Grade inflation is all the rage in higher education.
Harvard has a proposal to reduce the number of A’s it awards. A Yale faculty committee proposed that 3.0 should be the mean grade.
But all these solutions suffer from the same problem: zero-sum thinking. That is, for every winner there must be a loser.
Here’s the rub: traditional higher education doesn’t seem to have an obvious set of alternative answers for this problem compared to its K-12 or more innovative counterparts.
Let me explain.
First, the evidence does suggest that there is a grade inflation problem in higher education. Students do less work than in the past, in some cases seem less prepared for higher education than past generations, and yet grades have gone up.
The dominant answer we’ve seen so far from colleges is essentially to curb the number of high grades they give by introducing various forms of grading curves.
But, as some students have observed, that penalizes the student who may have demonstrated mastery of the course concepts, and yet, because of the forced curve, finds themselves on the short end of the stick, as professors must pit the students against each other as a sorting mechanism rather than judge whether students exhibited mastery of the course’s competencies.
The latter is difficult to accomplish. That’s in part because of one aspect of how traditional colleges and universities have often viewed academic freedom: as a license to decide what to teach and how to teach it. The result is that it’s almost impossible to leverage a tool that certain states have in K–12 education or Western Governors University has done in higher education, namely, objective, third-party assessments to judge mastery.
Consider the use of reading proficiency requirements or end-of-course exams, for example, in K–12 schools, which at least some are arguing should return.
Or how Western Governors University operationalizes its competency-based learning model, in which students must exhibit mastery of both “objective,” computer-scored assessments as well as performance assessments graded on a rubric by a separate set of faculty whose sole job is assessment, not teaching.
But for these approaches to work in traditional higher education, there needs to be some agreement or standardization around the course’s objectives, content, and what constitutes mastery—three things for which traditional faculty creating their bespoke courses are unlikely to sign up. The only possibility of changing this with any meaningful scale, perhaps, would be AI-powered assessment—if an AI-powered tool can understand a course’s bespoke objectives and content and design valid and reliable assessments.
In the absence of that, traditional colleges and universities are unlikely to move to a positive-sum world—in which one student’s success doesn’t come at the expense of another’s. Traditional institutions will instead remain stuck in a zero-sum game, caught in a fight between questions of rigor and fairness, with neither approach capturing whether a student has mastered the course material.
