CU’s Brown: Make grades meaningful, not inflated

By Jessica Peck Corry

This column originally appeared in the Pueblo Chieftain on September 30, 2007

An “A” should mean something. That’s the point of University of Colorado President Hank Brown’s latest effort to increase the academic rigor students are exposed to on the university’s campuses.

After decades of grade inflation, CU is fighting back by making students work harder to earn top grades. In the process, officials are fighting a national trend that clearly has rewarded students with higher grades for weaker academic performances.

According to CU Provost Phil DiStefano, CU’s recent efforts to fight grade inflation are showing small but significant progress. Student grade point averages have fallen from an average of 2.99 (on a 4.0 scale) in 2004 to a 2.94 in 2006, indicating that the average student is going to earn a B- in a typical course. Both figures indicate a significant jump from 1989, when published reports showed an average student GPA of 2.83.

While some would like to believe that higher grades indicate students are trying harder, a short conversation with any professor will prove otherwise.

Political science students know less about economics than they did a decade ago. A recent national survey indicates that only one in two CU students can pass a basic civic literacy exam. And one chemistry professor I spoke with said he fears what will happen over the next several decades as students fail to master skill sets, including organic chemistry, essential to excelling at medical school and beyond.

The fact is higher grades are being awarded because professors are caving to rising pressure by students and parents who demand them. Grades matter a lot more than they did a decade ago as more students prepare to meet the competitive GPA entrance requirements demanded at most top graduate-level programs.

It’s clear to see why most universities have looked the other way at grade padding. Why not give students a boost if it means the university as a whole gains a competitive edge? There are plenty of reasons.

Grade inflation hurts poor students and top students alike - making it harder to separate out a truly exceptional student from her peers. It also clearly punishes students who take tough courses; grade inflation is more prevalent in the soft sciences and humanities than it is in the hard sciences and mathematics. Why take a tough science class and risk a low grade when you can take a communications course and guarantee yourself an A? Certainly, even good students could be tempted to choose the former option.

CU is taking its courageous stand at a time when other universities are simply looking the other way. According to Stuart Rojstaczer, a Stanford-educated professor who runs the Web site www.gradeinflation.com, grade padding is a national epidemic.

According to Rojstaczer’s 2003 analysis, grades across the U.S. have risen at a rate of .015 per decade on a 4.0 scale since the 1960s. Students once likely to languish on academic probation are now rewarded with the “above average” status of earning a B, and the B students of a generation ago now qualify for Phi Beta Kappa.

Colorado students facing tougher standards may now wish they had invested in a private college. Grade inflation appears far worse at private institutions, including Harvard, where students have to fight to earn anything less than top honors. A widely publicized report by the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates in the early 2000s, more than 90 percent of all Harvard undergraduates were awarded honors upon graduation.

So why does this matter? Human beings - especially those in academia - are slaves to our egos. We want to be the best. When schools turn the other cheek to grade inflation, they send a dangerous message that mediocrity is tolerated and excellence is rarely rewarded.

All of this reminds me of a life lesson I learned in first grade, when at my school’s much anticipated field day, every competitor was awarded a blue ribbon. Clearly, this was an effort to build self-esteem. At the end of the day, when we stood on a stage, our parents applauded and our teachers called us stars. But even at the tender age of 6 or 7, my classmates and I knew better.

We all remembered who won the three-legged race (it certainly wasn’t my team). In trying to make us all feel like winners, we instead came away with the feeling that we shouldn’t even have bothered trying if our efforts didn’t change the end result. Even 6-year-olds can see through rewarding mediocrity.

CU is fighting back against the temptation of making everyone an honors student. While students may groan today, they’ll be thanking their professors down the road. They’ll be able to hold their heads high with dignity, knowing that at the end of the day, their efforts - good or bad - were properly rewarded.

Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@i2i.org) directs the Independence Institute’s Campus Accountability Project, a policy center dedicated to protecting free speech, individual rights and fiscal accountability in higher education.

This column originally appeared in the Denver Post’s PoliticsWest section on September 13, 2007

By Jessica Peck Corry

If you can’t handle conflict, uncertainty, or new ideas, you must be a conservative. This is the bigoted conclusion being tossed about in the aftermath of a new university study alleging that the brains of conservatives and liberals work very differently.

In a haphazard experiment released this month in Nature Neuroscience, scientists from New York University and the University of California at Los Angeles claim that they have successfully navigated the neurobiology of politics, and in doing so, have discovered that certain brain activity can be directly tied to an individual’s political ideology.

Those endorsing the study’s findings say they show that liberals were nearly five times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and more than twice as likely to accurately answer study questions.

Call me a skeptic. How can scientists tie brain function to socially constructed political distinctions that are constantly changing? The bottom line: They can’t.

The first problem with such a study is its methodology. After all, who decides just what exactly constitutes conservative or liberal? According to researchers, 43 study volunteers, over a period of 500 different trials, were asked to rate their political leanings based on a scale from negative five (considered “extremely liberal”) to positive five (”very conservative”).

Participants were then given a computerized test designed to test their ability to break from habitual responses.

Here is how the study worked:

A bunch of college kids, first asked to define their political ideology, were then put in front of computers and wired to machines that recorded activity in the anterior cingulated cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between habitual tendencies and a more appropriate response.

Specifically, participants were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. Showing their sneaky resolve, researchers designed the study to ensure that the letter M appeared four times more frequently than W, something they say conditioned participants to press a key in “knee-jerk” fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Researchers used responses to support a conclusion that liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives. There are countless problems with such a conclusion—but I’ll limit my analysis to just a few of the more obvious weaknesses.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes on a college campus knows that the vast majority of young political activists treasure passion over reason.

And while they may eagerly define themselves with one political ideology over another, they may not fully understand the confines and opportunities within different political or economic arguments. As a result, today’s liberals can be tomorrow’s conservatives.

Let’s say that instead, however, the participants had all been tenured professors at an Ivy League institution, well-educated in different political ideologies. Allowing participants to self-define is still problematic.

An expert on America’s founding principles may define himself as a liberal due to his commitment to “classical” liberalism’s individualism and free markets (a concept today associated with conservative causes).

Meanwhile, a Marxist women’s studies professor may define herself “liberal” based on her loyalty to educating students on the values of social collectivism.

According to researchers, which professor would qualify as the true liberal?

The study’s findings are also problematic because they assume that a person’s physical or psychological ability to respond to changing letter patterns on a computer screen somehow translates into their willingness to accept social or political change.

Every day, life events change who we are and our willingness to accept new politically-charged concepts.

A conservative minister’s son coming out of the closet will likely impact the family’s views on homosexuality, just as a liberal homeowner may second guess the virtues of high taxation when he’s faced with a property tax bill he can’t afford.

While the study’s conclusions remain highly questionable, using science to bash conservatives as a close-mind class is nothing new. Frequently in the past, academics have published their polemics parading as legitimate psychological studies.

According to a Los Angeles Times report: “Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences.”

As a policy analyst specializing in higher education, I frequently hear similarly dangerous ideas espoused as fact. Most common—there aren’t as many conservative college professors because conservatives care more about making money than they do about investing in public service careers like teaching. Such rhetoric wrongly assumes that conservatives aren’t discriminated against every day in the hiring process—a fact I’ve witnessed on multiple occasions.

It also assumes that professors today are lowly public servants, when in fact many are pulling down six-figure salaries, paid vacations and posh benefits. It’s a lifestyle many private sector capitalists can only envy from afar.

While the study’s lead author, David Amodio, an NYU assistant psychology professor, has publicly cautioned against making widespread conclusions about any potential for the ideological supremacy of liberals, the study’s botched methodology gives ample opportunity for those seeking to do so.

Such hesitation should be applauded—but certainly wasn’t properly explored in any major media coverage. The message sent was clear: conservatives are bigots—slow to accept new ideas and unable to embrace change.

In the Los Angeles Times coverage, Frank J. Sulloway, a well-known visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research, says such results “provided an elegant demonstration” that liberals are more likely to accept social, scientific, or religious ideas. Might be a nice idea if we could just figure out how to define liberals and conservatives.

Just as we can’t find an answer to every social problem solely by turning to public policy, we can’t explain away human behavior by looking at brain scans. Human beings, for good or bad, are just too complicated for such an elementary analysis.

Editor’s note: Jessica Peck Corry’s weekly blogs are part of a new feature on NewWest.Net/Politics called “Diary of a Mad Voter,” a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. Check back this week at www.newwest.net/madvoter.