The message does not appear in my inbox every semester or even every year, but it comes often enough. It arrived this past August to remind me of an issue that needs periodic attention. The e-mail in question originates in the AddRan Dean’s office, usually with a suggestion to “do with this as you see fit” or that it is “just for your information.” Since it always includes an attached document, which lists those instructors in our department who have the highest grade distribution averages, I cannot help but see an unwritten subtext that reads “some of your folks are giving way too many `A` grades!” As the chair of a department that employs a significant number of both adjunct faculty and doctoral students, all of whom feel some pressure to get good student evaluations, I perhaps face this issue more than others. As I considered how to address this issue with my colleagues, it occurred to me that rather than try to convince faculty members to adjust their grades, it might be worthwhile to use this as an opportunity to open a larger discussion about what we are trying to accomplish and how we go about it.
In 2011, a book entitled Academically Adrift garnered a good deal of attention from academia and the media. The authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, tracked college student learning and argued that the data indicates that a large percentage of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over the course of their college careers. They also concluded that students who faced more rigorous coursework in their initial years in college tended to demonstrate greater gains in learning, do better in their remaining years, and enjoyed greater success on the job market. The idea that hard work brings benefits is hardly novel. When talking to students, I sometimes compare academic work to physical exercise telling them that if they do a single push up each day they cannot expect to see many results. The same is true of their brains and avoiding challenging courses will not bring the desired results. They need to push themselves and raise their expectations in order to build their upper body strength or their brains. With regard to the latter, faculty members bear a significant responsibility for setting the parameters of the workout. The discussion surrounding this book led me to think of the issue of grade inflation in different terms. Rather than discuss what grades we assign, why not open a discussion about rigor and what we are asking students to do?
Actually, I did both. At the start of the fall semester in meetings with full time faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants I shared the data on grade inflation from the dean’s office (with no names), but then pivoted into an Academically Adrift-inspired call to faculty members to think about the level of rigor in their classes. Students have invested in us, quite heavily in some cases, and it is our responsibility to do our best to give them the opportunity to get a good return on that investment by challenging them to do more, to read more, to write more, and to think more. If Arum and Roksa are correct, then it is crucial to do so in the first two years. We certainly need to be mindful of “holding the line” as some have described attempts to curb grade inflation, but this also provides an opportunity to think more broadly about our expectations and the degree to which we challenge our students. I have no idea what my colleagues thought of my remarks this fall, but I am sure it was more productive than simply telling them “we are giving too many ‘A’ grades!”
This article was written by Peter Worthing, PhD, History and Geography and 2013 Koehler Center Fellow, for the Spring 2013 Issue of Insights Magazine.