Grade Inflation
What is the current status of grade inflation at Williams? See here for previous discussion. The Record reported 8 years ago that:
The Williams faculty voiced its concern over grade inflation at the College as it passed several motions of a proposal by the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) Subcommittee on Grading, instituting grading targets at the monthly faculty meeting held Feb. 16.
The targets, which range from 3.2 to 3.5 from 100-level to 400-level courses, increasing one tenth of a point per course level, intend to stabilize the mean GPA of the College beginning in Fall 2000 to about 3.3, the mean grade for 1998. The most frequently given grade in 1999 was an A- and the mean grade hovered just above a B+ at 3.34.
“When you take the long view and look from 1960 to 1999, you see overwhelming evidence that grades are moving steadily upward,” Chair of the CEP and James N. Lambert ’39 Professor of Anthropology Michael Brown said.
“The problem is that leaves you no room to move. Grades are so compressed that you start getting into making finer distinctions which are harder and harder to justify at the same time.”
“The so-called ‘Gentleman’s C’ is now the ‘Gentleman’s B+,’” quipped Associate Dean for Student Services and Registrar Charles Toomajian.
Indeed. But where are things now? A Record editor mentioned to me that they had sought the latest data but been rebuffed by the Registrar. True? Unless something has changed, the faculty should have access to this data.
[Professor Colin Adams said] “We passed one of the motions which said that we would distribute information to all the faculty at the end of every semester which told them where they were in relation to other departments, whether their GPAs were above or below the other departments.”
Is this still going on? If so, surely there is at least one faculty member who thinks that this information should be made public to force Williams to do something. Are you that faculty member? If so, my mailing address is David Kane, 30 Washington Street, Newton, MA 02458. Mail the paper to me (or e-mail an electronic version) and I will post it here.
Every year, the College exchanges information with a group of about 20 peer institutions of liberal arts colleges. Recently, Williams ranked second in the list of highest annual GPA. This fact concerns many faculty members.
“If the faculty doesn’t control grade inflation, in 10 to 15 years everyone is going to have a 4.0 or higher and the transcript will be utterly useless,” Brown said. “There will be no distinctions possible because everyone will get the same grade. That is one of the important issues that as grades become compressed, it is more difficult to present the nuances in a picture of a student’s performance at Williams.”
Perhaps Professor Brown could give us an update. I also suspect that faculty like, say, Sam Crane would agree with me that something needs to be done about this.
And, it is fun to go back even further, to 1998 when our own James McAllister was a new professor.
Assistant Professor of Political Science James McAllister said he made it clear to all of his students at the beginning of the semester that it would not pan out that way for them; they could not expect inflated grades. He said he distributed articles on the problem of grade inflation and vowed that he would not participate in the phenomenon.
McAllister commented that his stance against grade inflation was inspired by the grade reports from the Registrar. He saw that he was eleventh out of 44 on a list of classes with the highest mean grades, and began to fear that his classes were crowded because students thought they were easy.
McAllister said he deflated grades by downgrading borderline grades. Last year, he tended to upgrade grades on the border because he was a new professor and uncertain of the standards.
McAllister said he now knows that Williams does not pressure professors to grade high. “Williams is not a grade inflationary school,” he said.
Really? Even 10 years later? Show us the data.
For those of us who hire from Williams, this is a real problem. If a student tells me that she got an A from Sam Crane or James McAllister, then I really want to believe that she is one of their very best students. My guess, however, is that all this A tells me is that she is in the top 1/3, which doesn’t tell me much. When James MacGregor Burns put an A on a transcript 25 or 50 years ago, you knew that it meant something.
Do the grades on a Williams transcript mean anything today?
Fighting Grade Inflation
Although I still haven’t read Peter Siniawer’s ‘97 thesis, grade inflation is an occasional topic at EphBlog. Here is an idea that would make for a(nother) great senior thesis. How different would class ranks be if adjustments were made for different grading standards and talent levels across classes at Williams?
Highest, Highest
Back in the day, completing a senior thesis in economics got you “honors”. The same policy continues, I think. But grade inflation has reared its ugly head even here. In the past, only one of the senior theses won “highest honors,” because, well, only one was the best. There could not, as a matter of definition, be more than one “highest.” I think that this was true in other departments as well. The winner my year was, deservedly, Amy Glass, now a professor at Texas A&M. Yet now the Economics Department hands out highest honors like I-am-so-smart badges on Self-Esteem Day. By my count, there were five awarded in 2005.
How pathetic is that?! I guess it is possible that all five of last years awardees were as smart and hard-working as Amy Glass was 18 years ago, but I doubt it. More likely, we have here just another example of the sort of grade inflation that has infected too much of Williams. Now, to be fair, there has been some progress in fixing things. Latin honors are now awarded to only certain percentages of the class. Registrar Charles Toomajian continues to fight the good fight. Previous discussion here.
Of course, like any type of inflation, giving highest honors out like candy simply deflates the value of the award. When looking at a resume, highest honors from the economics department used to mean something. Now it means much less. And that is a shame. And, as always, the students hurt are among the best. There was one best thesis in the class of 2005, but an outsider will never know which one it was. That student is hurt by a policy which fails to identify the best of the best.
Does anyone know more of the history here? When did the economics department start handing out multiple highest honors? Why did it do so? Although I have had my disputes with, say, Ralph Bradburd, on various topics in the past, I would have counted on him and other seniors members of the department to hold the line. Perhaps the inflation started in other departments and then spread to economics.
Grade Inflation
Princeton began a serious fight against grade inflation a few years ago. The results so far are encouraging.
In 2004-05, the first year under the new policy, A’s (A+, A, A-) accounted for 40.9 percent of grades in undergraduate courses, down from 46.0 percent in 2003-04 and 47.9 in 2002-03. In humanities departments, A’s accounted for 45.5 percent of the grades in undergraduate courses in 2004-05, down from 56.2 percent in 2003-04. In the social sciences, there were 38.4 percent A grades in 2004-05, down from 42.5 percent in the previous year. The natural sciences, at 36.4 percent A’s, essentially held steady. In engineering, the figures were 43.2 percent A’s in 2004-05, 48.0 percent in the previous year.
Basic strategy seems to be to encourage/force individual departments to meet university wide targets. The departments are then left to their own devices as to both how to distribute the limitted number of A’s among introductory and advanced courses and how to encourage/force faculty members to do the right thing.
What does the distribution of grades look like at Williams today? Comments:
1) A lot of grade inflation has occured since the 1980’s. Back in the day, A+’s were virtually unheard of. [By you! -- ed.] It now seems that they are almost common. See this 1998 Record article for background.
2) I am still waiting for Peter Siniawer’s thesis, “When A=average : the origins and economic implications of grade inflation at Williams College and other elite institutions”, to be posted on the College library’s website.
3) Williams has acted on grade inflation recently. The Record reported in 2003 that:
The steady rise in student grade point averages (GPA) observed over decade the past appears to have halted since the implementation of a proposal by the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) in 2000 that encouraged faculty to cap GPAs at set levels for each course level.
At the time the proposal was made, the CEP Subcommittee on Grading reported a significant increase in average grades since 1990 from a 3.19 to a 3.34. This upward trend reflected a trend of grade inflation from the 2.67 average recorded in 1960. Thus, in February 2000 the CEP voted to set a maximum target GPA and disseminate GPA statistics on how each individual department fared in comparison to the targets.
Where can I find the latest statistics?
Too Many A’s
Although Oren Cass ‘05 makes this point in the context of a discussion of tips, I think that it is important independent of that debate.
Stop giving out As. I have little sympathy for a faculty complaining about rushed-through papers when they award those papers good grades. The GPA of a Williams student has been steadily rising. Either the work we’re doing is still OK, or faculty are giving out good grades for bad work. Stop doing that. The worst that will happen is people unserious about working hard will not take your class (which is what Professor Crane wants, isn’t it?).
If the rise of tutorials and the housing lottery are two of the most important changes for the best at Williams over the last 20 years, then surely grade inflation has been one of worst influences. I think that the situation may have actually gotten better, or at least stabilized, in the last few years. Much of the thanks for this goes, I hear, to the unsung work of College Registrar Charles Toomajian, forcing faculty to confront the problem.
But, from Cass’s comment, a lot more should be done. I can understand why an untenured member of the faculty might hesitate to center her grading curve around a B. I have never heard a good justification for senior faculty refusing to do so.
