Grade Inflation Harvey Mansfield Analysis

In “Grade Inflation: It’s Time to Face the Facts” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2001, Harvey Mansfield, a political philosophy professor at Harvard, describes and informs his reader of the recent increase of grade inflation. Mansfield states how this inflation has not only raised his grades higher and higher but also the grades of students in many colleges in the country. He uses the word, “contempt” to describe how being pressured into changing his grading scale feels and that he has been forced to conform with what has become the norm for many professors in America. Mansfield appeals not only to professors who are cheating themselves out of active students and submitting to the new grading scale, but also to students who are being tricked into thinking this scale is better for them and makes success easier, but who are paying more money for an education that will not last and won’t help them in their future lives. Mansfield is trying to “get attention” to the way

Students have started expecting good grades for mediocre work, knowing that the professors are under an obligation to give in to the way the rest of college professors grade. Harvey Mansfield, says that according to the american education system, grading strictly is ‘cruel and dehumanizing’ and affects the student's self esteem. The author says how he thinks that a reason professors have opted into a lenient grading scale is to spare their students self esteems and feelings. I wonder, if students don’t learn how to cope with a critique from a professor on an assignment how are these students going to cope in the real world with criticism from coworkers or authority figures. Not only do these students suffer from self esteem issues they are not being challenged enough and suffer from laziness and lack an incentive to achieve