ABSTRACT
Many instructors claim that the administration’s concern with grade inflation motivates them to grade on a curve. Some argue that the average grade in the United States used to be a C. Today it is somewhere between a B-and a B. It is unclear what this means, and there have been no definitive studies on the issue. An older argument held that antiwar professors gave higher grades to students to help them avoid failure and subsequent draft into the army during the Vietnam conflict. After the war, the practices became the norm. For this reason, grade inflation rallied the troops in the Culture Wars. People attribute grade inflation to the widespread use of curved or motivational grading, the practice of giving higher than appropriate grades to sustain the students’ motivation to learn. Still another canard one hears is that instructors’ lack of standards make it too easy for students to get good grades. For those on the other side of the argument, the change in the national average reflects betterprepared students, more effective classroom teaching and textbooks, a greater amount of information flowing through society, higher literacy advantages that were not available to previous generations, and changes in the standards for grading that encourage greater student participation with a concomitant rise in motivation and learning. Political attitudes about the benefits of meritocratic education, diversity, affirmative action, and cosmopolitanism strongly influence this debate.
