Your grades are getting higher.

Well, maybe not your grades, but according to a studypublished in last week in Teachers College Record , college students’ grades have shown a persistent increase since the 1950s. Then, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was 2.52. By 2007, it was 3.11.

While it’s impossible to say for sure what’s behind the increase, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, the study’s authors, put forward three possible factors that could be driving it.

1. It’s in universities’ self-interest to issue higher grades. If a university graduates a raft of 4.0 students, it will have more alumni in top graduate programs and jobs. The bottom line: more donors and a better reputation.

2. It’s in a professor’s self interest to issue higher grades. After all, professors aren’t the only ones who give out grades. Students evaluate their professors every semester, and since the advent of such evaluations, the grades professors have handed down have increased steadily.

3. It’s in a student’s self interest to get higher grades — and increasingly they’ve come to college with higher expectations. With the cost of college shooting through the roof, students have become higher education customers. And even when it comes to grades, the customer is always right.

But as Linda Perlstein of the National Education Writers Association notes one hypothesis behind the great grade inflation was conspicuously left out of Rojstaczer and Healy’s calculations.

What about the idea that students might be doing better? Just saying!

Maybe it’s just because we’re all college students, but here at The Diamondback, we tend to think that there’s a lot of merit to Perlstein’s point. Since the 1950s, nationwide education funding has increased, Communism has died, and the advent of Wikipedia has made learning random facts fashionable.

In conclusion, a highly scientific poll of The Diamondback’s newsroom showed that we’re all smarter than our parents — other than baseball beat writer Mike Lemaire, whose dad graduated valedictorian from Brown University. So there you have it. College students’ grades have increased because students are getting smarter. Now if we could just figure out how to bring up our own grades…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.