Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.
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All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students “showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.
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In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them. It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system.
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But grades don’t just have an important signaling function to the outside world; they are, first and foremost, meant to give students a clear sense of how they’re doing. When excellent, good and poor students get very similar grades, it is hard for students to know whether they are doing excellent, good or poor work.
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By the same logic, grade inflation also punishes students for uneven performance over time. If you are a middling student with few major life challenges and strong mental health, you will wind up with a high GPA. If you are a brilliant student who really struggles during one term because of a family crisis or some mental health problem, your GPA will tank, never to recover. The current grading system favors mediocre kids from stable homes over talented ones from less stable backgrounds.
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The best solution would be to take the simple, if somewhat brutal, step of ending grade inflation. But if that is not in the cards, then it’s time for universities to admit that the emperor has no clothes. The second best option may be to put an end to the whole charade: Universities could make all of their courses pass-fail.
