I remember when grade inflation began.  I was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech during the Vietnam War.  In 1969 Congress passed legislation, signed by President Nixon, that stopped students from staying in school indefinitely to avoid the draft, limiting the deferment to four years.  The act required students to have at least a C average, else they could be drafted.  (It also created the draft lottery.  I even remember my draft lottery number—187.)

The public turned from supporting the war to opposing the war around this time.  A number of university professors opposed the war; other faculty members who did not oppose the war did not want the blood of young men on their conscience.  So, many of them refused to give less than a C grade to any student.  The only significant exception was the engineering college, which apparently thought that ignorant engineers could be dangerous to society.  Overall, there was an immediate and statistically significant upward shift in the university’s GPA the next quarter.

As everybody knows, the other major impact on grades is student evaluations.  Universities, striving to objectivize the assessment of instructor performance, have turned to students.  Universities used to employ evaluations by other faculty members—and a few still do—but faculty members are loathe to cut the throats of those who may return the favor.

There are many problems with student evaluations, but I’ll mention only one here.  Instructors can manipulate the system by playing the game and patronizing the students.  I learned this early in my career when I was a member of the Promotion and Tenure Committee two years in a row.  The first year we had a person who regularly attained about 1.5-2.0 on a seven point scale, one being low and seven being high.  When the committee castigated his teaching one year, he came back the following year with 6.5s in all his sections.  The committee learned that he achieved this feat by giving students the exam questions a few days before the exam and offering coffee and donuts during the exams.

Today there is no draft, so the consequences of a bad grade does not carry the weight of yesteryear.  Perhaps it will lead to a lower self-esteem, but self-esteem is overrated.  It only leads to inflated egos.

I have sympathy toward untenured faculty who need to avoid giving promotion and tenure committee members reasons to deny tenure.  But, tenured faculty have no such excuses.  They can and should tell administrators to quit satisfying students’ demands when they involve a decline in educational quality.

This past semester a colleague and I team-taught Introductory Accounting to about 700 students (the number at the beginning of the term).  About 200 students dropped the course.  Of those who stayed, the class achieved a course GPA of 2.2; in other words, the median grade in the class was C+.

We think we avoided grade inflation.  Our teaching evaluations will take a hit, but so what?  The class deserved the grades they obtained and no higher. 

Surely other instructors hold the line as well, but some others do not.  We need as many faculty as possible to quit giving grades out merely because somebody paid tuition.  The way to stop grade inflation is simple—just do it.