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Friday, May 13, 2005

TO: Alliance for A’s

FROM: Janice Sidley [for background, type SIDLEY in SEARCH]

SUBJECT: GRADE DEFLATION



Like Y2K, Grade Deflation is one of those catastrophes that might, if we’re lucky and vigilant, fail to come off.

In other words, we hear a lot about certain colleges and universities

1. forcing faculty to analyze their own grading patterns; and/or
2. forcing faculty to limit their A’s to a set percentage of grades.

But, as a sophomore at UC Davis - where various departments are instituting deflationary policies - puts it, ““What is wrong with everyone getting good grades?”

What indeed. Why shouldn’t every American undergraduate, and every American graduate student, receive A’s all the time?




“We don’t want to penalize students,” a sociology professor at Davis assures a reporter from the university newspaper. “But grade inflation makes [grading] meaningless.”

Meaningless? The meaning of grade-inflation is that love is better than hate, cooperation better than competition. The deflationary system, as one student notes, fosters an environment of cutthroat competition in place of mutual support: “Why make students compete against each other? Students should want to help each other. The point of education is to learn.”

As to the “meaning” of deflation -- it sounds to me as though it’s more about perception than reality: “We do not want people to have the assumption that students could get easy A’s in sociology courses,” a soc professor says. “The system is for more campus respectability.”

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Many students only take soc courses because they’re easy. Artificially deflate soc grades and you’ll get a mass migration into psych.



The new grade deflation policy is “just a guideline, not a mandatory system,” a Davis professor assures us. The Alliance’s position is that such policies shouldn’t exist at all, mandatory or optional. We will continue to monitor them wherever they appear.