AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Harvard University officials recently raised the alarm on grade inflation. A report last month found that more than half of all grades awarded to students were A's. That number has increased by 25% over the past two decades. Some say grades are creeping upwards because students have gotten soft and the standards for academic excellence are lower than they've ever been before. Well, Ian Bogost is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and he says the issue is a whole lot more complicated than simply students having thin skin. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
IAN BOGOST: Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: So can we get into why grades are going up and up and up, starting with the institutional factors that you discuss in your article? Like, why do universities feel incentivized to give students higher and higher grades?
BOGOST: So one reason, especially at schools like Harvard or at WashU, where I teach, is the students have gotten a lot better. It's really hard to get into Harvard. And if it's harder to get in, that means the students are better. Maybe they deserve A's more. That's one reason. Another reason is that the work has changed. We've tried to modernize how the curriculum works, and, you know, assignments are sometimes smaller. Maybe you're doing projects and things that are not different from exams or papers or that sort of thing. There's conditions of academic labor. About three-quarters of faculty all across the country are nontenured, and their employment may be based in part on the evaluations that students give them. So there's an incentive for them to give higher grades 'cause students love getting higher grades.
CHANG: A little bit of old-fashioned bribery?
BOGOST: That's right. There's issues around, you know, anxiety and mental health concerns and universities' desires to address those. And certainly, the performance that - the pressure that students are under is very high. The cost of college has been rising, and that has turned students more into customers, and they say, well, I would like to perform well.
CHANG: Yeah, explain that because you argue that one factor that's playing into all of this is this broader trend of students transitioning from scholars into customers, as you put it...
BOGOST: Yeah.
CHANG: ...At universities. Talk more about that.
BOGOST: Yeah. It started with a desire to make sure that if you came to college and you were spending money, that you were going to graduate, you were going to get something out of the experience. And a whole regime that's sometimes called student success was launched. But as we started competing more and more for students on the intangibles - you know, the nice dorms and the pretty campuses and the facilities and all the rest - the student success expanded and, you know, it started to include wellness and satisfaction and other aspects of kind of lifestyle marketing, almost.
And all of that means that when you're at college and you're spending, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year in some cases, that it's impossible for the situation not to become one that's more customer-like. And faculty have - they've responded. You can't help but think, well, they're paying a lot of money for this, and, you know, I want to grade them hard, or at least fairly, but you also understand that they believe that they're getting something back.
CHANG: Well, let me ask you about your personal experience as a professor. You have taught in the humanities, you have taught in computer science. So you have...
BOGOST: That's right.
CHANG: ...This large range of student-professor relationship experience. And I'm curious what you've noticed in terms of have you seen students' attitudes towards grades shift over the years, over your own academic career?
BOGOST: Right. I've been teaching for more than 20 years now, and I think the biggest general shift I have seen across all of the fields in which I teach is that the students want to know exactly what they need to do to get an A.
CHANG: How will you evaluate me, you know?
BOGOST: That's right.
CHANG: Yeah.
BOGOST: That's right.
CHANG: I mean, I relate to that.
BOGOST: And that's a fair question.
CHANG: Yeah.
BOGOST: It's a fair question, yeah. The problem is that part of the assessment of a student is making them come to the table and figure out what it is that we're asking for. So when I say, I want you to do this assignment, if I have to tell them exactly what to do to perform, then they're missing the opportunity to complete the assignment in the way that I've designed it. I want them to think about the question or the project or the written assignment or even the coding project that I've given them and bring something to the table from their own heads and their own experience.
CHANG: So is grade inflation something that should be resolved and done away with? What do you think?
BOGOST: I think it's more like a symptom of a bigger problem. You know, when the grades are going up, but the level of performance or mastery that the grade is meant to measure is not going up, that does seem like a problem that we should address, but you have to fix all these other conditions that are at work...
CHANG: Yeah.
BOGOST: ...And some of them are really complicated. You know, one that I talk about in this Atlantic piece is the accreditation system. The way that we measure ourselves in order to be able to grant degrees by these regulating organizations, that's also impacted how we grade. You can't, like, unwind that stuff just by giving more B's or something like that.
CHANG: Right.
BOGOST: You have to solve those problems at the place that they happen.
CHANG: So we just kind of throw up our hands and go, oh, well...
BOGOST: No, I mean, we...
CHANG: ...Eighty percent of people are going to get A's now next year (laughter)?
BOGOST: Right, right. I don't think that that's the answer either, but I think the first step toward an answer is recognizing that this sort of idea that either the students are lazy or the professors are soft, that that's - and it's just not true. That's not what's really...
CHANG: Yeah.
BOGOST: ...Happening.
CHANG: Ian Bogost, professor at Washington University in St. Louis, thank you very much for joining us today.
BOGOST: Oh, thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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