The War on Grade Inflation

Professor Harvey C. Mansfield: “We should stop giving our students the same grades they used to get in high school.”

Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield is controversial. More than once he's stirred the pot on the issue of grade inflation. You might think of him as the General Patton on the War on Grade Inflation. This is one General who has a pretty good take on the enemy. Perhaps he revels in the nickname students have given him: Harvey C. Minus Mansfield.

As an instructor, I like the boldness with which Dr. Mansfield approaches the issue. It takes guts to award two grades to every student in his classes, one public grade and one private. The first is the student's official course grade, which is sent to the Harvard registrar. That grade is admittedly inflated to match the overall grade distribution at Harvard, which today amounts to one fourth A's and another fourth A-'s. The second grade is an unofficial accounting of each student's relative performance, with the effects of grade inflation removed.

In defense of the two-grade system, Dr. Mansfield writes:

The two-grade device is a way to show my contempt for the present system, yet not punish students who take my course. My intent was to get attention and to provoke some new thinking.

Dr. Mansfield puts his finger on the problem with grade inflation:

Grade inflation compresses all grades at the top, making it difficult to discriminate the best from the very good, the very good from the good, the good from the mediocre. Surely a teacher wants to mark the few best students with a grade that distinguishes them from all the rest in the top quarter, but at Harvard that's not possible.

What does this say about professors who are complicit in grade inflation?

Professors do not say to themselves, "This is what I can require; anything above that enters into excellence." No. With an eye to student course evaluations and confounded by the realization that they have somehow lost authority, professors begin from what they think students expect. American colleges used to set their own expectations. Now, increasingly, they react to student expectations ...

Thus another evil of grade inflation is the loss of faculty morale that it reveals. It signifies that professors care less about their teaching. Anyone who cares a lot about something -- for example, a baseball fan -- is very critical in making judgments about it. Far from the opposite of caring, being critical is the very consequence of caring. It is difficult for students to work hard, or for the professor to get them to work hard, when they know that their chances of getting an A or A- are 50-50. Students today are still motivated to get good grades, but if they do not wish to work hard toward that end, they can always maneuver and bargain.

How did Harvard, and by extension many other American universities, get into such a mess?

Grade inflation has resulted from the emphasis in American education on the notion of self-esteem. According to that therapeutic notion, the purpose of education is to make students feel capable and empowered. So to grade them, or to grade them strictly, is cruel and dehumanizing. Grading creates stress. It encourages competition rather than harmony. It is judgmental.

You might be thinking, "What's so controversial? Here's a professor who would like to implement higher standards. Nothing wrong with that, is there?" Dr. Mansfield isn't content to let sacred cows go unslaughtered. The academic sacred cows of silent acceptance of racial preferences and the damage done by multiculturalism are central to his arguments:

At colleges, self-esteem often goes hand in hand with multiculturalism or sensitivity to people of diverse races and ethnicities -- meaning that professors must avoid offending the identities (still another name for self-esteem) of victimized groups.

I know what that means. It means that despite all the talk about free speech at Harvard, you had better watch what you say. And how you grade.

When I was interviewed by The Boston Globe about my two-grade policy, one cause of grade inflation that I cited provoked a fiercely defensive reaction from the administrators at Harvard. I said that when grade inflation got started, in the late 60's and early 70's, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well.

Dr. Mansfield calls for university leaders to put standards first. He's seeking a political solution to the problem of grade inflation, focused on the politics of university governance. As an economist, I'm in a position to remind Dr. Mansfield that there's another force, more powerful than university politics, that has the potential to contribute toward a solution to the problem. That force is the free market.

Here's my argument in a nutshell. Grade inflation makes it more difficult and costly for employers to sort students by abilities. For example, there are real, significant costs associated with hiring a young engineer of average ability when the job calls for an engineer of exceptional ability. Thus, employers have a preference for hiring graduates of universities where grades correlate closely with the underlying abilities of the students.

Universities that allow rampant grade inflation will, in the long run, see recruiting of their graduates suffer. Additionally, when the best students come to understand that grade inflation diminishes their chances for a job, the students themselves, in partnership with employers, will call for greater realism in grading.

Perhaps Dr. Mansfield should see that employers know about the grade inflation he so passionately writes about by putting copies of his writings about Harvard's grade inflation into the hands of companies that recruit Harvard graduates.

Now, here's the diabolical part of my suggestion. Without student's names attached in order to preserve their privacy, Dr. Mansfield should put those unofficial grades into the hands of recruiters, too, right next to the official grades. I wonder how a company would react when it realizes that the A student that it has been recruiting is really only a C student. Just maybe, he would have an instant ally in his war on grade inflation. Remember, all's fair in love and war!