Grade inflation cited as concern

By Lindsey Hart

Santa Clara has yet to evaluate its own grading policies even though other universities, like Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford have investigated grade inflation on their campuses.

Experts say grade inflation occurs when students receive higher grades than their performance merits.

"It's an issue," said political science professor Kenneth Montojo. "Not just at Santa Clara, it's all of academia."

Stephen Lee, communication department chair, agrees: "Grade inflation is an issue at every college and university in America."

"We have not looked at that in any systematic way," said Conor Roycroft of the university's Office of Institutional Research. "Nobody has asked us to look at it."

That department is responsible for providing Santa Clara with research and analysis in support of its strategic planning and would perform such an investigation, were it requested. Approximately 25 percent of the graduating class of 2004 graduated with grade point averages of 3.5 (out of 4.0) or better.

University registrar Carol Lamoreaux thinks the trend has been toward inflation, but speculates that the quality of students has increased over time.

"If the quality is higher, i.e., students have better, higher test scores and higher high school GPAs, wouldn't they get higher grades here?" Lamoreaux asked.

"It is in a school's best interest for their students to be successful," she said. "If they produce students with good grades, they might look better to those outside the university community.

But some administrators deny inflation as a serious concern and instead say rigorous standards imposed by faculty instead make students work harder.

"My impression is that grade inflation is not a big problem here," Helen Moritz, vice provost for undergraduate education, said. "I think faculty generally set fairly rigorous expectations and give students the grades their work warrants in light of those expectations."

There are several offices on campus where a request to investigate grade inflation would originate. One group that could request an investigation is Santa Clara's Academic Affairs Committee. But the issue has never been brought to the committee's attention.

"I don't recall anything remotely like that coming up for discussion," said physics professor Richard Barber, a former chairman of the Academic Affairs Committee from Spring 2003 to Spring 2004.

Phil Kesten, physics department chair, attempted to conduct a study last year on the consistency of grading policies between departments at Santa Clara and the faculty within them, but was denied access to information needed to perform the study. "I haven't gotten the necessary data to perform the study yet, but I will soon," he said.

That necessary raw data is available in the Student Records and Institutional Research databases. But the Institutional Research rarely distributes raw data to individuals or groups wishing to conduct a study of their own.

First, a query is necessary to summarize the data at a higher level to make it more user-friendly for the study conductor.

A number of factors must be examined in an investigation of grade inflation such as class weight, difficulty of course material, and the individual teaching the class.

But Montojo acknowledges it is difficult to get an outside person to evaluate grading policies fairly because they are not present in class everyday and are not familiar with the teacher's techniques.

"University systems are really decentralized," political science professor Diana Morlang said. "The faculty want to be independent and don't want to be told how to grade."

A standard of normalcy doesn't exist among all faculty at Santa Clara, administrators say. "We don't tell our faculty how to grade," Lamoreaux said. "It's a form of academic freedom," which varies between departments and even between faculty in the same department.

"There has to be a balance between academic freedom and standards within specific departments," Lee said.

Some students, however, don't see inflated grades as troublesome.

"I wasn't aware that grade inflation is an issue at Santa Clara," junior finance major Hillary Boller said. "Teachers make you work hard to earn an A in the business school."

Many departments in the College of Arts and Sciences are undergoing overall program review. As part of this review, they are attempting to maintain consistency within their department by creating evaluative criteria for each course, Lee said.

Along with this program review, individual departments may address grade distribution as part of curricular evaluation.

Lee believes Santa Clara needs to put an ongoing program review in place for all departments.

The first step in determining whether grade inflation exists at Santa Clara would be to query the database for that information.

"We don't have the resources to do that right now," Lamoreaux said. "We'd like to be able to respond to requests like that, but we're hard pressed for time," Lamoreaux said.

According to her, the Office of Student Records lacks the necessary personnel to query data to conduct such a large, university-wide study.

Data on student grades trends at Santa Clara is outdated. Lamoreaux estimates the data is only updated through the 1970s or 80s.

This data is stored in the PeopleSoft administrative system. And according to Lamoreaux, the data are not publicized.

The Academic Affairs Committee has focused on program review for the past couple of years, but has yet to address the issue of grade distribution and grade inflation.