Pomona students have many advantages that their predecessors
didn’t have a few decades ago. Among the recent additions
to campus life are the new Smith Campus Center, T-3 Ethernet
sockets in every dorm, and a turbocharged GPA. According to
statistics released by the Pomona administration, 52 percent
of all grades awarded at Pomona college are now A’s,
while the percentage of C’s given has dropped to 4 percent.
The rise in grades has raised concerns over grade inflation
and academic standards at the college.
While Dean of the College Gary Kates is unsure “if the
rise is due more to academic merit or grade inflation,”
it is hard to dispute that Sagehen transcripts are looking
a little chubby. With almost 19 out of every 20 letter grades
an A or a B in some form, the average Pomona GPA has risen
to a 10.3 on a 12 point scale, or in letter terms, between
a B+ and an A- average.
A few of Pomona’s more venerable professors agree with
the statistics. “I think it’s quite clear that there’s
been some very significant grade inflation,” said Professor
of Physics Catelin Mitescu, who began teaching at Pomona in
1965. “I’ve noticed it.”
Statistics show a modest rise in the number of A’s between
1970 and 1990, with a sharper increase in the last decade.
While the rise in grades is part of a national trend in upper
tier colleges and universities, Pomona seems to give more
A’s than most. Harvard gives 51 percent A’s, Columbia
47 percent. Dartmouth and Cornell give 44 percent and 40 percent
respectively, putting Pomona well in the lead among these
five schools.
It is hard to make a thorough comparison, however, as many
colleges do not release similar statistics, fearing damage
to their institutional prestige.
Before releasing the data, Pomona administrators consulted
and decided that Pomona ought to be candid about this issue.
“We think students and faculty should be engaged in a
discussion of what is going on,” said Kates. “This
is exactly the kind of thing that should be in a student paper.”
The causes of grade inflation are widely disputed. Some educators
claim that the increasing importance of student evaluations
in tenure proceedings have forced faculty to adopt a policy
of appeasement; others have cited a corporatization of higher
education in which colleges try to sell students and their
parents high grades in exchange for tuition fees. Another
frequently cited smoking gun is the Vietnam War era, a time
when liberal professors started giving even their least deserving
students passing grades in order to keep students from flunking
out of school and being drafted.
Though both the extent and causes of grade inflation are debated,
it is widely accepted that a grade inflation trend exists
on the national level—most educational institutions find
that they now give grades substantially higher than those
of thirty years ago.
According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an
organization of leading academics, a policy of grade inflation
paves the way to more than just a tarnished reputation. In
a report published February of this year, the AAAS wrote “a
system that fears candor [in grading] is demoralizing,”
eroding the “central values of academic life.” The
logic is that if objective evaluations of student performance
disappear, academia as a whole suffers. If B quality work
is rewarded with A’s, students will have no incentive
to do real A-level work in the first place. If employers and
graduate schools lose faith in GPA as an accurate indicator
of a student’s relative performance, they will resort
to choosing candidates from the ranks of the good old boy
network and GRE superstars.
The impact of such deterioration in evaluation could potentially
be enormous, both in and out of collegiate life. The AAAS
has made the argument that grade inflation could disadvantage
the poor and students of color: both groups perform better
in the classroom than on standardized tests, and both groups
are traditional outsiders to the “good old boy”
system.
Admittedly, these are worst case scenarios. Professor Mitescu,
who says he tries to keep the grades he gives in a “sensible”
range, named a far more concrete effect of ballooning grades
at Pomona. “Grades are indicative of the effort students
put into a class,” he said. “If everybody gets an
A, we are not recognizing the work and ability that students
put into their courses.”
One method of recognizing academic excellence has been through
academic honors, both intra-collegiate and national. Ninety-two
members of the graduating class of 2002 graduated with honors.
In addition, Pomona has recently had to change the standards
of its internal distinction of merit: the annual “Pomona
Scholars” awards are now given to the top 25 percent
of Pomona students, instead of to all students with an A-
or higher GPA. The reason? There were simply too many students
honored under the latter method to make the award meaningful.
While there is a strong case to be made for the harm grade
inflation does to elite colleges, there are also reasons to
believe that many of the students who get A’s at Pomona
are doing A-caliber work. Dean Kates noted that Pomona’s
reputation has steadily improved in recent decades, attracting
students of higher merit. “There’s no question about
it,” he said. “The faculty is telling me that students
are doing work equal or better than that of previous years.”
This isn’t just speculation—objective methods of
evaluating student capabilities, such as SAT scores, indicate
that Pomona may now be smarter than ever. In this light, it
seems unfair to punish all the excellent students who simply
chose to go to a highly competitive college when they could
have coasted to Summa Cum Laude in a state school. In Dean
Kates’ opinion, Pomona’s current grading problem
is due to the college getting to be too good. “A lot
of times, good things result in negative side effects”,
he said.
No department has been immune to grade inflation, but certain
divisions are substantially more prone to grade inflation
than others. While Pomona chose not to release data on individual
departments, it did release divisional breakdowns of GPA between
natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities courses.
The differences are significant: Humanities average 0.6 grade
points more than natural sciences on a twelve-point scale.
Social sciences are only slightly higher than the average
Pomona GPA of 10.3. While the lead that humanities holds over
the natural sciences might not sound like a massive difference,
it comprises more than half the difference between a B+ and
an A-, applied to each and every grade.
Arriving at a consensus on this issue would be essential to
any effort to check grade inflation. But deciding what work
merits what grade is difficult. “The process is decentralized,”
noted Dean Kates. “Colleges give no training on how to
grade. It is assumed that professors know how to do so when
they get here.”
The idea of correcting grade inflation through the establishment
of uniform standards has been considered at several colleges.
Harvard, for example, is contemplating a top-down mandate
to its faculty to bring the letter C back from the dead. This
is a drastic response, one that doesn’t sit well with
much of Pomona’s faculty. “One of the primary duties
of a professor is to give grades,” commented Mitescu.
“It would be wrong for anybody to second guess. If you
don’t trust professors to give grades that are deserved,
you shouldn’t have hired them.”
While marking tests and papers is a personal activity for
most professors, a few institutions nationwide have been successful
in keeping the lid on rising grades. Mostly hard-science schools,
these puritans include MIT, Cal Tech, and Claremont’s
own Harvey Mudd College, where average GPA hovers just a bit
over 9.3, a B- letter grade which took thirty years to claw
its way up from a C+. While this gives Harvey Mudd students
less impressive numbers to put on their resumes, HMC’s
Dean of Faculty Sheldon Wettack believes that austerity is
in the college’s interest. “We would never encourage
our faculty to inflate their grades just to be consistent
with the inflated grades of other institutions,” he said.
HMC does its best to inform employers and graduate programs
of the college’s grading philosophy: along with every
sealed transcript the school’s registrar sends out is
a cover letter explaining how to interpret Harvey Mudd grades
and GPA. All the same, Wettack acknowledges that some of the
transcripts’ recipients might miss the point: “[the
grades] could be a disadvantage for some students— but
only if you just look at the numbers.”
The chair of the Pomona Chemistry department, Professor Fred
Grieman, agrees with Wittick that lower grades aren’t
necessarily harmful to his students’ futures. “Our
students are getting into the best chemistry graduate schools
and medical schools in the country,” he wrote in a statement
to The Student Life. “Part of this success is due to
the fact that these schools know that they can trust our evaluation.”
All the same, Grieman acknowledged that grade inflation might
eventually pose a problem. “If word [about inflated grades]
got out, it could conceivably end up harming our students,”
he said. For this reason, Grieber expressed some interest
in Harvey Mudd’s policy of explaining each student’s
relation to a relevant average GPA. “Any additional information
helps when you’re evaluating a transcript,” he noted.
To be fair, controlling grades is an easier task at an engineering
school than a liberal arts college. As a general rule, math
tests are less subjective and easier to grade than essays
on literature. And while the arbitrary nature of a curve raises
the hackles of Pomona students and faculty alike, there are
other conceivable ways to check the continuing rise in grades.
“Pomona is willing to consider anything which would improve
the college’s academic quality. What the administration
needs to know first is ‘would the students and the faculty
want it?’” said Dean Kates.
It’s hard to say yes to the question. Just ask the students
working in SACS at 3 a.m. whether they think their GPA is
undeservedly high, and you’ll come to the same conclusion
that Professor Mitescu has reached after 37 years teaching
at Pomona. “Grades,” he noted, “are kind of
a touchy subject.”
