Grade Inflation and Attention Spans

I recently came across a set of articles about grade inflation that got me thinking and made me want to sort out some of my thoughts. The articles were about a report recently released by Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education expressing concern about grade inflation; a concern which, from my experience, extends far beyond Harvard. The report makes the claim that grades have become so inflated that they’ve lost their meaning. The first article covers the report largely from the perspective of faculty who agree with the report, while the second covers some responses from students who have problems with the report’s conclusions.

At first, I found myself squarely on the side of the faculty. In an ideal world, course grades are supposed to reflect how well a student has mastered the content of a class, allowing them to be a shorthand for a student’s understanding of material. There are of course already problems with that view, including that one grade can’t wholly reflect the understanding of a whole term’s worth of material, and that a grade can be as dependent on the instructor as it is on the student, just to name two. But, taken at face value, that’s what I think the ideal characterization of grades is. I found myself agreeing with the concerns of the faculty in the report because, when grades are inflated and the baseline expectation is an A, the informational value of grades breaks down. When everyone is exceptional, no one is, and there’s very little information about a student’s understanding of material in their grade. I also found myself agreeing with the call for some kind of effort to return to stricter grading standards and go back to a world where an A really does mean that you’ve performed exceptionally in a class.

I began to question that view when I read the second article, especially when students started talking about the amount of time they were spending on their coursework. In the first article, instructors say that they feel like students aren’t spending as much time as they used to on coursework and aren’t engaging with it like they used to, to the point where they’ve had to reduce both the number and length of the readings they assign. This last point about readings has also been echoed by instructors at other institutions. Many have said that their students can’t maintain focus long enough to read a whole book and that they’ve had to change the structure of their courses to accommodate. This and this are good examples. However, in the second article, students push back and say that they do and have always spent a lot of time on their coursework.

I found myself torn in that argument because I see and have experienced the things being mentioned by the faculty, but at the same time the students’ claims are backed up by data. In the report these articles are both referencing, they found that the amount of time that students spend on coursework outside of class has remained stable over the past two decades. So how could it both be true that faculty are perceiving a decline in the attention that is being paid to their courses while at the same time data shows that students are spending as much time as ever on their coursework?

One explanation that helps explain both perspectives is that college-aged students are being pulled in every direction at once, caused in part by grade inflation itself. In high school, to stand out for college applications when just having good grades isn’t good enough, they need to have every extracurricular their school offers. In college, to stand out for job or grad school applications when, again, good grades alone aren’t good enough, they need to have been in all the best clubs and know all the right people. Then, on top of all that, to be a socially connected person, they need to be active on every social media app, where the content is nothing but short bursts of attention-grabbing noise, and have an opinion on every news story.

From that perspective, the discrepancy between the effort perceived by educators and the time spent by students isn’t because students are spending less time overall on coursework, it’s because the time they spend on that coursework is fragmented. If students are spending the same amount of time but faculty perceive less engagement, the issue isn’t quantity of effort, it’s quality of attention. They’re doing their coursework, while at the same time doing things with their clubs, their friends, their professional connections, social media, etc.

Moreover, somewhat paradoxically, that fragmentation isn’t just a result of grade inflation, it’s also helping produce it. When students can’t maintain focus on one thing at a time, their work reflects that, and not because they’re lazy or uncommitted, but because they’re overcommitted and sustained attention is nearly impossible given everything they’re managing. But, because they’re still expected to have good grades – even though, as we’ve established, good grades aren’t good enough on their own – students (and their parents) push hard to maintain those high grades. That pressure gets passed on to their instructors, who find themselves caught between noticing a decline in work quality and facing demands to grade leniently.

Instructors, who already have enough on their plates to begin with, are left with a choice: push back or lower standards. In the first article, many of the instructors mention that they fear that stricter grading will result in worse course reviews, which can directly hurt their career prospects. Concerningly, some also cite pressure from students that is “increasingly litigious.” Regardless of the reason, the ultimate outcome most of the time is lower standards and higher grades.

Then, when more students get better grades because the benchmark for a good grade has gone down, there’s more pressure to do more things outside the classroom to make yourself stand out, starting the cycle over again. The result is a system where everyone is working harder than ever, with students juggling impossible demands and faculty managing their own competing pressures, while grades climb and the depth of learning declines.

What that ultimately led me to is the thought that the modern college student, and the modern person in general, is expected to be in so many places at once, it’s no wonder that they can’t pay attention anymore. And while I acknowledge that students aren’t entirely blameless here – you could make a very reasonable argument that students bear some responsibility for how they manage their attention – students are responding to the incentives they are being given in the system we’ve all built. They’re expected to be everywhere at once, so they got good at that. They’re expected to ingest a firehose of media, so they got good at that. Unfortunately, as a consequence, that also means their attention is now so fragmented that they have trouble deeply engaging with longform material.

Where I think I’ve ended up after thinking about this from both sides is that we all need to calm down a little (or a lot). There’s so much competition and expectation for young people that it’s a miracle any of them can engage with anything long enough to learn it. The world we live in is obsessed with achievement, especially achievement that looks good from the outside. I agree with the premise that grade inflation is a problem that we should do something about, but I can also see that grade inflation is just one piece of the unsustainable feedback loop that we’ve all built. Grade inflation is a product of the pressures we put on students, and “fixing” grade inflation by only changing how we assign grades would be addressing a symptom and not the cause. It would be cranking up the pressure in one domain of a student’s life while at the same time maintaining the pressure in all the other parts of their life. Which, to me, feels like a bad idea.

To me, “fixing” grade inflation means deemphasizing a lot of the quantifiable forms of achievement that we all covet so much – GPA, test scores, awards – and instead focusing on helping students actually learn. One good model of this that I’ve seen recently is the idea of mastery learning, popularized by Sal Khan, where a student’s success is measured by their command of the material, not their test score. Unfortunately, that does mean that the outcomes will be harder to quantify, but I can’t say I’m a fan of where quantifiable outcomes have gotten us, so maybe it’s time to try something new.