I just finished about 12 hours of solid grading my students’ final projects. Grading is the bane of all teachers, a grind that must be minimized and finished by any means necessary. It’s also a minefield of problems.
It’s funny to be doing this at a time when the Grade Inflation Debate has flared up once again, thanks to an article in the New York Times that says that ~80% of grades given out at Yale are A or A-. The mean GPA is also 3.7 out of 4.0. The article and the report on which the article was based on attribute this to the pandemic when grading was (I presume since I wasn’t teaching then) simply impossible.
I’m here to say that Yale probably isn’t alone. Often my students freak the fuck out if I give them a B. And if I give them a C, I’m guaranteed an email or an office hour appointment to beg for something higher. (My response is usually: you can do the project over. Which everyone says they will and about half actually do.) Weirdly, Carnegie Mellon doesn’t allow undergraduates to get +s or -s, so a B+ is a B and an A- is an A, which causes more anxiety for them.
When I was in college, way back in the last century, there was the concept of a “Gentleman’s C” where if you attended class and tried even a bit, you got a C and passed. Apparently, this was a tradition for dumb rich kids at Ivy League schools. I contend, at least at prestigious universities, this has been replaced with the “Gentleperson’s B”.
It might be because of the pandemic, but I bet there are many factors at play here. The first is: it is easier for professors to just give a student a B than to give them a C, which in our graduate programs, means they fail the class and have to take it over. You get fewer crying students in your office and fewer emails from their advisors. The second reason is competitive universities have become more competitive over the years. Carnegie Mellon’s undergrad admissions rate is 11%. Most of my students have never gotten a C in their entire lives. Hell, most of them have never gotten a B in their whole lives. The third reason is our old friend college rankings. If students don’t graduate, it hurts your rankings. And rankings have become everything. College administrators' jobs rise and fall by college rankings, as do alumni donations, as do admissions.
My mom once told me that the hard part about competitive schools was getting in, that once you got in, it was really hard to flunk out. I think that’s true to a degree, especially at smaller, private schools. Bigger state schools (UCLA, Michigan, etc.) probably less so because each individual student matters less to its overall percentages and they can quickly fill any open slot.
Now, when I’m grading, all of this recedes in the background, but it is context. If I started to be a hardass and giving my students, even those trying hard, Bs and Cs or worse, there would be consequences. My FCEs (student evaluations) would tank and would put my reappointments and promotions in jeopardy. Administration would start to question if I’m a bad teacher.
Now this is not to say I don’t give Bs and Cs. I absolutely do. Grading design projects is not like grading, say math or science quizzes. There’s no “correct” answer. So you have to use a lot of judgment and discernment. I take a lot of things into account: how much effort was made, did they master the learning objective(s), did they participate if it was a team project, and of course, what the result was: did it follow the good design principles I’ve been trying to distill into them over the course. If they do most of those things, they are going to get a good grade. And most of my students do.
Here’s the honest truth though: although I probably seem like I’d be a hardass, I’m an easy grader. (Although not the easiest grader in my department, who will go unnamed.) Most of the students who go through my classes get at least an A- if they put in some effort. For final projects, it’s very difficult to get below a 90, or a B+. I actually have to adjust the grading scale because I’m such an easy grader. e.g. it takes a 95 to get a straight-up A in my class, which is a few points above most classes.
Is this grade inflation? Possibly. I could grade on a curve and watch as mayhem ensued as the majority of the class gets a B. But I’d prefer not to, so this is how I do it. I know that ultimately, it’s not the grades from my class that are going to get the students jobs after they graduate: it’s the quality of their work. If you fuck around in class and do shitty work, you will find out when no one hires you. Your portfolio will suffer and you can forget about getting a recommendation or industry connection from me.
I often tell my students at the beginning of a course, “Hey, I’m an alumnus of this university too, so I want my diploma to keep being valuable.” Getting a diploma should mean something, and not just that you got into a school and then coasted through doing the bare minimum. Ultimately, you do yourself a disservice if you do. You should learn something. Why pay all this money and time otherwise?