What to Do About Grade Inflation

is there some kind of rate hike we can implement?

quick edit: I realized I had been misusing the phrase “handwringing”! It’s not hand-ringing (obviously, now, in hindsight…)

Over the past few months I’ve read several pieces backing up something I’d noticed anecdotally: grades (in high school and college) are growing ever-higher and that has done nothing to decrease student stress.

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about student mental health and, like most people who encounter young people in the classroom, have been torn between the very real compassion I feel for students in the grip of anxiety and an also very real and growing sense of alarm over the way efforts to address this anxiety are playing out in the classroom and in the nature of relationships between teachers and students.

Earlier this fall, Jessica Grose wrote that teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to hold students accountable (anecdotally: very true) and that this has implications both for student learning and for teacher retention. In particular, she pointed to some national data attempting to quantify the grade inflation many educators have long observed.

And then, yesterday, I read that nearly 80% of grades at Yale are in the A-range. Handwringing over grade inflation at Yale feels a little bit like parody (I mean, really, not that much of a surprise, and also, that certain colleges are so important that their grade distributions merit discussion in national newspapers is also a little eye-roll in my opinion), but one particular part of the Times piece really rang true.

This idea that grades are a currency is both pervasive and insidious. The problem of applying business language and economic terms to learning and the human beings behind desks and at the front of classrooms is a topic for a longer piece (book!), so I’ll leave the general critique of that framework itself for another time, but if we’re accepting the idea that grades are a currency (which I guess, even though it makes me depressed I am because most people who give, receive, and decode grades view them as a currency) then I think this is a really important point:

Many of my students come to college having never received anything lower than an A. They come with the expectation that to do so is to fail and it sets up this very weird paradox whereby receiving feedback about room to grow as a writer, a reader, a thinker is unbearable and where there’s no distinction between truly outstanding work and work that is just fine or even, often, mediocre and half-hearted.

In the past, I’ve written about my dislike of grades and argued for something like Robert Pirsig’s strange experiment in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But increasingly that feels naive, and not just because I’m older and more cynical but because students’ philosophical approach to education has shifted. It’s a few years old now, but I recently finished Jean Twenge’s iGen and was really struck by her research suggesting that the current generation of high school and college students is demonstrably more likely to see education as a means to an end rather than as a worthy pursuit in its own right. It feels like an unsolvable conundrum: if grades are so inflated as to be meaningless and a great source of stress for students and educators, why have them? But, if students are increasingly unlikely to see education as intrinsically valuable, what would eliminating grades do to the depth of discussion, level of inquiry, or even literal attendance in class?