Grade Inflammation

Grading has become itchy and overreactive

Me and some students

Much has been written lately about grade inflation. As usual, most of the conversation has centered on the Ivies, particularly Harvard. That is tiresome enough but the framing of the problem is grating. The fear is that excellence is being diluted along with the signal value of the “A,” that universities have become consumer goods, that high tuition entitles students to good grades, that students are no longer capable of academic rigor, that professors don’t care enough, it goes on and on. It all seems a little overwrought to me, and nostalgic. “Back in the old days, grades meant something.” Yes, a “C” didn’t used to feel like a death sentence. Its meaning was supposed to be “average.” Average is average. We can’t all live in Lake Wobegon. But it isn’t just students who react to Cs as if they’re some kind of allergen. I see faculty do this, too, and parents. Aunts and uncles. Everyone seems upset, inflamed. We all want the A.

But Harvard’s institutional response has been to deploy a kind of corticosteroid bomb—a “20% rule” that requires faculty to only award A grades to a maximum of 20% of the students in any undergraduate course. (There is no cap on A-minuses.) (And it’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist.) This solution is silly. It suppresses symptoms without addressing any of the causes and risks introducing its own pathologies.

Maybe I’m just being defensive. Students in my classes frequently earn As. They also work their asses off. I make no apologies for either outcome. If my students do what I ask them to do when I ask them to do it, they get an A. That’s the whole story. If I could, I would give no grades at all. (Let’s get rid of course evaluations while we’re at it.) I am confident that if no grades were given, my students would work just as hard for me.

My classes are frequently centered on neuroscientific topics related to emotion, emotion regulation, perception, basic brain structure and function, social relationships, evolution, etc. I ask a lot from students. For each topic, I ask students to 1) do the readings, 2) submit two questions for discussion in class, 3) participate in discussions either in person of via written comments on each others’ work (via Canvas), and 4) write a 3 page essay called a “reflection” that synthesizes and generalizes from the reading and the class discussion. I ask them to write their reflections by hand. They start writing in the last 15 minutes of class and must upload them to Canvas within 24 hours. That leaves each student writing nearly 100 pages in a given semester. When I teach compressed courses, as during the January or Summer Terms, they have to write three pages per module, which sometimes has them writing a nine page reflection by hand every day.

I don’t rubber stamp accommodation requests. I am particularly opposed to releasing students from the handwriting requirement. I don’t want their writing picked over by spell checkers and grammar police and AI interventions. I want them to write quickly. I want them to become absorbed. I want to know what they feel and think. That said, when a student makes an accommodation request, I do sit with them, talk about their specific challenges, and work with them to come up with solutions. Sometimes those solutions are radical. Alternative modes of submitting reflections have included: composing and performing songs, making collages, writing poems, making comics, and writing short stories about the class. Why do I do this? Because part of my job is to help the student want to do all this work.

I’ll say it again: part of my job is to help the student want to do all this work. Here are some other responsibilities I take seriously: It is my job to make students want to attend class. It’s my job to make students feel like they own the material they are learning. It’s my job to motivate students to do more work than perhaps is typical for courses like mine. It’s my job to teach in such a way that the material is retained. It’s my job to make them feel like they want me to see how hard they’ve worked, to be accountable to me. It’s my job to read all the stuff they write, and comment on it, even when the writing isn’t all that great. I even think it’s my job to make the material compelling enough that they want to tell their family and friends about it.

I do not believe that some material is intrinsically boring. On the contrary, if a topic is included in a university class, I assume that topic is important, which means it’s interesting. If neither of those things is true, then—I’m serious now—stop teaching it. Don’t teach it. Leave it out of your textbook. Let the world forget about it.

I haven’t always taught this way. If you took my Affective Neuroscience course in the mid-2000s, you’d have had a mid-term, a final, and a final written project, which was usually a research proposal. The proposal was to be written in strict accordance with APA style (God help me, I did that to people). Writing test questions was tedious and honestly pointless. Responding to those questions during exams was about the same. Research proposals were often great but horrible to grade all at once at the end of the semester. I loved the material. So did the students. But the class was a bummer at the level of grading and I often ended the semester exhausted and dejected. Did fewer people earn As? You bet. In fact, in those days I had grade distributions that might even satisfy the hand-wringers at Harvard. Did my students benefit from those distributions? Nope. At least not in any specific ways I could enumerate. Who did?

Well, who are grades for? Ostensibly, they exist to let students know how they are doing. Does anyone think that is what grades are for now? Of course not. Grades are for credentialing. They are for graduate admissions and medical schools and maybe fastidious employers and overly detailed resumes. I do not care about any of that stuff, at all. Sue me. My obligation is to my students. If you want to sort students for graduate school, law school, medical school, whatever, then use instruments designed for sorting. Use standardized tests, like the GRE and MCAT. Tests like these suffer from reputations for bias all out of proportion to their actual crimes, and there is even evidence that alternative or “holistic” approaches make bias against underrepresented groups worse. Maybe don’t use writing samples anymore. AI has probably ruined that as a predictor, if it was ever useful in the first place. But whatever else is true, don’t ask professors to ration grades so that some downstream committee can use transcripts as a ranking system. My course is not a sorting machine.

What does an A mean in my classes? It means the student turned everything in and that I found the work responsive and complete. When my students produce unusually excellent work, I tell them so. When they produce something subpar, I tell them that, too. Do students ever get bad grades in my classes? Yes. But I don’t believe excellent work will become more excellent if I deny an A to someone else in order to create an arbitrary distribution.

Below is a quote lifted from a final reflection written for my Neuroscience of Social Relationships course. I have left it as written. I admit, reflections in my course aren’t meant to be polished essays. They are meant to help students think through writing, in real time, before their thoughts are laundered into academic prose. I want students to write while they think and maybe learn how to write to think.

“This class has pushed me in a variety of ways—speaking in class, critically thinking about topics and relating them to my own life, and honestly just by how much effort I have poured into the last 10 days. Here is me with my bluntness and honesty: I have genuinely never been more exhausted and frustrated by the amount of work in a class in my academic history, but I have also never gotten this much and felt more fulfilled from a class in my academic history. So I would do it all again for sure.”

Here is another, this time from one of my anonymous course evaluations:

“While I hated the reflections, like, honestly, sometimes having to do them sent rage throughout my body, I also have started to appreciate that this is the only resource I have created from a class that I feel you can see the development of my learning and gives myself and others a glimpse into my mind, which has helped me better understand how my mind thinks in connection to the topics we discussed. I feel I have gotten more out of my class than any other in my four years here at UVA. It’s challenging to make sure complex concepts feel easy and enjoyable to talk about, to where even the complexity can start to get exciting.”

Anyway, Harvard can keep its 20% rule. If institutions wish to spend their time auditing transcripts for other institutions to use, that is their business. My business is education. When a student tells me that my class made rage surge through their body, but that they’d do it again, I feel like I’ve achieved something for that student. When a student fills a notebook with 80 pages of handwritten thoughts about my course material, they’ve created an artifact that’s going to stick with them. If you believe from looking at my grade distribution that my course is too easy, I invite you to come take it. Bring your pen and a marble notebook. Try to keep up.