Grade Inflation In Education

There is a race where everyone gets a medal, a medal for simply competing the entire course. The incentives to run this race at maximum potential is reduced. This race is a phenomena known as grade inflation. Suzanne E. Fry in the article titled, “Grade Inflation”, claims that grade inflation in education is cheapening the worth of the education itself, and it affects all of mankind from the societal level to a personal level. Fry points out that in some well know Ivy League Universities, renowned as the hardest, highest standards of learning, there is a large proportion of “A grades” vs other letter grades. Fry further adds that the problem is compounded by institutions hoping to achieve higher ratings by catering to students just trying to

What has been happening now is the average number of students getting high marks in a class has steadily increased over the years. And one of the main reasons behind that is that professors believe that they are helping their students be competitive enough when they get to the job market. In fact, according to Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University, “the reason why inflated grades are given, is because many universities feel like they need to give their student a leg up in the job market” (Slavov). I remember a story told to me recently by a software engineer for the US Navy, that one his coworkers asked their boss to consider his son as one of the potential applicants for a recent job opening in their department. The first question the boss asked him was what his son’s GPA was. The coworker replied that it was a 3.5- a grade that is considered average. Eventually the boss told the engineer, behind the coworker’s back, that his son wasn’t being considered as his GPA was “too low”. Traditionally, a high GPA was a good indicator the potential candidates’ skills, as one had to apply themselves diligently in order to achieve their grades. However with the average for higher grades, it makes it much harder to determine

(Hartford) While the solution would work in an economist setting, in grading there is currently no standard body that would be governing the grading scale. And also if you look further into the subject, education by itself is a very general and broad term, and the subject and disciplines stretch in a hundred different directions. The idea in economics is to limit the amount of money in circulation to help control inflation rates and price level- all of which is accomplished by the a dedicated entity, with only one language, which is money. Another problem that would arise from this proposed solution is who would be appointed to head such a program, and how would a fair determination of the grade levels be made. In a sense this would also be unfair, depending on the amount of students for a subject and variations in enrollments per year, would cause this solution would be very unfair. So simply put, rather than changing the educational system, we should focus on the tried and proven way of evaluating students by how they perform, letting the educators judging themselves the students’ work ethics- making the students work hard to earn the