Is grade inflation a crisis at Duke and at other selective colleges? Former Duke statistics professor Valen Johnson thinks so - and will reveal his evidence in a book to be released April 18.
Titled Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, Johnson's book systematically details grading trends at Duke using historical research as well as data from the Duke Undergraduates Evaluating Teaching survey conducted during the 1998-1999 academic year.
Johnson, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, concludes from the statistics gathered that humanities courses award the highest grades and social sciences courses grade less leniently, while classes in the sciences and mathematics employ the most stringent grading practices. An exception to this rule is economics, a social science, which tends to give grades comparable with the natural sciences, he writes.
When synthesizing the data for his book, Johnson believed that a mathematical approach, rather than a holistic one, would yield clearer results.
"When evaluating grade inflation, it was very important to analyze any data I had quantitatively," Johnson said. "Looking at data qualitatively is also very important but would have been more difficult to compile into a study from which I could draw conclusions."
Chemistry, mathematics, physics and biology proved to have the most severe grading process, while drama, music and literature had the least severe process. Psychology, public policy, political science and English occupied the middle range of the grade continuum.
A crisis, Johnson believes, exists where students manipulate which classes they take in order to maximize their grade point averages. By more students enrolling in courses with leniently grading professors, the overall proportion of high grades awarded increases.
The problem, he continues, also comes from the professors, many of whom give out high grades to boost their enrollments and teacher ratings conducted by their students. Johnson provides data suggesting a strong correlation between the average grades professors give and the ratings their students give them at the end of the semester.
James B. Duke Professor of Economics Allan Kelley has observed that his grades have steadily risen, but does not see it as a problem.
"My grading standards have not decreased. I don't grade on the curve but rather on an absolute scale," Kelley said. "The quality of the students taking my classes has improved, which has pushed up the grades."
Johnson, however, does not concur with this popular reasoning for grade inflation. He believes that if the quality of students is actually improving, then grading standards should naturally rise, as expectations for higher-achieving students increase.
"We shouldn't be judging today's students using standards that are 30 years old," Johnson said.
In the last chapter of Johnson's book, he proposes many possible solutions to reform grade inflation. Chief among these suggestions is constraining course distributions in a similar way that many law and business schools do.
Additionally, Johnson believes that giving students the option of reporting adjusted GPA's with normalized grading would push down grades in the long run since students would pressure faculty to be more careful with the average grades they award. Johnson proposed just such an "academic indexing" system at Duke in the mid-1990s, but the plan was rejected by the Arts and Sciences Council in 1997.
Also, carefully excluding student evaluations of their professors from instructor summaries would cease grading biases that arise from high or low evaluations, he writes. To achieve this, Johnson proposes ignoring the lowest and highest 10 percent or 20 percent of the class since these two groups are the most likely to be grade-biased when evaluating their instructors.
"To right the boat, two things must happen," Johnson writes. "More principled student grading practices must be adopted, and faculty assessment must be more closely linked to student achievement."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.