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Several weeks ago I sat looking at my grades for two classes. In one class I knew the material backwards and forwards, while in the other I knew next to nothing. Yet when I looked at my grades for these classes, the one in which I was laughably ignorant had given me the highest marks possible (and here I earned an embarrassingly high ?A+?), while the other subject that I knew so well gave me marks on, well, the lower end of the scale. This left me scratching my head wondering: are grades in higher education really relevant, and are they measuring?anything?
I?ve been out of school for years, so the grade game has taken me some time to get used to. Barely a day goes by without a rabid fellow student asking me what I got on a test or telling me about their graded performance in a class (?Wha?d ya get?? ?I got an ?A?!? ?I got a ?B?!? ?How do you think you did?? ?What?ll you get in the course??). Although I find this intensely annoying, on one hand it?s understandable: graduate school is fairly insular, and we don?t have many common experiences to talk about on a daily basis. Yet on the other hand, the grade game seems to have become a detrimental obsession in which students stress themselves to the point of getting sick.
And it?s not just this school or this degree. A friend of mine broke out in shingles (a reoccurrence of chickenpox in adults often brought on by stress1) while studying for his medical school finals, and the stress from midterms left another friend in law school seeking the rapid relief of anxiety medications. Despite my own desire to dismiss grades, I?ve often worried myself sick over a math or biology test to the point of getting ill afterwards. While test anxiety may seem frivolous in comparison to many other health concerns, it?s worthy of a look considering the thousands of students affected annually.2,3,4
As a starting point in considering this anxiety, it?s important to examine the etiology of this distress and evaluate the relative worth of grading, asking the question of whether or not grades are accurate assessments of student performance. For grades to be accurate assessments of student performance, they should be reliable, unbiased, and consistent over time.
Reliability and the Burden of Proof in Scoring
In order for an assessment to communicate meaning, it needs to reliably measure items with the same characteristics in the same way each time it is used. For example, if we are assessing how tall two people of the same height are, we would expect their measurements to be the same. Yet, reliability in test scoring is often difficult because there is usually subjectivity involved in grading. This is even true in disciplines such as math and science in which there is often a single answer to a problem.
In one study, university chemistry instructors were given a test question to grade in which two different students had provided a correct final answer.5 For the first answer, the student had shown his work but used the wrong equations to arrive at his answer. For the second answer, the student had shown very little work, leaving the methods they used for obtaining their answer to conjecture.
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The results of the study showed that professors tended to give more points to the first scenario if they articulated the belief that the burden of proof was on the student to show explicitly what they had learned, while professors awarding more points to the second scenario tended to project correct thought processes onto students who had not shown their work and/or express a reluctance to take away points unless the student explicitly showed incorrect reasoning (i.e. the burden of proof was on the professor to show the student was wrong).In real life this could lead to the rather odd scenario in which students that knew less but showed their work are rewarded by the first group of professors, while the opposite would be true of the second group.
Adding to the confusion was the observation that the majority of the chemistry professors in this study had placed the burden of proof on the students, while in an earlier study of physics professors had placed burden of proof on themselves the majority of the time.
This indicates the possibility of grading inconsistencies both within and between professors in different disciplines. One way to circumvent this confusion would be for professors to explicitly state their expectation for students to show their work, with an automatic deduction of points if work isn?t shown (regardless of the student?s final answer). However, the question remains as to whether or not professors that articulate their grading policies consistently follow through with them when grading.
Partisanship in Grading
Most students and professors would like to think that their grades in a class are reflective purely of a student?s mastery of the subject and their articulation of this on assignments; however, a recent study published in the American Economic Journal suggests that the political orientation of the professor may have a strong impact on a student?s grade.6
In the study, a professor?s politician affiliation was obtained from voter registration records, with the assumption that those registered as Republican were conservative in their political philosophy and those that registered as Democrats are ideologically liberal (although whether this is actually true is debatable). Because the study assumed that conservatives believe less strongly in government intervention to reduce inequality, the researchers hypothesized that Republican professors would be less egalitarian in the distribution of their grades than Democrats. This hypothesis followed on the heels of an assumed Republican ideology that favors lower taxation and redistribution of wealth, producing a larger segment of very wealthy and very poor individuals. In the same way, a less egalitarian distribution of grades without intervention in the classroom would produce very high and very low grades.
The researchers also associated Democratic ideology with greater attention to assisting traditionally disadvantaged ethnic and racial minority groups compared to their Republican counterparts. Thus, the study hypothesized that relative to Democrats, Republican instructors would award lower grades to individuals from minority groups.
The results of this study showed empirical evidence for both of these hypotheses, with Republican professors providing less egalitarian distributions of grades and lower grades to minorities than Democrats.
With regard to grade distribution, the results were interpreted by the researchers in terms of two possibilities: either as a difference in Republican and Democratic grading policies or as a reflection of student performance. In the first scenario, the difference in grades was assumed to be created by the Republican teacher?s imposition of grading practices that assigned low grades to low-ability students and high grades to high-ability students. In the second scenario, grades were assumed to be reflective of the amount of effort that professors are willing to invest in students of different abilities (i.e. Republican professors were willing to invest less time in improving the performance of low-ability students and were more willing to nurture high-ability students).
Although all student ethnicities/races received lower average marks from Republican professors, the difference was much smaller for white students than for Hispanic or black students, with black students showing much greater grade depreciation under Republican professors. The cause for this ethnic/racial disparity was discussed in terms of the instructor either consciously or subconsciously taking into account the student?s race when grading, or as the result of differential treatment in class that led to different performance. It was also posited that the teaching style of Republicans professors might be less amenable to the learning style of black or Hispanic students. However, although the empirical evidence showed bias, the researchers were careful to note that it was unclear from this study whether Republican professors purposefully discriminated, or whether this was an artifact of other factors.
Grade Inflation Over Time
There?s hardly any need to provide evidence for grade inflation in graduate school, with almost any class showing an average grade somewhere between a ?B+? and an ?A-? (and sometimes as high as a solid ?A?!). Studies have shown that grade inflation has been on the rise in many major universities since the 1990?s, with higher average grades bestowed by private institutions.7
Harvard came under particular scrutiny back in 2001, when The Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy revealed that the majority of the grades given were ?A?s,? making honors classification?relatively easy to achieve.8 In fact, in the spring of 2001 Harvard conferred ?honors? on 91% of the graduating student body.9 This led Harvard to make ?drastic? reforms that currently limit the denotation of ?honors? to a paltry 60% of its graduating class.10 Similar expos?s have been published about other colleges11,12, indicating a high degree of grade inflation across US universities (for Ivy League reference, Yale gave 51% of their class honors in 2001, Princeton 44%, Brown 42%, Dartmouth 40%, and Columbia 25%).13 Whether this is inflation is detrimental to the overall integrity of the grading system is intensely debated14; however there is evidence that the application of inflated grades have been somewhat systematic in response to administrative pressures to confer higher grades for prestige and college rankings.
Adding to grade inflation was the the economic downturn in 2008. In the wake of the financial crash, many universities lost a substantial portion of their funding and began increasing their reliance on temporary and part-time instructors. These ?adjunct instructors? are easy for the schools to replace, and many of them are dismissed if they receive poor evaluations from their students. Thus, in the appropriately titled article, ?A is for ?Adjunct?: Examining Grade Inflation in higher Education,? researchers consistently found that adjunct faculty gave higher grades than full-time faculty; potentially as a way to maintain their jobs (consider the implications of this when choosing your classes?).15
Is It Really Worth Worrying Yourself Sick Over That ?A??
Like many markers of status and stratification in life, grades are about as imaginary and insubstantial as they come. As evidenced in these studies and articles, grades are often unreliable, biased, and inconsistent over time, existing as relatively poor markers of knowledge or mastery. Unfortunately, scholarships, graduate program admission, and even continued attendance at a college often require certain GPA?s and grades. So while many of us need to pragmatically stress over transcript alphabet soup, it?s important to maintain perspective. Your grades do not determine who you are as a person, reflect your intelligence, or describe your value as a human. Or, in the words of my father: ?If you?re happy with yourself before you take a test, you should be just as happy with yourself afterward, because you haven?t changed as a person, and more importantly, no test will ever determine your worth.?
Image courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art
1Mayo Clinic Staff. (2011, September 1). Shingles. Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/shingles/DS00098
2The Huffington Post. (2012, August 27). Most Stressful Colleges: College Rankings 2012 From Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/most-stressful-colleges-college-rankings_n_1832866.html
3Lewin, Tamar. (2011, January 26). Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshman. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/education/27colleges.html?_r=0
4Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. (2011, January). The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010. Retrieved from http://www.heri.ucla.edu/PDFs/pubs/briefs/HERI_ResearchBrief_Norms2010.pdf
5Mutambuki, J., & Fynewever, H. (2012). Comparing Chemistry Faculty Beliefs about Grading with Grading Practices. Journal of Chemical Education, 89(3), 326?334. doi:10.1021/ed1000284
6Bar, T., & Zussman, A. (2012). Partisan Grading. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 4(1), 30?48. doi:10.1257/app.4.1.30
7Hu, S. (2005). Beyond grade inflation: grading problems in higher education. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
8Healy, Patrick. (2001, October 7-8). Matters of Honor: Harvard?s quiet secret: rampant grade inflation. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.hsj.org/modules/ask_a_pro/article.cfm?ArticleId=182
9Ibid.
10Mellander, G. A. (2004, Sep 06). Targeting higher education; grade inflation. The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, 14, 9-9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/219300822?accountid=14667
11Archibold, R. C. (1998, Feb. 18). Just because the grades are up, are Princeton students
smarter? New York Times, A1. ?Retrieved from?http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/nyregion/just-because-the-grades-are-up-are-princeton-students-smarter.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
12Arenson, K. W. (2004, April 18). Is it grade inflation, or are students just smarter? New York
Times, A1. ?Retrieved from?http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/weekinreview/is-it-grade-inflation-or-are-students-just-smarter.html
13Ibid.
14Zimmerman, A. (2002). Reduced Rigor and Grade Inflation Diminish the Quality and Credibility of Higher Education. NACTA Journal. Retrieved from http://www.nactateachers.org/attachments/article/543/Zimmerrman_December_2002_NACTA_Journal-11.pdf
15Sonner, B. S. (2000). A is for ?Adjunct?: Examining Grade Inflation in Higher Education. Journal of Education for Business, 76(1), 5?8. doi:10.1080/08832320009599042
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