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October 19, 2005

Grade inflation

In tenth grade, one of my teachers told the class a supposedly funny story as he was handing tests back. He told us about a former student who had asked him: "Why did I get such a good grade?" That was the whole story. This teacher couldn't understand how someone could question a good grade. I guess the idea is to keep your mouth shut and not push your luck, even if you think there's been a mistake.

I've been complaining about grade inflation since a few weeks after the start of 11th grade (Norwegian: videregående) when I started getting tests and essays back. I remember thinking: "But I don't even understand this subject. How could I get a top grade? Don't they expect more from me?" I felt like I was banging my head against the ceiling - I had reached the top and I wasn't happy. It's not that I was doing perfectly in everything: I knew I was better in some subjects than in others and that relatively to my best subjects, I was struggling in some areas. But that didn't show up on my report cards. At the end of the school year, I received a top grade in Math - although I hadn't gotten a single top grade on any of the math tests during the year. It just felt wrong, and it seemed to devaluate all my other grades.

Once you have top-grade-status, two nasty side effects come into play:

  1. Some (or all, depending on your school) of your teachers stop helping you. If you have a question, the reaction is equivalent to: "You're getting a good grade for this. What's your problem?" Feedback on the paper you work on for weeks is just the grade, maybe with "Of course" or "Again" in invisible ink. These teachers will never tell you what you need to do to improve, to move on up.
  2. You're expected to keep right on getting top grades. Slip-ups, however minor, seem enormous and alarming. Whether it's teachers saying they're disappointed, competetive peers feigning sympathy, classmates with lower grades going into shock or just you pressuring yourself, once you're a top-grade-student, a less than top grade can feel like the end of the world. Some say this is why students who are great in one subject are sometimes automatically great at others: they're expected to succeed and - through a combination of teachers' subconscious prejudices when grading and the ambition students have once they're at the top - they do. This can be a good thing, but it can also remove all the joy of actually getting the top grades you do work for. An occasional ok grade is a huge disappointment, while every good grade is a relief.

In this article The Economist looks at one Harvard professor's way out of the grade inflation problem. It also explains the problem very well in the last paragraph.

"People who are coddled with unearned A-grades despise the system they are exploiting. Living on a diet of junk grades is like living on a diet of junk food. You swell up out of all decent proportions without ever getting any real nourishment. And you end up in later life regretting your disgusting habits."

I wish the Norwegian school system had an impossible grade, the one they would give Einstein if he had taken Physics class with me last year. There probably is some wisdom in what my friend's French chef teacher said about the French 20-grade system: "20 is for God. 19 is for me. 18 is for you."

Posted by Julie at October 19, 2005 11:27 PM

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Comments

Grade inflation is a huge problem at the university level in Norway: at my faculty (maths/physics), the top grade used to be 1.0, with 4.0 being a failing grade. An average student might get 2.0, an excellent student would get 1.6 and Einstein-like people would get 1.2 or better. The last category would in fact get to meet the King, but as a professor friend of mine said: with everyone getting a straight "A" these days, the Royal Palace in Oslo would be overcrowded.

Posted by: Eirik at October 20, 2005 12:35 PM

With the old scale, there was a very good distinction between the different grades, especially in the amount of work to earn a 2.0 from a 2.5 or even a 2.3.

Today those are equal to a "B", and since the distinction between 40 different grades to only six, the A is higly overinflated - however not discovered by the employers yet....

Posted by: Henrik L. Lindstad at November 6, 2005 12:02 PM