Is college grade inflation really a bad thing?

Benedict College is a historically black college located in Columbia, S.C., with an enrollment of 3,000 students. Several years ago, the school’s president, David Swinton, implemented a grading policy that’s called Success Equals Effort. It requires professors to calculate freshman grades based on a 60 40 formula with effort (turning in assignments on time, class attendance, class participation) counting for 60 percent and academics counting for 40 percent of a student’s final grade.

In the sophomore year, the formula is 50/50 and in their final two years, students are graded solely on academic performance. Swinton contends that the SEE policy at Benedict, which has an open enrollment policy and serves kids with poor study habits and weak high school records, allows students to develop the study habits necessary to succeed in college.

A study will be conducted on incoming sophomores to determine how successful the program has been.

The grading policy at Benedict has drawn national attention. Critics see it as a worst-case scenario of grade inflation and believe that grades should be determined solely on classroom performance. However, Swinton’s open policy explodes this cherished myth -- many institutions of higher education in the United States have fixed student grading formulas.

Last spring, Princeton University adopted a policy to limit A grades to 35 percent of students in undergraduate courses and 55 percent of upper classmen in independent studies. Several years ago, Harvard capped the number of students who can graduate with honors at 60 percent. Fifty percent of Columbia University graduates in 2002-03 had grades of A- or better.

Smarter students or a policy of informal grade inflation?

Anyone who has ever taught a college class knows that a variety of subjective measures go into the calculation of a student’s grade. Some profs have an attendance policy. Others gave credit for class participation. Most grade exams on a curve. All of these mechanisms give informal credit for “effort” and push grades higher.

President Swinton’s policy is the first, however, to explicitly tie the “effort variable” to specific public and social policy outcomes -- higher student retention and graduation rates. Other higher education systems do the same thing without having a formal policy. For instance, professors in the University of Georgia system inflate grades through the “effort variable” to achieve a noble public policy goal: Georgia residents lose their HOPE Scholarships from the state (which pays full tuition) if their GPA falls below a B average.

What most critics don’t understand is that the SEE policy can be a powerful motivational tool. Stanford University social psychology professor Albert Bandura is a leading expert in this field. His research over the past 30 years has shown a strong cause-and-effect relationship between successful completion of a task and increased self-confidence. Bandura’s ideas on motivation and self-efficacy are used in institutions that range from public schools to the workplace. Several years ago, I was on a dissertation committee at Virginia Tech that explored the relationship between self-efficacy and choosing a career in teaching.

If improving student success through enhanced self-confidence and esteem are Swinton’s strategic goals, he is using one of the most widely respected theoretical frameworks in the social learning area of organization behavior.

Benedict College is not Princeton or Harvard. These schools occupy different niches in the hierarchy of American higher education. Yet they all share policies that use a fixed formula for assessing student grades. As a professor who truly values the concept of academic freedom, I don’t like the policies at any of these schools.

However, the Benedict policy does seem the lesser of two evils. Positive educational, social and personal outcomes can be the direct product of SEE. Conversely, the Princeton policy is simply a crusade to eradicate grade inflation in a nostalgic attempt to return to a bygone area when the prevailing thought was that lower GPAs were a sign of academic rigor.

Now, as was the case in the past, the manipulation of grades downward will be accomplished by giving impassable exams and averaging scores based on the standard deviation. Talk to any University of Virginia biology or economics major about this grading system and you will find unanimity that this “weed-out” process is inherently unethical and serves no valid educational purpose.

The Benedict College SEE program has its critics. So does the Princeton policy.

Yet, there is some method to the madness in Columbia while the new Princeton grading system just seems maddeningly senseless.