EDITORS' CORNER
A debate about A-plus grades is happening at Columbia University this spring amid wider concerns about grade inflation, easier course loads, and students graduating without ever having read an entire book at prestigious higher education institutions across the U.S.
Columbia is one of only two Ivy League institutions, the other being Cornell, that gives students higher than a 4.0 for an A-plus grade, The Columbia Spectator reports.
Recently, the School of General Studies had a committee look at ending the 4.33 weight for A-plus grades given to undergraduates, and instead capping weights at 4.0, according to the report. However, nothing has been decided.
What’s more, a 2023 report from the Columbia College Student Council determined that students are “forced to ‘gamify’ their schedules with courses that award A-pluses” in order to have a better chance at graduating with honors, according to the report.
Whether or to what extent grade inflation itself is a problem at the New York university is unknown because Columbia has not published grade statistics in 15 years, the student newspaper reports:
In 2011, a spreadsheet obtained by Spectator showed that at least 8 percent of students in Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science earned straight A’s or A-pluses. In 2008, a faculty forum on grading found that A-range grades increased by 22 percent since 1996.
More recently, a 2023 Columbia College Student Council proposal found that the cutoffs for summa and magna cum laude honors—which Columbia awards to the top 15 percent of the graduating class—have fallen above 4.0, with summa cum laude falling above 4.10. CCSC suggested in the proposal that students were forced to “gamify” their schedules with courses that award A-pluses to be competitive for any Latin honors.
One former administrator believes grade inflation is a big problem at Columbia.
Jonathan Cole, a former provost and dean of faculties, told the Spectator that professors often are “afraid” to give lower grades due to student complaints and low enrollment in their classes.
“The grading system is totally out of control,” Cole said. “The faculty is at least as complicit in this as students and others, because everything over the last two decades has pushed us into this compressed area.”
Professors at other universities also say they feel pressured to give better grades than their students deserve, The College Fix reported earlier this week.
“While there are certainly good and socially responsible reasons for supporting students at risk of failing at public institutions, when the taxpayer is subsidizing the education, I have long seen the pressure put on faculty members not to give a student an F, even if the student deserved it,” University of Utah Professor Hollis Robbins said.
Robbins said faculty are often nudged toward alternatives that keep failing grades off the books.
“Allow the student to ‘withdraw’ from the class instead,” she told The Fix. “Faculty are told repeatedly that the failure of a student is the faculty’s failure.”
Last fall, Harvard’s grade inflation report attracted widespread criticism and, in February, resulted in a faculty committee proposing a 20 percent cap on A grades. The 25-page report from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education found that 60 percent of undergraduate grades are now A’s.
However, there has been pushback from some students, as the Wall Street Journal recently noted. And a faculty vote on the matter, initially slated for earlier this month, was postponed “to at least May to allow for extended discussion,” according to the Harvard Crimson.
Concerns about grade inflation are not limited to the Ivy League. At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, recently released data shows “a 0.15 point increase in the mean grade given in courses across all three of the college’s academic divisions” over the past 20 years, according to student newspaper The Phoenix.
MORE: Some professors say they’re under pressure not to give F’s
