While many factors have contributed to grade inflation, I believe it began in earnest as student evaluations became widespread in the 1960s—an offshoot of the student protest movement of that day. At a term’s close, students graded their teachers. These evaluations could affect whether an academic department bestowed tenure on a young professor or promoted an associate professor. A large number of negative evaluations could do a teacher in, even cause him to be fired.
Student evaluations encouraged informality in the classroom. Many young professors ceased to come across as authority figures, but presented themselves as contemporaries of their students, all but equals. Professors no longer regularly wore jackets and ties or dresses to class, but came in jeans. They addressed students by their first names, and in some cases encouraged students to do the same to them. Love affairs between young professors and undergraduates, once the cause of scandal and immediate dismissal, became more common. It isn’t easy to give a C or D, let alone an F, to someone with whom you are sleeping.
Student evaluations tended to be unimpressive, if those I received during my years teaching English at Northwestern University are any example. “This guy knows his stuff,” read one. “I like his bow ties,” read another. “I wish some of the novels in this course weren’t so long,” went one, complaining less about me than about Henry James. I retired from teaching in 2002, and only one interesting evaluation sticks in my mind after all these years: “I did well in this course, but then I would have been ashamed not to have done.”