different adjustments from year to year (and at my school there are many majors where the numbers of grads in a year is less than 10).

I think you're right in that it wouldn't be as meaningful for a school with departments with only 10 grads, but I think it's unlikely that a department's chair and faculty would care or even consider to mandate their grading to be curved in an effort to raise their student's GPA to compete with other departments. A difficult major is expected to have a lower average GPA than an easy major in any school, that's why latin honor thresholds are different for each department and different majors don't get considered for the same jobs purely on GPA.

No offense, but I can see that you don't work in a college or university, or for that matter have experience with Gresham's Law.

No offense taken, but I'm honestly an Associate Professor at a major research university. But no worries, I respect your viewpoint.

Ah, I see. Give it a few years, then.

As long as having good grades provides advantage outside of school and the school is judged by graduates achievements, there is strong incentive for school to give better grades.

During the draft period (1964-1973?) of the Chiến tranh Việt Nam, I've heard a rationale for grade inflation at the university level was to protect draft deferments.

But that doesn't square with the 50 year trend.

Not a fan of the graphs not starting at zero. Feels disingenuous.

A couple years ago, I was an exchange student in the physics PhD program at $UNIVERSITY on the East Coast and ended up working up as a TA in a physics class for life sciences majors (mostly freshmen), where I was guiding students through their lab experiments and grading their lab reports. Some memories and observations, from a European perspective:

- A third to half of all the lab reports I graded every week sounded as if they had been written by grade schoolers, both syntactically and rhetorically. I, as a non-native speaker, frequently had to correct people's English mistakes.

- I gave elaborate feedback on every single lab report, announced what things I'd like to see them do and what my scoring rubric looked like. All these remarks were largely ignored by at least half of the people time and again.

- The head of the labs, my boss, always urged us, the TAs, to grade fairly and to deduct points where students had clearly messed up. "There must be a difference between the grades of good students and bad students," he said. Unfortunately, his actions spoke louder than his words: He had already assigned each of the lab exercises a certain number of points which left us TAs little room for our own scoring rubric(×). Basically, very easy and low-level exercises (like copying a definition from class) got them already 30-40% of the points and recording measurements correctly gave them another 30-40%. The actual evaluation of the experiments, where the students had to actually do some thinking, was practically optional.

- The course material was high school level. I had learned it back in 9th grade. This is clearly not the students' fault but it speaks volumes about the US high school system.

- There were many students who I would have given an F, had we been at a European university. But I couldn't, due to (×). One of the aforementioned students actually had the audacity to ask me for an A instead of the already very generous B she was going to get.

- I will say that there was a small group of students who were extremely motivated and interested in the stuff I taught, asked questions all the time, took each piece of advise by heart and did extremely well overall.

- Side note: I had previous TA experience and had always gotten very good grades by my students. Judging by their comments, I know how to present and explain things well. So I can say with confidence that it wasn't that I was a bad TA.

- I supervised the mid-term exam and not only were the exam questions very easy and multiple-choice (with every question having precisely one correct answer), students were also allowed to mark multiple answers: Assuming they managed to at least mark the correct answer, marking two answers would give them 0.75 points instead of 1 full point, marking three would give them 0.5 points and marking three (out of five) would still give them 0.25 points. On top of that, towards the end of the two-hour exam when some few students weren't done yet, the professor extended the deadline multiple times so that they could all finish. In short: The exam was designed so that students could pass it and get good grades.

Here's the kicker, though:

Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that practically all other TAs were simply giving their students full points for everything. After talking to some of the TAs, I came to learn that that they had realized in previous semesters that the grades us TAs gave didn't matter at all (as they were going to get "rescaled" by the professor anyway), so why bother and put in so much work? At the same time, though, they encouraged me to speak up about it. So I emailed both my boss (the head of the labs) and the professor multiple times about it. They never responded. All students ended up getting an A for the class.

While I wasn't a TA, we did a lot of peer grading and reading of reports and papers at my college, and I can confirm, there is a lot of stuff where people just turn in complete crap. The number of nights I had to stay up to fix sections on my team's report that someone had written horribly were way more than I ever thought should happen.

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