Lone Professors Resist Grade Inflation

I want to applaud Roger Arnold for “Way That Grades Are Set Is a Mark Against Professors” (Commentary, April 22).

Grade inflation seriously affects not just faculty up for promotion and tenure but all of us who are teachers. Since student evaluations of their professors are now commonplace, those of us who have tried to maintain firm standards find ourselves being sharply criticized by students because of their higher grade expectations. The fact that far too many instructors have caved in, or compromised, on this issue has only reinforced students’ belief that tough teachers are unreasonable.

What is even sadder is that teachers who have backpedaled on grades tend to be critical of those who have not capitulated. Can that be because they do not wish to admit that they are a contributory factor for having compromised the quality of higher education?

Elliott R. Barkan

Professor Emeritus

History and Ethnic Studies

Cal State San Bernardino

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It is unrealistic to expect that professors would agree to stop inflating grades. Shouldn’t this occur at the university level? When I was at Stanford during the ‘60s, university policy was a straight curve: 15% A’s, 35% Bs, 35% Cs and 15% Ds. This universitywide policy not only discouraged cheating while rewarding true excellence but preserved the competitive edge for admittance to grad school, even for those graduates whose grade point average was less than 4.0.

Karen Wakefield

Los Angeles

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Just the way a size 6 dress today is much larger than a size 6 dress was 20 years ago, college grades have been inflated to keep the students and their tuition-paying parents happy. My father was a professor of biology at Goucher College in Baltimore for 40 years, retiring in 1970. He once explained his grading system to me: C was “good, standard college work”; B was “significantly better than good college work”; and to get an A from him you had to show “a spark of the divine madness.”

At today’s consumer-driven college, my father would have been ridden off campus on a rail rather than retiring as a much-beloved instructor.

Jane Moment Jordan

Oak Park