I've teased and hinted, and now I've finally done it. My original title suggestions were"Grade Inflation and its Discontents" or"Blowback: Grade Inflation, Accreditation, Testing and Academic Freedom." Rick Shenkman doesn't pay much attention to our suggestions, but he does publish our stuff, so we forgive him....

I've been thinking about the connection between student evaluations and grade inflation for some time now. Then came No Child Left Behind, and my department chair and the associate dean both started talking about"student learning assessment." Why have grades, I thought, if they don't actually tell us whether students learn something? But it came up a few times on Tomorrow's Professor, as well, and at that point I had to start taking it seriously [by the way, if you're in academia, particularly grad school or pre-tenure faculty, you should be reading TP; cheapest, easiest way to see trouble coming, as well as very good ideas, there is, and to see academia from a variety of institutional viewpoints]. Then came the accreditation committee visit, and the pieces started to fit together. I started working on an argument linking grade inflation with accreditation agencies' interest in"student learning assessment", and a few other things. It's a little long for an op-ed, but short for an article.

It feels decidedly odd to be arguing some of the samepoints as ThomasReeves, by the way. I think it's more or less the same thing that happens when I watch the Republican Convention. As an historian, I am very sensitive to change, as are social and cultural conservatives. The ability of conservative commentators to note changes and cleavages in society is quite useful, though I find their proposed solutions usually highly objectionable. However, I believe some degrees of change are inevitable, and that the present, though immeasurably better than the past in some ways, is also a compromise, as will be the future; what we need to do is maintain a sense of our core values and continually revise our programs to reflect those values and the changing situation. Conservatives like Reeves are also sensitive to change, but they believe that change is something to resist because, at some point in the relatively recent past, we had it"right" and we should be able to recreate those conditions without compromising with those who did not, in fact, enjoy the benefits of whatever idyllic age is at stake. So, while both Reeves and I believe that grade inflation is an important and troubling issue, that the broadening of the student population is a component of that issue, that ideas like multiculturalism and self-esteem-building are part of the problem, I disagree with Reeves' solutions. I do not believe that multiculturalism, postmodernism, etc, are problems in themselves, but that their misapplication to pedagogy is; I do not believe that the vast majority of state school students are unfit for college, merely that they don't understand the value of it; etc.

One thought which didn't make it into the article is that student evaluations and student learning assessments both assume that learning is a short-term process, that a student can judge at the end of a semester what impact a teacher has had, and that what a student learns over a semester is best evaluated at the end of the semester. [Cliopatriarch Burstein expands on this here] They also assume a sort of separability which is not entirely justified, either: students evaluate teachers in comparison, not in isolation, and students do not take one course at a time (and, by the way, there's no control group, and no attempt to openly discuss evaluation metrics, just a self-referential population making up their own scales). The most effective and realistic forms of assessment are going to be post-graduation tracking, long-term studies, carefully selected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative measures. Those are hard to sell as"immediate solutions" and I tend to agree that we need some short-term measures as well. But the fundamental problem is long-term, systemic, and solvable.

Another thought, inspired by the British article some of the Cliopatriots have been discussing has to do with the role of introductory courses. The article describes grade inflation in this case as a result of the institutional need for students' tuition and fees: not failing students whose work merits it, so that they will continue to enroll and other prospective students won't be scared off. Pure market-driven grade inflation, which I allude to in the article, as a downside of departments taking grade deflation on themselves without institutional support. But, as my wife reminded me when I mentioned it to her, there used to be a tradition of"weeding-out" courses, introductory courses that really did fail significant numbers of students so as to discourage them from pursuing a course of study for which they would be, in the long run, unfit. First-year Chemistry for science majors at my undergraduate instutitution was ranked one of the five hardest undergraduate intros in the country while I was there, and both the department and the students (at least my science major friends) took real pride in that. Now, instead,"retention" is the magical buzzword (along with a companion statistic, the six-year graduation rate) an unalloyed good; it's the collegiate equivalent of"social promotion" I think: not bad in small doses, perhaps, but as a general theory, flawed.