According to a recent article in the New American Statesman, grade inflation in English universities has reached epic proportions. According to the article, “They have increased the number of undergraduate degrees they award fivefold since 1990, while the proportion of Firsts (the English equivalent of honors) they hand out has quadrupled – from 7 per cent in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2019. “
There are other supporting statistics in the article just as disturbing. The article thoughtfully chews over the question of whether this phenomenon could be due to some miraculous instructional strategies, or unusually sophisticated students, but finally concludes that the cause is what anyone would have expected at the outset: rampant grade inflation.
Surely most readers jumped to that conclusion at the beginning.
The first question for the American reader is, are our universities the same? Quite possibly, I muse, but since studies of the number and types of degrees that are being awarded, and grade point averages of graduates, are not widely known– perhaps studies aren’t even being done — it’s not yet clear.
So I look online. And I find a webpage constructed by academic researcher Stuart Rojstaczer and see that yes, grade inflation is rampant in America too. The difference is, apparently, that while grade inflation in America was covered by the Washington Post back in 2003, not much interest has been brought to the subject by the media since.
And what university tops the list of U.S. grade inflators? If you’re a university type, you won’t be surprised by the answer: Duke.
What should we do? Well, I have an idea. They should give standardized tests to college graduates to verify whether they’re learning things while they’re at the academic county club that is the modern university. Then we could know which university is doing it’s job, which is teaching, and which university it just creating a consumer product, which is now known of as “the college experience.” And if a college isn’t providing ROI — in education circles, that’s Return on Instruction, a big phrase for “students are learning things” then maybe they should rethink the $160,000 plus price tags.
