Study: Grade inflation plagues SUS

Many universities tout their high six-year graduation rates as a sign of academic excellence. But these schools are often quiet about a growing problem that frequently surrounds those statistics: grade inflation.

The Fort Myers News-Press recently investigated 12 years of university-wide grade point averages (GPAs) in the State University System and found what it described as “strong evidence of grade inflation at Florida and Florida State and moderate inflation at Central Florida, North Florida and Florida Atlantic.” (Click here for a spreadsheet)

UF’s average GPA jumped from 3.07 in spring 1999 to 3.30 in spring 2009. FSU had the second highest leap, going from 2.78 in spring 1999 to 3.05 in fall 2008.

UF officials are not concerned.

“If you look at the profile of our incoming students over the last 10, 15, 20 years, there certainly is an upward trend," said Steve Orlando, director of media relations. "The demand has increased so much that we've been forced to be more selective with our admissions.”

Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor who studies grade inflation, doesn’t buy UF’s explanation and believes the school’s soaring average GPA raises a red flag.

“Some administrators and professors have tried to ascribe much of the increase in GPA since the mid-1980s to improvements in student quality,” Rojstaczer said. “Such quantitative efforts are of dubious worth because even the organization that administers the SAT test, the College Board, is unable to show that SAT scores are a good predictor of college GPA.”

Rojstaczer believes the biggest factor behind grade inflation since the 1980s is higher education’s adoption of a “consumer-based culture.”

“Students are paying more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the reward of a good grade for their purchase,” he said. “In this culture, professors are not only compelled to grade easier, but also to water down course content. Both intellectual rigor and grading standards have weakened.”

FAMU did not submit its GPA averages to the News-Press by the paper’s May 20, 2009 deadline. But Rojstaczer says his studies have shown that: “Non-selective public schools (typically with 15 percent rejection rates or less) with GPAs in the 2.8 range or less tend to have only modest grade inflation. Some have none.”

In fall 2008, FAMU admitted 3,518 of the 5,828 students who submitted applications. That’s an acceptance rate of about 60 percent.

Skyrocketing GPAs are not a new problem in the SUS. 35 years ago, Board of Regents Chairman Marshall Criser called the state’s grade inflation rate a “national disgrace.”

According to a 1974 BOR report that was cited by the St. Petersburg Times, “The toughest grading is at [FAMU] where only 48.4 percent of the grades were A’s and B’s in 1973, 28.3 percent were C’s and 15.5 percent D’s and F’s. FAMU also had less grade inflation.”