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Grade inflation is said to occur when higher grades are assigned for work that would have received lower grades in the past. Whether rising grades are a result of grade inflation or higher achievement can be difficult to discern and often can be determined only with systematic research.

The forces leading to grade inflation can emanate from parents, students, schools, or politicians. Grade inflation may reflect underlying credential inflation.

(supporting url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation)

Complaints about grade inflation have been around for a very long time.
Every so often a fresh flurry of publicity pushes the issue to the foreground again, the latest example being a series of articles in The Boston Globe last year that disclosed -- in a tone normally reserved for the discovery of entrenched corruption in state government -- that a lot of students at Harvard were receiving A's and being graduated with honors.
The fact that people were offering the same complaints more than a century ago puts the latest bout of harrumphing in perspective, not unlike those quotations about the disgraceful values of the younger generation that turn out to be hundreds of years old. The long history of indignation also pretty well derails any attempts to place the blame for higher grades on a residue of bleeding-heart liberal professors hired in the '60s. (Unless, of course, there was a similar countercultural phenomenon in the 1860s.)

Yet on campuses across America today, academe's usual requirements for supporting data and reasoned analysis have been suspended for some reason where this issue is concerned. It is largely accepted on faith that grade inflation -- an upward shift in students' grade-point averages without a similar rise in achievement -- exists, and that it is a bad thing. Meanwhile, the truly substantive issues surrounding grades and motivation have been obscured or ignored.

The fact is that it is hard to substantiate even the simple claim that grades have been rising. Depending on the time period we're talking about, that claim may well be false. In their book When Hope and Fear Collide (Jossey-Bass, 1998), Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton tell us that more undergraduates in 1993 reported receiving A's (and fewer reported receiving grades of C or below) compared with their counterparts in 1969 and 1976 surveys. Unfortunately, self-reports are notoriously unreliable, and the numbers become even more dubious when only a self-selected, and possibly unrepresentative, segment bothers to return the questionnaires. (One out of three failed to do so in 1993; no information is offered about the return rates in the earlier surveys.)

However, even where grades are higher now as compared with then, that does not constitute proof that they are inflated. The burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative explanations. Maybe students are turning in better assignments. Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and have become more reasonable. Maybe the concept of assessment itself has evolved, so that today it is more a means for allowing students to demonstrate what they know rather than for sorting them or "catching them out." (The real question, then, is why we spent so many years trying to make good students look bad.) Maybe students aren't forced to take as many courses outside their primary areas of interest in which they didn't fare as well. Maybe struggling students are now able to withdraw from a course before a poor grade appears on their transcripts.

(From "THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION" 2002, "The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation")


Question
1. How is your grade? It is most important thing to get a job?
2. What do you think about a grade inflation? What is the reason of it?
3. What is the solution about it?

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