It’s my first year teaching high school, and I’m handing back 10th grade English papers for the first time. This kid named Benny gets his paper back and rifles through it to check out the grade on the last page. He did OK — got a B. Most of the kids got grades in the B-range. A few did better. A few did worse. It was a distribution of grades familiar to most high school teachers. Benny then asks me, “Can I do a rewrite?” I look him right in the eye, and say, “No.” You see: I can’t let him rewrite it. I can’t let any of the students rewrite their papers. Do you know why? Because they’re likely to produce better papers that deserve higher grades. And I can’t let that happen because I’m more terrified of being accused of grade inflation.
I’m worried that the administration is going to take one look at my grade book, and think I’m a pushover because I give out too many A’s and not enough B’s or C’s. (This actually happened once my first year of teaching. The 9th grade Dean saw my grade book, pointed to a student who received an A and said, “Vanessa is not an A student.” True story.) I desperately want to be seen as a “legit teacher” with high academic standards and integrity. So I say no to Benny because at this point in my career I’m actually more worried about accusations of grade inflation than I am about his learning.
To understand my response to Benny, you need to know that there was a good dose of cultural anxiety about grade inflation when I began teaching high school 10 years ago. Op-Ed pieces in the Washington Post and New York Times were complaining about the rising percentage of students receiving A’s at American colleges and universities.
Educational thinkers and researchers were speculating back then that grade inflation was bad news. Some thought grade inflation was the inevitable impact of consumerism on education. Students were getting more A’s because they insisted on higher grades in exchange for higher tuition payments. Alternately, grade inflation could be the product of increased emphasis on student feedback in teacher evaluation. Teachers eager to solidify their employment status sought to ingratiate themselves with students in an informal exchange for positive results of student feedback on their teaching.
Other educational writers tried to suggest that grade inflation was actually good news because grade inflation could simply be the product of students getting smarter and working harder. It turns out that most subsequent studies have concluded that students are generally demonstrating lower academic achievement than in the past, and spending 13 fewer hours per week in class and on homework than their peers forty years before. It looked like grade inflation was nothing but bad news for an American educational system that some fear is failing to prepare students for an increasingly competitive world.
My story is one way in which grade inflation could be good news. There’s one explanation of grade inflation that few researchers consider, and even fewer take seriously. Grade inflation could be the effect of better teaching — better teaching that can happen precisely when teachers stop worrying about grade inflation, and focus more on helping all students learn and grow as much as possible. What I see now is that my anxiety about grade inflation prevented me from being the best teacher I can be.
Let’s start by thinking about the concept of “grade inflation.” What’s the desired state of affairs that has been inflated?
Well, consider this: In 2004, Princeton University responded to its concerns about grade inflation by encouraging academic departments to limit the percentage of A’s and A-’s its professors handed out to no more than 35% of total grades given to undergraduates. A recent report by an internal committee at Princeton recommended abandoning the policy since it claims it has contributed to undergraduate stress, but let’s think about the deeper assumptions behind Princeton’s idea. Princeton’s policy assumed that in a given population of students, no more than 35% of them would legitimately attain the level of mastery associated with A-level work. One could assume that the majority of the grades would probably be B-level grades, and a few on the lower end would be C-level grades.
Worries about grade inflation often seem to rely on the assumption that the goal of good teaching is to reveal the normal distribution or “bell-curve” of ability that lies latent in any student population. We are thus skeptical that a teacher with integrity and high academic standards would testify that more than a few of his or her students have attained the highest levels of mastery.
But where’d we get this assumption? In the 19th century, the incredibly influential Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet developed his concept of the “average man,” a fictional man that embodies the mean variables of a normal distribution of human traits. Quetelet, for instance, could show how the relationship between crime, gender, age, and employment status followed a normal distribution pattern in society. But Quetelet’s success in explaining certain social phenomena may have spilled over into other fields where it may not belong. For instance, what reason do we have to think that Quetelet’s “social physics” developed almost 200 years ago to explain crime, marriage, or suicide rates should be applied to today’s classroom where the aim is not to measure facts but to cultivate human potential?
Without critical awareness, the bell-curve assumption can have a powerful and I think problematic effect on how we teach. When we assume that educational outcomes should fit the bell-curve with only a minority of students achieving mastery, we tend to teach in a way that will help only a minority of students do exceptional work. Conversely, we’ll leave an equal number of students behind doing unimpressive work, and the majority of our students settling for mediocrity. When teachers have the bell-curve in mind as a mark of their success, they tend to design their lessons so that the majority of students will not have the opportunity to push past their initial limitations. The final irony is that in pursuit of teaching excellence, some of us unwittingly prepare our students not to learn.
Here’s how it worked for me when I worried about grade inflation: My teaching was more about sorting my students according to the bell curve than helping them all attain mastery. The students would write a paper, and I’d grade it with the expectation that I’d see a few A’s, mostly B’s, and a few C’s. I didn’t offer my students the opportunity to rewrite papers on the basis of my feedback because I knew that if they did they’d likely screw up my bell-curve, and the bell curve was the indicator of my legitimacy as a teacher. I passed this off as a kind of rigor — “Hey, I’m a tough teacher!” — but the truth is that I was prioritizing an irrational prejudice regarding the expected distribution of grades over real and sustained opportunities for my students to continue learning and improving their skills.
I don’t mean to suggest that all concerns about grade inflation are silly. We should have rigorous academic standards, and apply them fairly and consistently. But grade inflation isn’t necessarily a sign of the educational apocalypse. It could just be that we’re finding more effective ways to teach each and every kid, and letting them set the limit to their progress — not some dead, Belgian guy. Today I think the purpose of great teaching isn’t to reveal the bell-curve in a classroom, but to shatter it.
So now my students re-write papers and submit test corrections whenever doing so is likely to deepen and reinforce their learning and skill development. And you know what? I give out more A’s than I used to, and a whole lot fewer C’s, but I sleep better because I believe that my grade book is not the product of a loss of integrity or lack of rigor. I’ve just decided to care more about learning than the bell curve. We need to be careful about what we expect to find in any group of people because sometimes that’s all we’ll end up seeing.
