EDUCATION GETTING SCHOOLED.

MAY 14 2014 11:57 AM

Confessions of a Grade Inflator

Between the grubbing and the blubbering, grading fairly is just not worth the
fight.
By Rebecca Schuman

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

I
n the classroom, I can be formidable: I’ve been known to drill-sergeant lethargic students
out of their chairs and demand burpees; I am a master of the I’m Not Mad, I’m Just
Disappointed scowl. And yet, when it comes to assigning an end-of-semester letter value
to their results, I am a grade-A milquetoast. It’s grading time once again, and I’m a softie as
usual: Of my current 33 students, 20 are getting either A’s or A-minuses.
 REBECCA SCHUMAN

R ebe c c a S c human is an e d u c at io n c o lu mn is t f o r Slat e.

And I bet you anything the A-minuses are pissed.

It’s not that I just “give” students good grades. Each course I teach has a meticulous
assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and
for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly
fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in
my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale
now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors
today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.

If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their
level best to ruin my life. Granted, there exist professors whose will to power out-powers grade-
gripers. There are stalwarts who remain impervious to students’ tenacious complaints, which can
be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of
that focus to their coursework. I admire and cherish those professors, but I am not one of them.
You know why? Because otherwise, at the end of every semester, my life would become a 24-
hour brigade of this:

@pankisseskafka Student accused me of causing her to lose her scholarship. Don't think the B+ she

earned is what made her GPA too low.

-- Morgan C. Goldstein (@GoldsteinMorgan) May 9, 2014

Abram Fox Follow

@abramfox

@pankisseskafka 'If I don't pass this intro-level, gen ed-

fulfilling class I'm going to lose my student visa and get
deported'
5:49 PM - 9 May 2014

1 RETWEET 5 FAVORITES
 Liz Lundberg Follow

@readmoar

@pankisseskafka Student demanded I bump B+ to A-,

complained in detail on "anonymous" eval when I didn't,
asked for a rec a week later.
4:54 PM - 9 May 2014

2 RETWEETS 10 FAVORITES

Mícheál Ó Broin Follow

@michaeloburns

@pankisseskafka "I came to almost every class" "I

followed instructions" "I did the readings" "I turned in my
work" (for real)
3:11 PM - 9 May 2014

1 RETWEET 3 FAVORITES

Karen Zgoda Follow

@karenzgoda

@pankisseskafka Student w/ A- threatened to blackmail

me by telling Dean I passed out grading rubric "not part of
adjunct syllabus contract"
4:13 PM - 9 May 2014

2 RETWEETS 4 FAVORITES

Chance McMahon Follow

@chancemcmahon

@pankisseskafka I got a student who wanted me to bump

up a grade on their paper from a B- even though they
plagiarized two wiki articles.
3:13 PM - 9 May 2014

2 RETWEETS 3 FAVORITES
 Alyssa Picard Follow

@ThatPicard

@pankisseskafka Mom called. 'Nuff said.

4:04 PM - 9 May 2014

1 RETWEET 5 FAVORITES

Mícheál Ó Broin Follow

@michaeloburns

@pankisseskafka currently getting bombarded with

emails from students who didn't meet w/ me once this
semester demanding A's.
2:40 PM - 9 May 2014

2 RETWEETS 2 FAVORITES

My time is worth more than said bombardment. Everyone’s is. The other day, a friend of mine
who teaches at a tony private university in the South messaged me in a huff: “I posted my
grades at 10:00, and by 10:04 I had two hysterical complainers. OMG. I hate grades.
#Hampshire,” she pined, wishing to work somewhere like proudly grade-free Hampshire College
in Massachusetts. As she was typing, another complaint came in.

There are many categories of grade-grubber, and none of them are worth dealing with, so I’ve
largely just acceded prematurely to their demands. Take, for example, the student who never
comes to class or turns in any work—then, suddenly, two days before grades are due to the
registrar, he’s sending 2,000-word diatribes:

Lori Lantz Follow

@AmiWiesel

@pankisseskafka Student who never attended class and

wrote "blah blah" as final exam answer wrote 3-page e-
mail about how much he "cared."
7:16 AM - 10 May 2014

4 RETWEETS 8 FAVORITES
Another classic is students who utter the phrase “med school” in conjunction with wanting a
grade they did not earn, as if their inability to churn out an acceptably mediocre lit paper is all
that stands between them and Johns Hopkins. I thought the purpose of easy gen-ed courses
like mine was to weed out the people who should be too dumb for med school, but sure, here’s
your A; now leave me alone (and I weep for your future patients).

My personal favorite was the student who, when I insisted upon ever-so-slightly dinging her
participation grade because of copious absences for “migraines” that never came with a
doctor’s note, seethed: “But I do my reading, and nobody who sits around me ever does!”
Maybe, but at least they’re not tattletales.

Where did students get the gumption to treat a grade as the opening move in a set of
negotiations? As a professor, there is little worse than spending an entire semester attempting
to connect about a subject you find both interesting and important, only to have them ignore
everything you do until the moment their GPA is affected. And then, of course, it’s war.

War, interestingly enough, is also probably to blame for grade inflation in the first place:

Mel Johansson Follow

@H_E_Sarah

@pankisseskafka I have the advantage of age. I tell

students I was in school during Vietnam: guys who
flunked out went to war.
4:06 PM - 9 May 2014

3 RETWEETS 2 FAVORITES

Apparently, it all started with a bunch of bleeding-heart flower profs trying to keep young men
alive. Opinions differ as to why the bell couldn’t be unrung, but 50 years later, add a brutally
competitive job market and the consumer model of higher education, and you’ve got colleges full
of students who rarely see a curvy letter on a report card.

But it doesn’t start in college. Thanks to American K-12’s relentless culture of assessment and
testing, everything our students have done since the age of 5 has been graded—but almost all of
those grades have been “exceptional,” so the exception is now the norm. Now we’ve got high
schools with 34 co-valedictorians—hell, why not just make everyone valedictorian, just for being
alive?—et voila, students enter college having never gotten anything but an A for their entire
lives.
 That’s why it’s no fun to give a “bad” grade (by which I mean, of course, a B); I love my students,
griping aside, and I, unlike them, think grades don’t matter even a little bit. I can’t handle being
the person who causes their young faces to crumple at the sight of that B, or, egad, C, which
they equate with abject failure. I don’t want them to think they failed, and stop trying
altogether. I know there are professors out there who delight in being a student’s first earned C,
but those professors have more intestinal fortitude than I do.

Or at any rate they are probably not adjuncts, whose popularity is the only thing that can keep
them employed. Although exceptions exist, the trend in U.S. higher ed at the moment is
precarious faculty, hired semester to semester or at best year to year, and rehired based almost
solely on student evaluations—which, alas, are themselves often based on how “well” the student is
doing in class. Adjuncts like me regularly admit to grade inflating, simply as a survival measure,
but the consistency of nationwide trends means that even tenured and tenure-track faculty must
be inflating grades, too. After all, a pissed-off student who goes all the way to the dean can
impact their careers as well.

There’s no real solution here, short of a standardized, universal, scorched-Earth approach that
brings back the curve—a real curve, where the average grade really is a C. But I cannot imagine
the millions of parents of co-valedictorians, currently racking up six-figure debt so that their
children can join frats and fall out of things, would stand for that. Some advocate going
#Hampshire and ditching grades altogether, which makes tons of sense for literature courses like
mine, but not so much for math, biology, or engineering—quantifiable subjects with, someday,
lives at stake.

There’s nothing I can do about either the ubiquity of grades’ “importance” or the ubiquity of
their inflation. I attempt, feebly, to change the culture in my own classroom by telling students
that grades mean jack-diddley squat to me; that if they “need” a good grade, they should
concentrate on actually learning (or at least convincingly pretending they want to), and the
grade will fall into place. Sometimes this approach even works—though, obviously, on a scale
from B+ to A, it’s a bit hard to tell.

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