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Venerable conservative Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield — a notoriously hard grader — famously gave his students two grades: the one they earned for their transcript, and the unofficial one they really earned in his class.
“I decided that it would be good to have one grade for the students as the private grade from me, because I was telling them the truth, and another grade, an ironic grade, sent to the registrar, which would keep them from being punished for taking my course,” he explained earlier this year to Harvard University Press.
Taking a page from this concept, Manhattan Institute policy analyst Neetu Arnold recently authored a report that advocated an “inflation-adjusted GPA” to reform grade inflation problems that plague universities nationwide today.
Under her proposal, campus officials would take the professor’s letter grade, factor in how high or low the class grade average was, and calculate an inflation-adjusted score. The inflation-adjusted GPA would appear next to the traditional GPA on student transcripts.
“A student who earns an A in a course where the median grade is also an A would receive less of a boost than one who earns an A in a tougher course,” Arnold wrote in a June 16 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
“If a student filled his schedule with easy-A classes, his transcript might show a traditional GPA of 4.0 and an adjusted GPA of 2.7. This large difference communicates that the student’s traditional GPA overstates his academic performance.”
It would give employers and graduate school admissions officers a statistic that presents a student’s academic performance “in a way that is not contaminated by grade inflation or student selection into easier courses,” she wrote in her June policy paper.
The idea “creates incentives for both professors and students to support rigorous grading,” she said in an early August email interview with The College Fix.
For students, especially high-ability ones, it would show their A grades mean something, and for faculty, it gives them the freedom to grade fairly and accurately, Arnold wrote in her paper.
Faculty could choose to adjust their grading style or keep it as is, but an “adjusted-GPA system would redirect student and institutional pressure on professors away from lenient grading and toward rigor,” she wrote in the Journal.
Supporters have argued such a system would also encourage students “to explore rigorous, challenging courses without having to worry about the hit to their GPAs,” wrote Johns Hopkins University sociology Professor Andrew Perrin in a letter to the editor.
As for students who prefer the grade-inflation paradigm, “I expect some students who benefitted from easier grading to not be happy with any policy change that effectively curbs grade inflation,” Arnold told The Fix. “But once the norms are in place, these students will adjust.”
The proposal did prompt at least one rebuttal. Higher education expert Hollis Robbins, an English professor and former dean of humanities at the University of Utah, wrote on her Substack that there are larger problems facing colleges and universities.
“I’m against the idea on principle, as someone who wants to keep administrators out of the classroom, but I’m also against it because it ignores the much bigger problem in public higher education, which is lack of quality,” wrote Robbins.
In an email to The College Fix, Robbins expanded on her argument.
“I have made the case in my essays that a substantial percent of undergraduate courses in the U.S. have almost no rigor at all, so until that problem is solved, addressing grade inflation makes no sense,” she said. “Giving someone a C in a non-rigorous course isn’t really helping the student. Let’s raise standards.”
Robbins said reforms using artificial intelligence will overtake this issue soon anyway, noting universities “need to be completely overhauled and redesigned in the AI era” and “most of the knowledge taught in required ‘general education’ courses could be delivered by AI.”
“The state mandate of general education classes results in incompetent teachers,” she told The Fix. “Arnold is proposing a government solution for incompetent teachers without asking the purpose incompetent teachers were hired in the first place. They’re almost all hired to teach lower-level general education courses.”
Robbins also cited the old Florida CLAST test as one way of getting rid of both incompetent teachers and unnecessary, general education courses on a high-school level.
“Students could learn from AI on their own and then take the CLAST — if they pass it they only need to take two and a half years of courses to graduate,” she told The Fix.
Arnold, in a rebuttal, wrote that “working on solutions to grade inflation doesn’t stop anyone from thinking about quality issues.”
