Are US colleges awarding more A-scores?

Question

On the June 4, 2021, episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host makes the claim:

In 1960s colleges awarded A's to 15% of the students. Now it is 45% of the students.

I was able to locate some supporting articles, such as timeshighereducation and theboar.org, yet they did not strike me as conclusive.

Is the claim made in the show true?

Is this 45% of all grades are As or 45% of all students earn at least one A? It's a bit ambiguous. — CJR, Jun 11 '21 at 11:39
@CJR The source does not specify this. However, the context is that amount has tripled compared to that of half decade ago. — pinegulf, Jun 11 '21 at 11:40
@pinegulf the 1960s were more than half a century ago, not half a decade :-) — Hulk, Jun 11 '21 at 12:38
I have a suspicion that it's related to the cost of tuition. Maybe not 100%, but when you are looking at repaying a loan, the larger the loan would tend to make you work harder to make it mean something. When 4 years of college in 1969 cost roughly 1 year today (adjusted for inflation), I would think the student has more reason to get good grades to pass. But that's not something I know how to prove. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-cost-college-jumped-incredible-122000732.html — computercarguy, Jun 11 '21 at 18:03
Isn't it self-evident that if you turn higher education into a for-profit industry, all the customers need to "buy" something for their tuition fees, and therefore everybody needs to get an above-average qualification? — alephzero, Jun 12 '21 at 15:32
But what difference does it make? In graduate classes, absolutely nobody gets worse than a B+, but everybody knows and treats a B+ is a failing grade. — user71659, Jun 12 '21 at 19:11
If grades reflect how much a student learns in a course, then your goal (ideally) as a teacher should be to give everyone A's. So maybe, college isn't getting easier but rather teachers are getting better :) — RN_, Jun 13 '21 at 09:02
@user71659 While grade inflation in graduate schools is even worse than it is for undergraduate schools, it hasn't always been that way. Getting a B (not a B+) used to be quite acceptable in grad school classes. On the other hand, a C in a graduate class has long been the equivalent of an F in an undergraduate class. — David Hammen, Jun 13 '21 at 14:04
What's sad is that all those people in earlier generations who worked very, very hard to receive A grades have now lost some of the value of all that hard work. Now that `A` grades are handed out like candy as the most common grade (see CJR's answer below), they have lost much of their value. — RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket, Jun 14 '21 at 08:51
@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket A grade someone in an "earlier generation" has no absolute value in their current life, much less an value relative to grades someone got in a class today. — Azor Ahai -him-, Jun 14 '21 at 19:36
@AzorAhai-him- That's a blanket statement contrary to the obvious. — RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket, Jun 14 '21 at 21:09
@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket Tell me, how is a 50-year-olds A grade in Physics 101 in 1998 lower in value to them now that more people may be getting As in the class 20 years later? — Azor Ahai -him-, Jun 14 '21 at 21:11
@AzorAhai-him- Please stop being nonsensical. Of course a *single* grade isn't usually going to make a noticeable difference. And second of all, a 50-year-old likely would not have taken Physics 101 in 1998. You just earned an F in math. I hope you don't need any to complete your PhD. ;) — RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket, Jun 14 '21 at 21:22
@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket Lol, so I typed a 9 instead of an 8. Please do still try to defend your point. — Azor Ahai -him-, Jun 14 '21 at 21:43
@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket I get Azor's point, and if you don't, I believe you are being willfully ignorant. I am 56 years old. What I got in college has _absolutely_ no bearing or effect on my life now. None. So there is no _loss of value_ to me of the A's I got as compared to A's being given now. I don't compare any value change to what I earned in school as compared to kids today. Do you? Really? — CGCampbell, Jun 25 '21 at 16:34
@CGCampbell Your claim and personal smear are both based on a sample size of 1. You might benefit from a couple refresher courses in the sciences as well as statistics. — RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket, Jun 26 '21 at 00:23

score 51 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '21 at 14:10

51

Well I tracked down the origin of the claim: http://www.gradeinflation.com/

Specifically from [1]:

The authors hypothesize the following to explain these results:

On a national basis, the evolution of grading practices seems to be the result of a gradual abandonment of curve-based grading (Figure 2). Grading practices for private and public schools, which were similar prior to the 1960s, were quite different by the 1980s.

Basically, their theory is that college classes went from assigning grades based on a curve to defining grade achievement requirements at the beginning. That's a reasonably consistent explanation, and I certainly know that many universities require a clear explanation of grading in the course syllabus nowadays.

As always with "research" on the internet, the methods section (at least it exists) will not inspire confidence:

We assembled our data on four-year school grades (grades given in terms of percent A–F for a given semester or academic year) from a variety of sources: books, research articles, random World Wide Web searching of college and university registrar and institutional research office Web sites, personal contacts with school administrators and leaders, and cold solicitations for data from 100 registrar and institutional research offices, selected randomly (20 of the institutions solicited agreed to provide contemporary data as long as the school’s grading practices would not be individually identified in our work).

I would overall rate this as plausible, but the quality of the work is poor enough that I wouldn't say it's true.

answered Jun 11 '21 at 14:10

CJR

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So in other words, it's not really grade inflation. Schools simply dropped the curve that was *deflating* grades. – bta Jun 11 '21 at 22:44
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@bta: Well, isn't that kind of "anti-deflation" a form of inflation? – gspr Jun 12 '21 at 20:23
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It also seems like it's comparing apples to oranges. Grades given on a curve shouldn't be considered equivalent to grades based on specific criteria. – Barmar Jun 13 '21 at 02:32
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@Barmar grades on a curve cant really be considered equivalent across groups either, but thats exactly what school grades are used for…. So its always been comparing apples to oranges. – Moo Jun 13 '21 at 07:17
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@bta: no, but: other important changes in grading occurred, so we cannot reliably conclude grade inflation yes/no/extent from this data alone. (I'm from a culture where curve-based grading was basically never used, and is seen as rather weird and unfair) but we did have an important change in determining the final grades: they used to be the average of a few final exams (Diplom, Vordiplom), whereas now (BSc/MSc) they are the average of a large number of courses from all years. This caused a substantial drop: on average students don't do very well in their first year because they've not yet... – cbeleites unhappy with SX Jun 13 '21 at 12:29
... fully adapted to the change from school to university. It was quite usual for students who'd pass their Vordiplom exams with A (or 1 as the system goes here) to "wake up" after their first year with C or D (3 or 4). But of course an average including such a first year won't be A...) – cbeleites unhappy with SX Jun 13 '21 at 12:35
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@Moo In fact, comparing grades between different schools is unfair. I think I had a B- or C+ average at MIT, but could probably have gotten mostly A's at an "average" college. – Barmar Jun 13 '21 at 16:52
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@cbeleitesunhappywithSX That's why the first semester at MIT is pass/no-record, second semester is ABC/no-record. They know that the transition to such a difficult school is tough, even for the high achieving students who get admitted. – Barmar Jun 13 '21 at 16:56
Thanks for info. Wondering how they were going to implement equity in colleges. "Everyone can be a super! And when everyone’s super. No one will be." – paulj Jun 14 '21 at 11:09
Yes those people sure are going to "implement equity" in colleges by making changes to grading in 1973. – CJR Jun 14 '21 at 13:48
@bta It's an objectively worse system. In the 1960s, if you read a transcript and had a grade A student, you knew you were getting the top 15% of students. Now an A student is average, and you have no way to distinguish top performers from the average. The 'inflated' grades put all the resolution into the tail, so the best you can do now is to use grades to weed out completely useless failures by their degree of uselessness - you've lost all information that separates the high achievers from the pack. – J... Jun 14 '21 at 15:04
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FWIW, the new grading schemes that have replaced curve grading are **rubric-based** and **outcome-based** grading. – Joel Coehoorn Jun 14 '21 at 17:37
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@J... I'd argue the exact opposite. Knowing somebody is in the top 15% is useless unless you know the top 15% *of what*, and nobody is going to have a good idea of that for X program of Y school at Z university, in year ABC. An oil downturn made the GPA req for the chemical engg program at my school go from 3.5 to 2.3 over two years, and ECE do the inverse. Do you really expect somebody to know that a B for a 2017 cohort chem engg student is actually better than an A from a 2019 student? – mbrig Jun 14 '21 at 17:57
@mbrig Agreed that grading to a curve is also poor, but my objection is more that the rubric-based grading has also reduced the difficulty of achieving a good grade so as to ensure that most students are leaving with an A grade. There is no room for exceptional students to differentiate themselves in such a schema. – J... Jun 14 '21 at 19:37
Neat plot. I think it's better plotted as a stacked barchart, then you can also directly read off "percent of B's or better/ C's or better". – smci Jun 14 '21 at 21:14
(asking from a part of Europe where marks are given with numbers, not letters) : Why is "E" never given as a mark ? – Evargalo Jun 15 '21 at 06:06
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@Evargalo The scale is typically >90 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, <60 = F. The "F" stands for "failed", it's only a coincidence that it looks like it's part of the sequence. – bta Jun 15 '21 at 21:55
@J... I think that's less a problem with the grading system and more a problem with standards being lowered. Also, the low resolution of the 4.0 grading system is a big factor. Using a 100 point system would give students much easier ways to stand out. – bta Jun 15 '21 at 22:20
Man, that sharp rise in A's and B's and declines in C's, D's and F's in the mid-to-late-60's to early 70's (vietnam-era draft years) is quite obvious. – CGCampbell Jun 25 '21 at 16:43

score 32 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 18 '21 at 20:03

The title asks a broader question, while the body seems to focus on something more specific. Since CJR's answer seems to have addressed the more specific question, I'll try to address the broader one.

Yes, this is extremely well documented, and the trend has not been at all subtle. A good book on the topic is Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, by Valen Johnson. Grade inflation has been especially pronounced at schools with highly selective admissions and in the humanities and liberal arts. It exists, but is less extreme, in STEM fields and at community colleges and other less selective institutions.

Popov and Bernhardt have collected a lot of data as a function of time. As an example, here are their numbers from Yale for average GPAs:

1960: 2.56
1980: 3.27
2000: 3.48

One could ask whether students are just doing better work these days, so that they deserve the better grades, but actually there is a lot of evidence that they are assigned less reading and writing than in the past, and that their critical thinking skills develop less now than they did in the past. This is discussed in Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, who also demonstrate that the lower outcomes are not just because a broader demographic is going to college.

Johnson did some very clever studies to show that there really is a difference between STEM and non-STEM fields, and also that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between grades and student evaluations of teaching. For STEM/non-STEM, he looked at grades for both STEM majors and non-STEM majors in STEM and non-STEM classes, i.e., closer to or farther from their own specialization. For the cause-and-effect relationship, they devised a ruse in which students were allowed to give online teaching evaluations, then saw their grades, and then were asked to redo the teaching evaluations. They found that students revised their evaluations based on their grades.

A popular theory is that this trend really got going in the US during the Vietnam era, because professors didn't want students to drop out and get drafted. The beginning of the trend also coincided in time with the period when student evaluations of teaching became a thing, so that there was more pressure on instructors to give good grades. Part-time faculty are especially vulnerable to these pressures, and the trend toward teaching as many classes as possible using part-timers dates to roughly the same period. However, as far as I know these cause-and-effect relationships are not objectively documented in any scientific way. Anecdotally, though, the pressure from student evaluations is pretty obvious, though, for anyone who's been on a tenure committee or has been involved in hiring and retention decisions involving part-time faculty.

Prior to the mid 1960s there was nothing wrong with getting a "gentleman's C". Only swots got A's. (Swot is an outdated term. A close modern equivalent is nerd, except swot was even more derogatory than is nerd nowadays.) — David Hammen, Jun 11 '21 at 20:15
@DavidHammen: In my social circles, "nerd" is often a term of endearment, and not derogatory at all... — Kevin, Jun 13 '21 at 07:03
I would imagine that those admitted to YALE were more of a random selection 50 years ago than today. Basically, if you are likely to exit a school with all A's you're "just" another average YALE undergrad. Top schools can demand this kind of non-random selection student body. — Edwin Buck, Jun 13 '21 at 13:33
"a lot of evidence that they are assigned less reading and writing than in the past, and that their critical thinking skills develop less now than they did in the past" This answer would benefit from actually citing this evidence, other referring the reader to a seriously flawed book that costs money. — Onyz, Jun 14 '21 at 14:32
Aren't universities more selective with admissions now than they were decades ago? — Subatomic Tripod, Jun 14 '21 at 14:42

Flydog57 · Answer 3 · 2021-06-14T21:33:48.073

In the early 2000s, Princeton changed their grading policies with the explicit goal of trying to curb grade inflation.

The policy was eventually rolled back after complaints from students that the new policy was unfairly affecting their grad school chances. It's not like Princeton's policy change wasn't well known among other schools.

After an undergrad degree in the late 70s (in Canada, in a department that awarded about 10-15% A-s) and some grad school in the early 80s, I went back and got a US Masters degree in the mid 2010s, right as Princeton reverted the policy. Princeton was definitely a topic of discussion among the profs.

When I jumped back into the higher education game, I was astounded at the distribution of the grades that I was seeing. There appeared to be an expectation among students that they were entitled to an A, or, at the very least a B. That's not the world I did my undergraduate studies in.

Are US colleges awarding more A-scores?

3 Answers3