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This is the writing (altered
slightly to protect anonymity, but not for grammar) of a student in
English 104, Critical Writing and Argumentation. The same unfortunate
accretion of language persists in sentence after sentence and in a
succession of essays she has submitted. This student was given — and the
word “given” is used pointedly —an A in English as a Second Language 151
and subsequently a B in English 101, the prerequisite for 104.
I teach English and
journalism here and see more of this kind of writing/thinking than I
would like to, and I am often told by students whose writing is not much
different from the example above that he or she received a B or even an
A in the class that came before. This led me to wonder if grade
inflation might be as serious a problem here at Glendale as it
apparently is at other colleges and universities. Newspapers and
professional journals are full of alarming reports of institutions that
have virtually eliminated grades below B, thereby rendering grades
virtually meaningless. Some of them are taking measures to correct the
problem.
Last year Columbia
University raised the bar for the dean’s list when it found that 75
percent of undergraduates made the list. If the honor was to mean
anything, the university reasoned, it would have to raise the GPA from
3.5 to 3.75.
Just last month
Princeton, where more than half the grades were A’s, decided to limit
A’s to 35 percent campus-wide — a move which would still make more than
one-third of the grades A. Harvard has taken a hard look at its 90
percent rate of students graduating with honors. UCLA has reported that
in a sample of 18 colleges and universities, A’s had increased from 22
percent in 1968 to 47 percent in 2002.
Are teachers
getting better? Students getting smarter? Most researchers think neither
to be the case. They think it is purely grade inflation.
In a 1998 op-ed
article headlined “Why Colleges Shower Their Students With A’s,” Brent
Staples of the editorial board of the New York Times said that if
colleges continued to pass out A’s and B’s like party favors “diplomas
will become weaker and more ornamental and the years go by.”
If grade inflation
is a problem in the elite colleges and universities, how does it affect
students and teachers in the provinces, the community colleges that feed
many students into those systems of higher learning?
Young Gee, chair of
Credit ESL, says “I think generally it is a national problem. You read
about it all the time. Glendale is probably no more immune than anyone
else.”
Gee, like other
division chairs, receives printouts of grades every semester. Where he
sees potential problems, he talks to individual teachers.
“We [division
chairs] talk about the need not to inflate grades, to maintain standards
regardless of success rates,” says Roger Bowerman, chair of Social
Sciences. He says he sees people getting too tough, as well as too
lenient. Adjuncts, he says, tend to grade higher “and every year we
advise them not to be too lenient.”
Staples says that
adjuncts are under particular pressure to grade higher because of their
tenuous job security. But both adjuncts and tenured professors tend to
inflate grades “to escape negative evaluations by students” — adjuncts,
to keep their jobs, full-timers to make sure their favorite classes
aren’t cancelled.
While Bowerman says
that adjunct teachers wouldn’t be evaluated for rehire based solely on
the grades they give, he admits that student evaluations can often be
deceptive. In the evaluations, as in the new web sites that anonymously
rate teachers, a teacher who grades hard may be rated harshly for
reasons that cleverly, or not so cleverly, mask the fact that the real
grievance is that the teacher is a hard grader.
The grading
statistics that Glendale College has on file may not prove the case for
grade inflation one way or the other, but they do indicate that grades
on the campus are apparently lower than those at the elite institutions
and have not increased over several years.
If Columbia
reported 75 percent of undergraduates on the dean’s list, Glendale
College for fall of 2003 reports a much more modest 7.8 percent. There
is a slight upward trend over the 12 years reported by Admissions and
Records, but the numbers remain relatively low. With
virtually the same
enrollment in the fall of 1991 and the fall of 2003 (15,765 and 15,877),
848 students, or 5.4 percent, made the dean’s list in 1991, while 1,235,
7.8 percent made it in 2003.
Overall grade
distributions have remained relatively flat over those years, with a
slight dip in the late 1990s. Average grades campus-wide were 2.60 in
1990 and 2.50 in fall of 2003.
While these numbers
are considerably lower than those reported at the elite institutions, it
isn’t clear whether it reflects differences in the quality of students
or instruction, or whether Glendale professors are dramatically less
prone to inflating grades.
Michael Ritterbrown,
recently elected chair of the English division, says that English “has
always been supportive of instructors who grade by the standards.” He
adds that “nobody gets pressured to pass a certain percentage of
students.” As to whether students are passed who shouldn’t be,
Ritterbrown is less certain.
“I’ve been
encouraged to enforce the standards for the classes,” Ritterbrown says.
But does everyone
enforce the standards?
One of the
standards of the English division is that students who pass English 120
should be sufficiently prepared for English 101. And while the success
rate for students who have entered 101 after passing 120 has increased
over the past five years, there seems to be a higher success rate for
students who have taken 101 after successfully completing ESL 151. While
60 percent of students who have passed English 120 subsequently pass
English 101, 63 percent of students who have passed ESL 151 succeed at
English 101. (These are averages over five years; for fall of 2002, the
last numbers available through Institutional Research are 60 percent for
English, 68 percent for ESL.)
While it should be
noted that students enter English 101 in several ways, through test
placement and high school grades, as well as taking ESL 151 or English
120, one upward trend since 1999 is the increased average of grades in
English. While grades in English hovered over the 2.3 mark for much of
the 1990s, in the fall of 2003 the average hit 2.51, converging with the
campus-wide average of 2.50.
Is this a measure
of increased student success?
Success rates, Gee
admits, are hard to measure. “You can’t really predict that you will
succeed in the subsequent class,” the ESL chair says. Other factors come
into play: family situations, work requirements, differences in
instructors.
Yet English
professors and professors in disciplines that require writing provide
troubling anecdotal evidence of students surprisingly ill-prepared to
express themselves in essay form or to respond to written English.
The same student
in English 104 who had “succeeded” so well in preparatory classes also
suffered from serious reading deficiencies. Midway into the semester she
pleaded that she was having difficulty with the reader assigned in the
class. She struggled to understand the essays, both old and new, that
deal with the social and intellectual issues of the ages. One of the
readings was Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v.
Wade.
In class discussion
it became clear that the student had not grasped that Blackmun’s subject
is abortion, yet the justice’s prose is a model for directness and
precision. Blackmun is often remembered for his elegant lament in his
minority opinion on the death penalty: “From this day forward, I no
longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” As is the case with
many Supreme Court opinions, Blackmun, in the Roe decision, presents a
clear premise, followed by concrete examples and references to prior
legal cases, ending with a conclusion reinforcing his premise. In short,
he does what we expect of students in advanced composition classes.
Another student,
this one in English 101, found The Declaration of Independence to be
incomprehensible. He asked if the problem was that it was “old
English,” presumably confusing Jefferson’s language with that of
Beowulf.
This was after a lengthy classroom discussion comparing the original
draft of the founding document to the final draft, in which Jefferson
had deferred to the masterful editing of his elder, Benjamin Franklin.
Yet, here was a
Freshman Composition student who was baffled by such language as “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He
could glean no particular meaning from these words.
In other words,
these are students taking the transfer-level English classes who cannot
comprehend writings that form the foundation of our democracy and that
establish women’s right to choose.
“Numbers do not
lie,” the dictum goes, and the numbers at Glendale College indicate that
overall, and for more than a dozen years in which records exist, we do
not appear to be guilty of wide-spread grade inflation. Clearly, the
steady 6 to 7 percent of students who earn grades averaging 3.5 or
better is far lower than the staggering percentages at the elite
schools. And those 7 percent likely go on to further success at the
colleges and universities to which they transfer.
But that shouldn’t
make us too self-assured. We need to continue to guard against advancing
students to classes beyond their skills, and we need to do all we can to
encourage all students to become better readers and better writers, and
better citizens.
Thanks to Cathy C.
Durham and Edward Karpp of Research and Planning for their invaluable
help in researching this article.
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