By Michael Belmont

Gargoyle senior editor

Posted Wednesday, June 6, 2007, The OG, news & in depth

[Note: Gargoyle assistant editors Michelle Gao and Alex Zhai helped to research this article. All references to a student's class (such as “junior”) pertain to the 2006-07 school year.]

WHEN YOU HEAR the phrase “chivalry is dead” in schools these days, it might have something to do with the decline of the “gentleman's C.”

Educators and parents across the country have noticed for a while now that report cards aren't written in the same dialect as they once were.

While A's and B's were once reserved only for “above average” students, if a teenager today earns mostly C's, he or she is often labeled a below average student, or an underachiever.

For the 2006 fall semester, less than 6 percent of all letter grades given at Uni were a C or below. (The letter grades counted did not include physical education evaluations.)

But if almost everybody is getting A's and B's, do report cards still have meaning? How can a student's performance be accurately judged if virtually all students earn the same marks?

“It's not a problem as far as students are concerned,” said math department head Craig Russell. “It may be a problem as far as college admissions officers are concerned, because they can't tell if this student has a 3.9 average from this high school and some other student has a 4.0 from another high school, how much of that 4.0 is because that student is a nice student and everybody wants to promote that student, so it's hard to tell.”

THE NATIONAL TREND

Though direct comparison of grade point averages at different schools is difficult because of different weighting systems and scales, a broad trend toward higher grades is still discernable.

A U.S. Department of Education study found that the average high school GPA in the United States rose from 2.68 to 2.94 from 1990 to 2000.

In April, the University of California at Los Angeles released a report analyzing the results of 40 years of nationwide surveys of incoming college freshmen. The report, “The American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends, 1966-2006,” documented among other things the rise of high school GPAs over that span.

In 2006, according to the report, a record 24.1 percent of college freshmen said they graduated from high school with an A average. In that same 2006 survey, 68.6 percent of all freshmen rated themselves “above average” or in the top 10 percent of their peer group.

SchoolMatch, a private research and consulting company, reported that nearly 70 percent of schools analyzed had average GPAs that were disproportionately high compared to their students' performances on standardized tests.

Out of 47,317 students who applied to UCLA last year, almost 21,000 had GPAs of at least 4.0. This spring, more than 75 percent of the 2,465 applicants offered freshman admission to Stanford had a 4.0 or more.

The controversy among educators today is over whether or not rising grades are representative of greater achievement among high school and college students. While some argue that grades are being boosted illegitimately, others say that young adults now are simply outperforming previous generations in the classroom.

GRADE INFLATION AT UNI?

At Uni, the situation is complicated because of the school's reputation and small size.

On the one hand, there's an expectation among parents and students that the curriculum will be tougher than at other schools.

But teachers also must be careful not to grade kids who would probably be at the top of their class in other circumstances too harshly, or else many bright pupils might decide not to attend Uni so they can look better to colleges on paper.

“I would never want to punish anybody for being here, so if they're taking my class, and they're doing B work, I'm asking myself, ‘What if they were somewhere else, would they be automatically getting A-pluses?'” said physics teacher Jim “Ray” Carrubba. “If they're getting A-pluses somewhere else for the same work, I'd feel bad about giving a real bad grade.”

There is also the effect of elective classes, some of which give grades for activities that are treated as extracurriculars at other schools.

“I was an editor of the school newspaper in my high school, and it wasn't a class — you just did it after school or during lunch time, and so there was no grade associated with that,” Carrubba said. “And now we've incorporated a lot of these things into the class. A lot of this stuff has been moved into the curriculum, so people are just kind of mellow about the grades. A lot of these classes didn't exist a long time ago.”

Of the 64 different courses (not including PE) offered at Uni during the first semester of 2006-07, 18 fell outside the “traditional” school subject areas of English, social studies, math, science, and foreign language. In 16 of these classes not a single student earned a grade below a B, and in one of the other two there was only one grade under that mark out of 31.

Overall, there were only nine courses in which the majority of students didn't earn a semester A.

At the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, an institution comparable to Uni in size and academic rigor, the majority of students earned grades below an A in six of the 10 most commonly taught junior courses in the 2005-06 school year. More than 85 percent of the letter grades awarded in these courses were A's and B's.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF WORRY

History teacher Chris Butler, who began his career at Uni in January 1979, doesn't feel that grades at Uni have been inflated significantly over his time at the school. What he has noticed is that parents and students have become a lot more conscious of grades.

“I think there was more of an open creative atmosphere [in the past],” he said. “[Now] there's tremendous pressure coming from multiple sources, and the system itself. There's a much greater emphasis on grades.”

To Butler, this trend in American education is more ominous than grade inflation.

“There is that creative element that is missing more and more in American education,” he said. “We can create technocrats, but are we nurturing really brilliant scientists, historians, artists, things like that? I think we're doing much less of that just so we can create the technocrats, so to speak.”

With a college admissions process that demands achievement in many different subjects, success is likely to involve even distribution of time and effort, even for courses a student is not excited about.

However, this doesn't mean kids don't know what they like. Junior Emily Chu, who says she works about equally hard in all areas, has a simple way of telling.

“I'm just happier to do work in my favorite classes,” she said.

Though report cards do weigh heavily on the minds of many Uni students, some are still able to apply pure love of learning to their favorite classes in a way that transcends mere letter evaluations.

“At this point, I'm very concerned with grades because the college application process is already kicking in,” junior Erin Hayes said. “However, classes that I am good at tend to be classes that I like, and I tend to get good grades in those classes almost as a side note to learning and participating in something that I enjoy.”

All the teachers interviewed agreed that one of the reasons Uni students do well is the drive and ability they tend to bring to their studies.

“The caliber of student that we have here and the level of work we get means that the grades will be good,” English teacher Steve Rayburn commented.

To students like Chu, however, getting a good grade isn't always the most important thing.

“If I know I'm good at the class, if I get a bad grade, I'm very disappointed,” she said. “But if I'm not [good at the subject], then I'm not going to get worked up about it. Grades are relative, and they depend on a lot of different factors, so I'd rather have fun and actually keep some of the knowledge that I get.”

RELATED

— U.S. Department of Education: The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement, 1990-2000

— UCLA Higher Education Research Institute: The American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends, 1966-2006