Grades in higher education --and the Ivy League in particular-- are inflated, according to a report issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last Friday.
The report, Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing?, was conducted by Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Matthew Hartley, a lecturer at Penn's Graduate School of Education.
"Grade inflation is a nationwide problem in higher education," Academy spokeswoman Suzanne Morse said.
The study concluded that, for various historical and educational reasons, the grades given to undergraduate students have steadily improved since the 1960s.
"There are three basic questions that we are asking," Rosovsky said. "What are the facts, what are the possible explanations and what can be done about it?"
Grade inflation was defined in the report as "an upward shift in the grade point average of students over an extended period of time, without a corresponding increase in student achievement." The report says that the average GPAs of students across all institutional types rose approximately 15 to 20 percent between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s.
The report builds upon work done by Indiana University at Bloomington professors George Kuh and Shouping Hu, which compared the GPAs of students from all types of institutions between the 1980s and 1990s. Kuh and Hu concluded that in that time frame, the average GPA rose from 3.07 to 3.34 and that only 10 to 20 percent of students received grades less than a B-.
According to the study, the problem is not grade inflation, but rather grade "compression." The difference is that inflation has no limit, while compression has a limit, in this case at the "A level," pushing all grades against that maximum point.
Schools in the Ivy League have seen particularly severe grade compression.
"There seems to be evidence that [grade compression] is more prevalent in the Ivy League," Morse said.
Amongst Harvard graduates, 91 percent graduate with honors, and 50 percent of the grades given are A's. This compares to 46 percent A's in 1996 and only 22 percent A's in 1966.
In 1973, about 30.7 percent of all grades given at Princeton were As, while in 1997 the percentage had risen to 42.5 with only 11.6 percent of the grades given falling lower than a B.
The study said that the high percentage of A's granted in the Ivy League could simply be a function of the increase in competition to get into the schools and the quality of the students.
"Because admission into these institutions became increasingly competitive since the 1960s, it might be possible to argue that higher average grades merely reflected a more academically talented student body," the report said.
But the report said that the immense grade inflation could not be a result exclusively of increased competition.
Some critics say that such competitive institutions -- like those in the Ivy League -- purposely give inflated grades to keep the student body happy and to make them competitive in the graduate school market.
How well a school retains its student body can affect its position in national rankings such as those found in U.S. News and World Report.
The top three universities -- Princeton, Harvard and Yale -- each have the top three graduation rates, respectively.
Penn, which is ranked fifth in the annual survey, has the 15th highest graduation rank and retains 97 percent of its freshmen, according to U.S. News.
The authors of the report also found that letters of recommendation have been rather uncritical of students, rendering them somewhat useless to some graduate schools.
"Basically, [letters of recommendation] have the same characteristics as grades," Rosovsky said. "The reason for the inflation of these letters is virtually the same as for grade inflation."
