The Wrong Solution for Grade Inflation

“There’s fascism running rampant in this country, and we’re talking about grade inflation? Just give the students A’s and let’s all move on with our lives.”

But no, I get it. We can think about two things at once. Should, even. Maybe more than two things, one day. Yet the manner in which coteries of faculty have been pursuing grade deflation is more akin to single-mindedness than a holistic approach. When this crusade bleeds into the content of courses, it’s gone too far. This dramatic approach manifests itself as explicit mentions in the class syllabus, mandatory departmental policies that restrict rather than expand faculty freedom to grade, and a general culture of one-mindedness and of toxic (self-)improvement. A recent article from the Johns Hopkins Newsletter sums this up pretty well:

Michel Foucault once said that in the past, those in power punished through surveillance. But now, we surveil ourselves. We’ve internalized the warden. He lives in our Fitbits, our productivity apps, our curated feeds. We flog ourselves with our own ambitions. No one is making us. That’s the genius of it.

I speculate that this is what’s going on at Amherst College right now. The adjective “elite” appended to our college’s title has carved out a bigger space than that of “liberal arts,” and also of our call to enact meaningful change. In an effort to justify our complacency and success to ourselves, we need to really labor, maybe even suffer. This is unsustainable. I’ll do my best to show why and offer some alternatives.

To be clear, I’m not against grade deflation in general; it’s just that it has to be done in an intelligent, meaningful way, and I fear that’s not what’s going to happen. Let’s consider a rumor that’s been floating around recently: Grades above B+ in political science courses will be capped to 25% of the class. This policy might ring a distant bell because it’s been tried before. 

In 2004, Princeton University, another elite institution of higher education, launched a program to address grade inflation. Their measure in the first year of their program aimed for a reduction of A’s by 5.1%, setting the target for A letter grades at 35% of all undergraduate courses. Part of the rationale, in the English department, for example, was in order to “resist the impulse to award high and higher grades for work we know is undeserving.”

Does arbitrarily capping letter grades translate into more or less deserving work from students? What does deserving work look like? We already know that the nature of deserving work is different on a class-by-class basis, and so, who determines what is deserving for each class? The professor. What happens, then, when the professor has limited control over calibrating academic standards for their class? Naturally, these standards fall. 

Faculty ought to take accountability for the way they teach their classes, as it is both a great responsibility and honor to do so. I am proud to say that in my time at Amherst, the overwhelming majority do. It seems Princeton also realized the shortcomings of arbitrary grade deflation, as after 10 years, the program was eliminated following a faculty report and confirmation by the university’s president. (Read the full report here).

The failure of this policy is not the nail in the coffin for grade deflation, but rather signals that arbitrary cutoffs can be ineffective. Although grade deflation was curbed following 2004, the report stated that  “increased faculty attention to the issue — not the policy — may have played the key role in the lower grades handed out since then.” This is one possible alternative to arbitrary cutoffs.

Although one might assert that this cut-off policy lifted grade deflation off the back burner by forcing the conversation, it is important to recognize the detriments that came with it and which were ultimately found to outweigh the speculated benefits. One of the factors that caused the Princeton policy’s repeal included enhanced stress on the student body, “many of whom believe they [were] battling each other for a limited pool of A’s.” Do we really want students trying to undermine each other, or even perceive that such a combative environment exists? As Tetsuya Tanaka ’28 wrote last April, “What truly sets Amherst apart is its collaborative spirit.” This doesn’t mean a policy of grade deflation cannot be pursued, but it should not be of the ilk of past policies with etiologies of failure that are extremely well understood. 

Now, let’s consider one kind of argument for an aggressive policy of grade deflation: grade inflation makes giving out awards harder. As Brooke Ingemi ’26 reported last Fall, one issue that grade inflation created was “a 12-way tie for the Woods-Travis Prize last year, a prize awarded to the graduating senior(s) with the highest GPA.” This is a valid concern, but not one that mandates decreasing professor autonomy when it comes to them teaching and grading their classes. That is, while I accept the correlation between grade inflation and this award losing value, (1) issues external to academia, unless exceptionally important, ought not to intrude on the environment of the classroom, and (2) the award for highest GPA is not exceptionally important. The award itself aims to acknowledge “outstanding excellence in culture and faithfulness to duty as a scholar.” I don’t mean to cheapen the efforts of my fellow classmates who have received or will receive this award in the future, but I do not think that grade inflation or grades in general necessarily correlate with scholarship, although that is what it has come to represent. Maybe we ought to recontextualize our standards before jumping to numbers on a transcript? I can assure you, the former will outlive the latter.

By all means, address grade inflation. There are some very compelling reasons for doing so; but I have not seen them enunciated. Unless there is a state of emergency, we should not be making sweeping policy decisions without giving them rigorous consideration; there are enough crises in this country and across the world that demand such treatment. The “why” when we undertake making policy is not submerged within the “what” and “how,” but is equally important, as it should be at a liberal arts college. I have cited the Princeton vignette as an example of what kind of policy not to pursue, but inasmuch as it was not a good policy for combatting grade inflation at Princeton, it will not be good for Amherst because it is not tailored to Amherst College’s needs, as it fails to recognize this leads to confusion amongst students and faculty alike. Chaos is a ladder, but it only permits one person to climb its rungs; I understood that at Amherst College, we were supposed to be doing everything we could to help as many people up as we can. Terras Iradient.