Recently a table from a report on grade inflation at Yale has been circulating on social media. The table shows the number of students earning an A across various programs of study.
As you can see, the results are striking. Even in the apparently most difficult subjects at Yale – economics, mathematics and psychology – over half of all students earn an A grade.
Very quickly, you have three-quarters of students earning A grades in regular subjects like engineering, anthropology and political science.
It then reaches stupid levels with 92% A awards in women’s studies and the history of science. One can only presume that the instructors in these courses disagree with the notion of grading itself.
Personally speaking, after processing the implications of this – i.e., that even at Yale grades are fake – I wondered if this were merely social media data.
This is in fact not the case. The table comes from a report published in the Yale Daily News and authored by Yale Professor Ray Fair, who is Chair of Yale’s Committee on Grading.
Are we dealing with the same issue in Australia? One researcher based at Sydney Business School found something similar.
According to lecturer Abdul Razeed, a distinction is the new credit at Australian universities. Razeed found that in 2011, 30% of students earned a pass and 35% earned a credit. Distinctions were 23% of grades and high distinctions just 8%.
Since then, distinctions have become the most common grade, with 38.5% of students earning them. The high distinction is the second most common at 26%. That’s a 234% HD “grade-flation”.
Many faculty lay the blame on the new MBA class and their enthusiasm for reducing higher learning to performance metrics. One in particular, student satisfaction with their instructors, is difficult for an instructor to score well on while maintaining a standard that is too difficult for a good portion of the students.
In the wake of the report, a couple of academics at Deakin came to the defense of the institutions. Follow the link if you want to find out if it really is possible to argue that the run of better grades means students really have got 234% better.
Feature image courtesy of @amutiomi via Unsplash.
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