Reports from the Office of the Registrar reflecting the distribution of student cumulative averages at Amherst seem to indicate similar findings. Forty-nine percent of students in the senior classes of 1998, 1999 and 2000 earned cumulative averages of A-minus or higher. Furthermore, ten years ago (in the senior classes of 1988, 1989 and 1990), only 34 percent of the students earned cumulative averages of A-minus or higher.
Dean of Students Ben Lieber said that Amherst faculty members are carefully considering the issue of grade inflation.
"Latin honors used to be tied exclusively to writing a thesis, but a few years ago it was changed so that Latin honors are given out according to [grade point average]," Lieber said, suggesting that Latin honors may be "given out too loosely" due to grade inflation. Lieber added that the faculty will be discussing this issue at their next faculty meeting on Feb. 20.
One of the effects of grade inflation is that a student's performance is reflected more in pluses and minuses than in individual letter grades. The difference between an A and a B forty years ago is similar to the difference between an A and an A-minus now, according to Professor of English Robert Townsend.
"Clearly, the grades have moved up," said Townsend. "There is a distinction between pluses and minuses in high grades. Where they used to go from A to D, they might now go from A to C ... It doesn't take great insight to translate. The middle has gone from B-minus to B-plus. I feel I am apportioning things in similar ways."
With grade inflation, the GPA gap between the average and the top students has decreased.
"There is one real inequity in the grade inflation," said Professor of Political Science Ronald Tiersky. "The students who would have gotten an A under the old system now are given an A in a category with students who would have gotten an A-minus or B-plus in the old system. Students who do the best quality work are not recognized the way they used to be."
Tiersky estimated that "51 percent of the school graduated with magna honors last year," and considered this "a real scandal."
Though Tiersky does not approve of the inflation, he said he didn't want his students "to be disadvantaged because [he] might be trying to maintain the old standard, when everyone else is grading on a new standard."
"It's not fair for me to do that," he said.
"Many faculty believe there are only three grades-A, A-minus and B-plus-and that anything else indicates a serious problem," said Tiersky.
The argument that grades are up because students are more prepared is controversial.
"I don't sense a huge difference in preparation between students nowadays and students a few years ago," Lieber said. "However, there is certainly more anxiety around needing to go on to graduate school, and more and more students hold themselves to a higher standard, which could certainly be a factor."
Townsend attributes higher grades to students' work ethic.
"Grades are inflated because students are better than they used to be. They ought to be, after all, given the level of preparation and competition," said Townsend.
Students themselves often advance this argument, despite the fact that over the time period when grades were inflating most rapidly-from 1965 to 1980-average SAT, ACT and GRE scores were in decline, according to Bradford P. Wilson, executive director of the National Association of Scholars.
Wilson also points to statistics in the book "When Hope and Fear Collide" that suggest that the percentage of Cs and As students received from early 1969 to 1993 on American campuses of every variety reversed itself. While seven percent of all students received grades of A-minus or higher in 1969, this proportion had risen to 26 percent by 1993. Grades of C or lower shifted from representing 25 percent of grades in 1969 to representing only nine percent of grades in 1993.
Grade inflation began during the Vietnam war when college students needed Cs or higher to be kept out of the draft.