Grade Inflation or Course Content Inflation

Grade inflation is often a topic of heated debate in educational environments. There seems to be a tendency for more and more students in a course to get higher and higher grades. This certainly can be the result of instructors making the course content easier and easier, but there could be other factors. As the instructor gets better in presenting the course materials, the instructor could be gaining the ability to reach more students and thus produce higher grades, the students could be getting more motivated and doing better, or the textbooks could even be better. Schools often respond with the view, that there must be something wrong if every student gets high grades and this must mean that the material presented is simply not sufficiently difficult and "challenging".

Imagine for an instant that we have a group of 10 student surgeons that are learning to amputate a leg. We decide that they all have a grade of "A" in the procedure, so now we have to design a new course that is sufficiently more challenging to force some student doctors to get lower grades. We then institute a new type of practical exam, where a student doctor must be able to perform the amputation blindfolded and we even end up with one passing this exam with flying colors.

It is not likely we would want to trust such a procedure to a doctor that can perform the procedure blindfolded. In this extreme example the test for the course content has exceeded reasonable evaluation. I happen to teach a course titled "Introduction to Computers" and the content of this course has tended to migrate into "Intermediate" or even "Advanced" computer topics. As a result, I have seen students drop the class that were really just beginners on the computer and were expecting a course that was truly "Introduction", but which was not an introductory course. Grades in such a class would conveniently be forced into a "bell" curve and the administration would be happy, but we have lost some students along the way that fully deserve a course that has content that is represented according to the title of the course.

We may have grade inflation, but we also have content migration. Once a course content has moved effectively into a higher level of presentation in is not simply more challenging, it is inappropriate because it is not titled correctly, leading to student frustration, and an increased drop out rate.