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BY MEGO LIEN

In print | March 25, 2004

“Anywhere else it would’ve been an A.” Say it enough times, and this catch phrase evolves into a mantra crucial to the survival of the Swarthmore student’s self-esteem. B on your paper? Could’ve, should’ve been an A. Can’t pass the swim test? Go splashing anywhere else.

Swarthmore prides itself on offering academic rigor in a non-competitive atmosphere. The de-emphasis on grades and maintenance of high intellectual standards has allowed Swarthmore to keep its grades “at 1970s standards,” an article in Dartmouth’s newspaper reported. “Swatties may or may not have more work than their counterparts at Dartmouth or Amherst colleges,” the article said, “but they do have lower average grades.”

Despite popular belief, however, one professor’s study and the testimonies of several others reveal that Swarthmore’s grades are on the upswing.

Grade inflation, by definition, involves a rise in grades without a concurrent rise in student performance, a study by the Texas Education Review said. It can occur over time, across academic departments or among academic institutions.

Harvard embodies a famous case of grade inflation. A 2001 Harvard study reported that 91 percent of Harvard seniors “graduated with some kind of honor on their diploma,” where honors required a B-minus or better in students’ majors.

About half of the undergraduate grades were A or A-minus. By contrast, only 22 percent of Harvard graduates had A’s in 1966, USA Today reported.

In 1993, economics professor Mark Kuperberg set out to study the state of grading at Swarthmore.

By comparing grade records over time, across departments and (confidentially) among other colleges, Kuperberg found “significant grade inflation” in all three areas, he said.

Inflation across departments

Where Harvard professors attributed the high grades to, as the Harvard study said, “pressure to grade similarly to colleagues, fear of becoming known as a ‘tough grader’ and pressure from students accustomed to higher grades,” Kuperberg suggested two interrelated and more objective explanations for his findings.

First, he said, grades tend to be lower in larger classes, which are frequently more impersonal entry-level courses. When the college went to PDCs, Kuperberg said, classes were capped at 25 students, so many courses shrank in size, resulting in a rise in grades across time.

Similarly, PDCs and smaller classes focus more on writing, where grades tend to be higher due to the subjective nature of evaluating the work.

Kuperberg said he himself found it difficult to dip lower than C-minus when grading papers.

Professors today experience “less certainty” and “more self-questioning” when evaluating students’ ideas, Kuperberg said.

But in the English department, where grades are based heavily on students’ writing and ideas, “there [aren’t] any great obstacles to assigning the grade that a paper deserves,” English professor Nora Johnson said in an e-mail.

The English literature department discussed grading standards and that the faculty tended to agree about what made a strong paper, according to Johnson.

“Our standards for grading papers are rigorous, and we’re generally satisfied with those standards,” she said.

On the other hand, the department “takes low grades very seriously,” Johnson said. “We know that when we give them we are communicating our real sense that the work needs to improve substantially.”

Relating grade inflation to the rise of PDCs and writing sheds light on the discrepancies between the grades of humanities majors versus natural science majors, whose classes tend to be larger and less writing-oriented. Kuperberg’s study confirmed that the natural sciences graded lower than the social sciences, which in turn graded lower than the humanities.

No one had to explain this trend to natural science majors.

“Coming here, I definitely had a hard time trying to adjust [to the academics],” said Wee Chua ’06, who is on the pre-med track. “I still have not been able to crack the A barrier … [which] is sometimes hard to accept because of expectations from my parents or myself.”

Inflation across time

Economics professor Larry Westphal estimated that he had taught 900 students in 23 years of teaching at Princeton and then Swarthmore. Intermediate Microeconomics is notoriously difficult among students, but Westphal said he had maintained the same rigorous grading standards since the ’80s. Students can typically “forget it” if they expect to ace the course with ease, he said.

By maintaining strict grading standards, Westphal can accurately compare students’ performances, lending credibility to recommendations he writes for his students. “If you’re known and your standards are known, then your recommendations count for something,” he said.

Political science professor Richard Valelly ’75 attributed grade inflation to better student performance. “Professors are not more lenient, but students today are doing better than we did,” Valelly said.

Kuperberg agreed that “the objective qualities of students, on average, are rising,” but he said they “work less hard” than before, causing an evening out in students’ performances across time.

Westphal, on the other hand, attributed the rise in grades in part to a rise in student expectations. “When I first came [to Swarthmore],” he said, “getting a B was a good deal. Now, students get B’s and think they’ve failed.”

Engineering professor Lynne Molter '79 said that while she had not observed any change in students' abilities -- "Swarthmore students have always been extremely gifted," she said -- students today do give "more attention to a broader diversity" of extracurricular activities.

Graduate schools and jobs

Nonetheless, the fact remains that Swarthmore’s grades are generally lower than the grades at competing institutions. “Colleges … are very private about their grades statistics,” Registrar Martin Warner said in an e-mail. “I have nothing to say about grades except that at Swarthmore … we emphasize learning, not grades.”

Johnson wrote that English majors from Swarthmore “do very well” after college. “It isn’t ever easy to compete for admission to exclusive graduate programs, but we’ve been very pleased with the results that our students have gotten when they apply,” she said.

Where they had to, professors have always dealt with the difference in grades in their recommendations for Swarthmore students competing for post-college programs and jobs. “I deal with [grade inflation] personally,” math professor Stephen Maurer ’67 said in an e-mail. “When I write a recommendation for a student … if I mention the grade a student got from me, I always give the grade distribution for that course.”

Recommendations are particularly important for competitive programs where one-tenth of a GPA can influence a student’s chances of acceptance. Nevertheless, Swarthmore pre-med students have experienced a “tremendous amount of success” in medical school admissions, Health Sciences Adviser Gigi Simeone said.

Medical schools “know we’re a very tough place,” Simeone said, “so there’s a little bit of give in Swarthmore grades.” The average GPA of accepted pre-med students has typically been lower than the national average, she said.

Grades do not affect employment as much as they do graduate school admissions, Career Services Director Nancy Burkett said. However, Sanggee Kim ’04 said that, in her experience, employers “do use [GPA] as a filtering system,” especially for hiring at highly competitive companies.

Some students become troubled when their comparatively lower GPAs affect their chances for graduate school and job acceptances. Carolyn Sha ‘04 said GPA had never really been a matter of stress for her and that the GPA requirements for jobs in business appear to spread over a wide range. But some of Sha’s friends who majored in the natural sciences have expressed frustration that Swarthmore grades “don’t reflect our absolute ability,” she said.

“That does put us at a disadvantage,” she said, since many less-qualified applicants are getting jobs over Swarthmore students and “it’s an extremely trying and frustrating experience.”

Ultimately, employment is determined much more by people skills than by grades, many students said. “It’s really all about networking,” Kim said.

“Maybe it’d be better if people had higher grades,” Chris Atanasiu ‘05 said. "Maybe you’d feel better about yourself. But you’re either competent or not [for a job], and that comes through in the interview."

Final thoughts

In the end, grades up or down, no one at Swarthmore really seems to care.

Kuperberg’s study “didn’t cause a big stir,” he said. “The faculty are not paying a lot of attention [to grade inflation]. They never have.”

“I don’t feel very informed [on the issue],” history professor Lillian Li said. “Everyone says there is grade inflation. I don’t particularly feel there is in the history department, but I don’t really know.”

Kuperberg himself is “not a big one” on grade inflation. “Grades are like signals,” he said. “They should be informative.” His major concern on the matter is grade dispersion. If all grades were equal and rising, then it would be OK, Kuperberg said. But if “the signal gets corrupted, and students gravitate towards higher grading departments,” then he would have cause for concern.

“Swarthmore doesn’t need grade inflation,” Atanasiu said.

“I generally try not to care about grades,” Alan McAvinney ‘06 said. When asked about his concerns about getting into graduate school, he said, "I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it."

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