Missing the Marks HOW GRADE INFLATION CHEATS BOTH STUDENTS AND FACULTY by Professor Peter Metcalf I am delighted that the issue of grade inflation is finally getting an airing. I expect that many of my colleagues will respond defensively, and start muttering about academic freedom and bureaucratic interference. I am as jealous as any of them of my independence as a teacher, but I have the opposite reaction. Let me spell out why. From the point of view of undergraduates, professors may seem to hold an awful power. We do, after all, hand out grades that are recorded permanently on your transcripts, grades that may very well have a direct effect on your future career. It may even seem at times that this power is exercised capriciously, and that your instructors need to be placated like some unaccountable pagan gods. I can only say that from our side it looks very different. For most of us, assigning grades is the least pleasant aspect of teaching. Far from enjoying the exercise of power, we agonize over it. We don't want to disadvantage the students who trusted us enough to take our courses, and paid attention, more or less, while we tried to talk about the things that seem important and interesting to us. At the same time, we don't want to cheapen those things by bribing the merest attention with easy grades. So we walk a fine line, constantly fiddling with assignments and grading techniques, and accusing ourselves alternately of being too hard or too soft. Especially in small classes, it can be painful to hand out poor grades to students who made a decent effort but did not do well. When that happens, we try to make ourselves available to go over assignments, and then to emphasize the positive learning experience. After all, to understand why one failed in the past is the surest way to avoid failing in the future. Sometimes, however, our sympathy is strained by a student who appears to be more interested in talking a grade up than in learning anything. I am invariably irritated by the question: Why did you give me a bad grade? The response is always the same: I didn't give you anything; this is the grade you earned. Everyone, in the end, is autodidactic. The other side of the coin is the pleasure I can take in handing out a good grade that means something. In doing that I not only reward effort, but something much less grimly hitched to the Protestant work ethic. I celebrate the enterprise, the ingeniousness, the feistiness, the sheer fun that students at Virginia often display in their work, sometimes in spite of themselves. From our point of view, those are the moments when what is supposed to happen here is happening. Most students would be surprised at the eccentricity and perversity that we will gladly tolerate if we detect a little of that. So now I can make my point: those of my colleagues who do not worry about these things, but solve the dilemma to their own satisfaction by handing out A grades left, right, and center, cheat on the faculty code of honor. Not only do they do a lousy job themselves -- something I can't be worrying about most of the time -- but they actually make my job tougher. They make it that much harder to hand out an honest assessment of C grade work, and that much less satisfying to hand out an A. They stick me with their failure to discriminate, and they cheat the students too. How many of you have had the experience of feeling pleased with yourself for getting a B in a tough course, only to have your satisfaction turn to ashes as a roommate who never did a lick of work gloats about the easy A he or she scored in some carefully selected gut? I applaud Mel Leffler's interest in this issue because it reassures me that someone in the administration knows and cares about the day-to-day business of teaching. That improves my morale. It is also very much in the interests of the College, which is routinely ranked as one of the best educational deals in the country, and in particular as having rigorous academic standards. Would that evaluation survive an inspection of the current statistics on grade distribution? So what should be done? Evidently, the notion of grade quotas has already been suggested and rejected. I personally favor the idea, but it is a trifle Draconian, and there would be problems in applying it. For instance, if in correcting a grading error one student's grade went up, would someone else's have to be retroactively lowered? Aside from enforced quotas, however, there could at least be targets set up for the distribution of grades. I'd find some clear statement about this helpful. We might decide collectively that, in large courses, we expect normally no more than, say, 20% A's, and, say, another 40% B's. For small courses, it would be necessary to aggregate over a couple of years. This would be a start.. Notice that I say "decide collectively." I do not want supervision by SCHEV in Richmond, or even by the President or Provost. That would set me muttering about academic freedom. But I will put my faith -- some faith anyway -- in the good judgment of my colleagues, who do the same work that I do, and deal with the same problems. Already I am subject to their supervision: the College rules do not allow me to teach a new course more than once without having it approved by the Curriculum Committee. They don't tell me what to put in the course, but they will tell me if it looks totally daffy. That brings me to the question of sanctions. If grade quotas are only targets and not enforced, what are we to do with those who ignore them? My answer is first to identify them. I am told, crazy as it sounds, that there are courses at U.Va. with enrollments of a hundred or two hundred who all regularly get A grades. No doubt just about every undergraduate knows exactly which ones they are ­ but the professors do not. Let us expose them. Let us mobilize our most savage tropes. Let us enquire with heavy irony by what miracle these instructors manage to recruit year after year entire cohorts of geniuses. As every anthropologist knows, everywhere, the most common and effective sanction is public ridicule.

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