The standard for A’s needs to change


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Anne Hall, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted last week in The New York Times as saying over the years, “the student [has] bec[o]me the customer who’s always right.”

To a large extent, she’s right. I came to college expecting challenging courses and I definitely heard about them — in the science and math departments. I was less than impressed by the General Education classes that were on offer. Of course, they’re interesting and certainly serve the purpose of breaking up the usual monotony of major classes, but few are academically rigorous enough to be considered college level courses. Case in point, I took a class called “Just Because it Happened to You Doesn’t Make it Interesting: The Art of Autobiography.” As long as you wrote a 7,000-word autobiography over the entire semester and did a couple of two-page book reports, you were guaranteed an A in the class.

All too often, students take GEs to get the easy A. Many students feel like they deserve to get an A in GEs regardless of whether they actually put in the work. Websites such as ratemyprofessors.com and teacher evaluations have also exacerbated the problem, as students give negative feedback when they aren’t handed easy classes. Professors are given the wrong incentives to encourage students to rate their class highly, such as making the class easier and giving out high grades.

And yet, Princeton, after almost a decade of upholding policies against grade inflation, has chosen to finally embrace it. A strict quota that put a cap at 35 percent of students who could get A’s was lifted last October when faculty voted against it. According to the Journal of Economic Perspectives, however, studies found that strict quotas increased students’ stress levels and in Wellesley College, was shown to decrease the number of students majoring in subjects with quotas by 30 percent.

Taking Princeton’s story into account, perhaps what USC needs to do is reevaluate its own policy to combat grade inflation. Instead of setting quotas, which students might see as unfair, USC should increase the difficulty of its classes, particularly for GEs and majors such as Business Administration which are typically easier. GPAs would remain low and ultimately USC’s classes would uphold the standards of higher education.

1 reply
  1. b juardo
    b juardo says:

    Francesca, did you ever consider that if your major (concentration classes) are hard, the ‘easy’ elective classes are meant to pad your GPA i.e. GPA-inflation? Your concentration courses, especially if you’re a STEM major, are rigorous and competitive to the point that if your “easy” gen-ed classes didn’t confer As so easily, then you’d have a 2.XX GPA. How are you going to get into grad school or impress potential employers with a lowly GPA like that?

    But I beg to differ. I took a poli-sci class here and thought it had a very unfair grade distribution. I wrote better and more articulate papers that expounded on the subject matter than my fellow students, but alas, I was given a fricken “C” in that class; not a “C+” or a “B-” but a motherfarken “C.” And because of that bitter experience, I know that gen-ed, elective classes are nothing but ice-skating contests: grades conferred arbitrarily or with bias.
    I thought USC was academically rigorous, even with the “frivolous” GE classes. I didn’t walk through the raindrops by getting all the ‘easy’ professors….

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