The Most Common Grade In College: An 'A'

nytimes.com:

Most recently, about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A's, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B's has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A's instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C's, D's and F's. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D's and F's.

Read the whole story: nytimes.com

Comments

[sydneymoon]

07:42 PM on 07/15/2011

"...where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
-Garrison Keillor

[eclipse535]

04:22 PM on 07/15/2011

Everyone is above average.Just ask them.

[Tiger70]

02:18 PM on 07/15/2011

As a Professor Emeritus, I agree that the incredible grade inflation is adversely affecting our universities. Personally, I used to include in my syllabus A (Excellent), B (Above Average), C (Average), D (Below Average), and F (Failing). I did not adhere to the 10% A, 20% B, 40% C, 20% D and 10% F grade distribution and typically was somewhat higher in my grading, but I felt that by including grade designation, I would be sending a warning that the course would be rigorous. Given the importance of student evaluations, the importance of "publish or perish," the importance of obtaining tenure, the importance of keeping a student scholarship, and the importance of just being "liked" by students for many faculty, the fact that 43% of all grades are "As" is not truly surprising. Some students just avoided me because of the concern that they would receive a "poor" grade. Most students preferred the challenge. The sad fact is that those students who truly deserve an "A" are seeing their efforts being unrewarded.

[nbradley07]

01:37 PM on 07/15/2011

This is partly due to how well-prepared many students are nowadays for college. Students that are accepted into competitive institutions are, by and large, very hard-working and intelligent students who are fully deserving of their "A"s. Top-tier schools engaging in "grade deflation" are unnecessarily burdening their future alumni's career prospects by making very intelligent students look merely average.

Another impetus behind this, and perhaps the more troubling problem, is the proliferation of third- and fourth-tier schools aimed at less competitive and less well-prepared students. These schools don't have the professors or resources necessary to develop and maintain high standards. As a result, you end up with many students receiving As where they would barely be passing at a more competitive institution. THESE are the "fake" As that we need to worry about. This phenomenon is a result of two ideas: the mindset that "everyone should go to college" and the introduction of market forces into the higher ed realm. In truth, for colleges to remain competitive AND standards to remain high, some students MUST be rejected. The maintenance of high standards relies on exclusivity, not inclusiveness. As long as colleges and universities continue to proliferate to match "demand" (a concept that is ill-equipped to drive the direction of the realm of higher ed) for degrees, we will see lower and lower standards. The further proliferation of "for-profit" colleges (aka degree mills) is a major problem.

[J R M]

01:04 PM on 07/15/2011

When I was a teaching assistant for senior level mechanical engineering classes our average grade was a B-. We gave very few D's or F's - we had already filtered the failures out of the program. But we didn't give all that many A's.

[SangZe]

11:45 AM on 07/15/2011

In the good ole USA nobody can fail. In fact, if a student is given less than a B, it is cause to fire the professor. Grades have become meaningless jokes.

[raiserSword]

10:58 AM on 07/15/2011

In the engineering schools at least, we suffer through something called grade deflation. In many of my math and science classes, class averages are what most people would call failing. For example, in my differential equations class, the class average on a test was a 30%. Of course, the professor would adjust the grading scale so that the whole class wouldn't fail, but only a small fraction of students got As. However, I learned most in the classes I did not do well in, simply because I had to work harder to keep my head afloat.

[J R M]

01:10 PM on 07/15/2011

In one graduate chemical engineering class I took no A's were granted at all (and anything below a B is failing). The teacher gave ~ 30%+ of the class C's.

Looking back at it, the class: "Chemical Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics" which crammed 2 years of material into one semester, served as the department's "weed-out" class. It was the class that the department used to get rid of the weaker students. It worked.

I was a materials science student, not chemical engineering. That was a very hard class.

[raiserSword]

02:00 PM on 07/15/2011

But was getting less than stellar grades in college worth it? I don't know yet, because I'm still getting shafted lol!

[SBleeder]

10:39 AM on 07/15/2011

Just another sign of our "everyone is awesome" times.

China has to be loving it.

[Kyle Kingma]

01:39 PM on 07/15/2011

In Communist China, grade inflates you.

[JoeyDee2]

02:49 PM on 07/15/2011

We may be something like 17th in science and 25th in Math, but we're first in--confidence! (source: "Waiting for Superman")