I Teach at an Elite College and I Inflate Grades. Help Me.
I know I’m old because I remember when a B+ was a respectable grade.
Now it’s more like an indictment. I’m a masochist if I hand down too many of those.
The students getting them may fill out negative course evaluations, which could mean empty seats in my future classes and professional grief. Some students will show up in my office to argue for a more generous appraisal, forcing uncomfortable conversations. That’s not because they’re snowflakes or brats but because they’re smart, motivated, self-protective denizens of a higher-education system in which so many professors dole out so many A’s that even an A- is a setback, and a grade-point average of 3.8 instead of a 3.9 can mean rejection from law and medical schools.
They’re just trying to keep their most deeply felt ambitions alive, and a B+ is a dagger in hope’s heart. Do I really want to wield it? And be the assassin of their dreams?
This month marks my five-year anniversary on the faculty at Duke University. I arrived as more and more Americans began to look askance at higher education, which was often cast in caricature. It’s untrue, for example, that professors tiptoe across a minefield of microaggressions, at the mercy of humorless students itching to cancel them for insufficient wokeness. The overwhelming majority of the young people I teach are just earnestly trying to figure out the world and their places in it. They’re more curious than censorious.
But grade inflation is as bad as they say, and it drains students’ transcripts of meaning, deprives professors of agency and turns schools into approval factories. We should be ashamed, and we should fix it.
