Editor’s note: A list of the percent of A’s awarded per college during spring 2009 may be found at the end of this article.
Chelsea Alford sits near her note-scattered coffee table with a book and yellow highlighter in hand as she prepares for tests. But the silence and her disconnected laptop come only the night before an exam, when she devotes four to five hours to an intense, undistracted study session.By 1 or 2 a.m., the political science sophomore said she feels pretty prepared. But this last-minute preparation is enough for her to earn a 4.0 GPA, she said.
Students more commonly find the mark of “distinguished mastery” on PAWS accounts today than students in the ’60s saw A’s on report cards as the percent of A’s awarded at the University has increased since then.In 1965, 17 percent of grades were A’s, but that number increased to 21 percent in 1984, 27 percent in 1991 and 33 percent for the spring 2009 semester. Changes in grade distribution may result from higher admissions standards leading to a higher caliber of students and a late withdrawal policy, said Stacia Haynie, vice provost of Academic Affairs.No campus-wide policy governs grading, but professors are required to list how they will calculate student grades on the syllabus, Haynie said. A 2002 Faculty Senate resolution looked at grade inflation at the University and determined although a rise in grades may be justified by increased academic performance, the overall rise cannot be justified by that reason alone.”If you tell me 60 percent (of students) are getting A’s and B’s, I’d be really suspicious,” said Robert Perlis, chair of the Faculty Senate Committee on Admissions, Standards and Honors.The resolution proposed the Committee annually monitor the distribution of grades, but later committees found this measure unnecessary and left the monitoring to individual college deans, Perlis said.To combat inflation, Princeton University adopted a quota system in April 2004, in which no department may award more than 35 percent A’s in undergraduate programs.The quota has brought Princeton grading standards back to what they were in the 1990s, said Stuart Rojstaczer, who runs a national grade inflation tracking Web site, in an e-mail to The Daily Reveille.
“That’s hardly draconian,” he said. “Change in grading has to come from the top. There are too many incentives for professors to confer easy A’s.”LSU is not currently considering any changes in grading because the Faculty Senate has not seen data to prove grade inflation is a big issue here, Perlis said.”We should be given what we earn,” said Devin Leivo, psychology freshman. “There shouldn’t be a quota on how well you can do.”Grade distribution for the campus as a whole has stayed fairly consistent since 2001, although the amount of B’s awarded has increased slightly, from 29.8 percent in fall 2001 to 32.3 percent last semester, according to data from the Office of Budget and Planning. “People used to talk about the ‘gentleman’s C,’ but students are not happy with that anymore,” Perlis said. Grade distribution varies among colleges and year classifications as well. The amount of A’s awarded in colleges varied from 26.8 percent in the E.J. Ourso College of Business to 79.1 percent in the School of Social Work last semester. The amount of A’s awarded consistently increases from freshmen to seniors.
This increase is typical after students develop a learning style, become more accustomed to life at the University and begin undertaking major-related course work, said Melissa Brocato, associate director for the Center for Academic Success.Historically, grades began to rise during the Vietnam War, Rojstaczer said, and the 1960s also started a steady increase of A’s given at LSU.While partially driven by sympathetic professors who didn’t want students to fail and be drafted for the war, it was also fashionable at the time for professors to be “leftists” and “Marxists,” he said.  “Somehow that translated into a feeling that professors should no longer promote hierarchal structures in the classroom,” he said.That feeling is still prevalent around some humanities departments, Rojstaczer said.Other historical milestones leading to inflation include the advent of the computer in the 1980s, resulting in papers with fewer typos and the Internet in the 1990s, allowing students to easily find resources for papers, but also allowing for easier plagiarism, he said. “Probably the biggest influence on grading since Vietnam was the widespread use of student evaluations beginning in the 1980s,” Rojstaczer said. Many professors feel pressured to give better grades because of teacher evaluations, said sociology professor Yoshinori Kamo.
 
Percent of A’s awarded per college during spring 2008 (least to most):
E.J. Ourso College of Business:                   26.8College of Engineering:                                29.1College of Basic Sciences:                           29.3Manship School of Mass Communication:   30.0College of Arts and Sciences:                      30.3School of the Coast and Environment:        34.4College of Agriculture:                                 37.5College of Art and Design:                          40.7College of Education:                                  48.8College of Music and Dramatic Arts:           55.9Library and Information Science:                 59.6School of Social Work:                                79.1- – – -Contact Olga Kourilova at [email protected]