Grade inflation has popped up again in the news, this time with the disclosure that it has spread to American high schools. High schools, public and especially private, now serve up 50 percent A’s to their students, just like the universities. It’s part of the college preparation track in high schools to keep graduates from being shocked by the flattery they are about to receive from the college of their choice.
We have reason to believe that the high schools are inflating grades because scores on the SAT (test of aptitude) have dipped slightly as grades have gone up. It is easy to attempt too much refinement in quantitative measures of human behavior and easier still to attempt to gain trust for the results. But the new standard of high schools and the most prestigious colleges is to give more straight A’s than any other grade. Just to hear that is enough to know that something is wrong in American education.
How deeply wrong? I have been speaking against grade inflation most of my career, and the longer I continue, the deeper I think the wrong of it goes. The last time I raised the matter at a Harvard faculty meeting, I was greeted by embarrassed silence. The faculty senate considered it for a while—and decided to do nothing, not even to deplore it. President Drew Faust has to my recollection and in my hearing never said anything about it. Among the Ivy League universities Princeton decided a few years ago to take measures to reduce grade inflation, hoping to be followed by others. But after getting no response other than student complaints, a new president rescinded Princeton’s modest reform.
Almost nobody tries to defend grade inflation. Some try to excuse it by saying that students are smarter than they used to be. I doubt it, but suppose it is so: Are students smarter in the way that the whole top half deserves the same highest grade? In this distribution, quantity swallows quality as the B performance, or even the B-minus one, becomes unified with the B-plus, the A-minus, and the straight A. The “fairly good” B-minus becomes as good or almost as good as the best.
When the top grade is given to half the students, not extraordinarily but normally, the academic standard by which all grades are given is either disregarded or rejected. Not only are distinctions among the top students lost but the distinction between an “honor grade,” traditionally B and above, and an average grade disappears. Today a C is received as would be a sword thrust into one’s vitals, and it is given only reluctantly and not for an average but for a bad performance. Hence the notion of “self-esteem” has come to be established as an entitlement to equal dignity for all rather than reserved for estimable persons.
No longer does American education uphold a distinction between average students and the elite. In practice there is and must be a distinction that no teacher can ignore between the two groups, but we deprecate it and do not uphold it. The idea of “elite” does remain, especially for sports, where it is sanctified in the celebrity of the extremely well-paid best players. In colleges it is also kept for the summa or highest academic graduates. But with grade inflation, the margin of the best over the pack has to be razor-thin, as most everyone is deemed close to the best.
Grade inflation is hardly grading; it yields marks with little or no gradation. With so many high grades there is flattening not only at the top but throughout. The “honor grade”—signifying what one would praise—is extended to cover the average performance that one would accept as satisfactory. B becomes A and C becomes B. This phenomenon, known as “grade compression,” is widely regarded as a vice, but the harm it does is underestimated. It may seem to be merely a failure of measurement hardened into routine because most everybody likes easy grades. But it is more: It shows disregard for the special ambition of modern, and particularly American, democracy.
At its founding America was established as a “republic” rather than a “democracy,” meaning pure democracy (see James Madison’s Federalist 10). Today we have dropped the distinction of name between the two, but the difference can be seen still in the phrases “constitutional” or “liberal” democracy, as opposed to pure democracy. A pure democracy does not tolerate differences of ability and status, but a prudently qualified democracy encourages excellence of performance and permits inequality of status.
The combination America has sought of respect for excellence and insistence on equality has always characterized American education. Such a combination is necessarily tense and difficult. Its classical expression can be found in Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal versus his acknowledgment that our democracy must make a place for the “natural aristocracy” of “virtue and talents.” The first was addressed to the world, the second occurs in a private letter to John Adams in 1813. One must be careful about announcing the need for an elite, but the need is all the more compelling as it is harder to defend.
Today the tension between equality and excellence is shown in attacks on “elitism.” This aversion would naturally arise in people who believe that they gain no advantage from excellence because they do not have it themselves. They share the spirit of democratic ostracism in the Athenians, who exiled Aristides because he was too just. In this view excellence is a source of danger to the people because it will be used to exploit them rather than benefit them. Or if excellence is not a danger, it is an irritation and its mere existence a slight to average folk. Anyone better than you has a claim on your admiration that your vanity may find irksome.
“Elitism” means taking the side of the elite against the rest. Those opposed to elitism alternate between denying the worth of any elite and alleging that people suffer under an unjustified, existing elite that is harmful. These anti-elitist folks are at present in charge of American education. They are themselves an elite, an elite united against elitism.
The elite of anti-elitists could have satisfied their opposition by giving the same average grade to all students, thus enhancing democratic equality. In so doing they could have vaunted the virtues of ordinary citizens, who are more good-hearted than hard-driving ambitious types and less pretentious than intellectuals. But instead they have chosen to swamp the elite by bestowing elite grades on average students. It is as if elitist pretension could be cured by universalizing it, forcing it on those without pretensions.
Grade inflation has become an issue between the parties, with liberals in favor or not opposed and conservatives standing up for academic standards. In the universities there are a few liberal professors who resist grade inflation, but most welcome it. Conservative professors resist it but ineffectually, since they are too few to matter and to grade strictly would be punishing their own students.
An earlier generation of liberals thought and acted otherwise. They came on the scene after World War II and included in their number many Jews who for the first time were getting the university admissions and appointments they deserved. They came upon incumbent faculties of largely conservative old fogies by whom they were mostly welcomed—yet whom they replaced. These liberals emptied the most prestigious colleges of the “gentleman’s C,” using the SAT exam and more vigorous recruiting methods to find able prospects outside the usual prep school sources and legacy families. They were liberal Democrats almost to a man, but their principle was meritocracy. These were the professors who taught me at Harvard (graduating in 1953), and they would have been appalled by 50 percent A grades.
This generation in academia was conscious of being an elite and proud of having replaced an inferior elite. They understood that the principle of excellence that they had espoused, and which of course benefited them, was one that had to be applied to their own students and to their own families as well. Within the elite the principle of merit was as necessary as outside it. There had to be an average at Harvard as well as outside it. The great goal of admission to a top university having been realized, one had to join a new competition and be judged by a much higher standard than before.
Liberals today, however, have a new principle of inclusiveness that is not so friendly to merit. They believe in affirmative action to include overlooked groups, as did the earlier liberals, but these are groups of the vulnerable and the oppressed, neglected and forgotten, rather than “virtue and talents.” Vulnerable groups no doubt have merit and outstanding qualities, but they are sought out because they are held down rather than for what they can contribute. So for the sake of inclusiveness, they must all be given high grades rather than average or low grades. It is no accident, in sum, that affirmative action and grade inflation in the universities came on the scene together, during and just after the late sixties.
Our democracy needs an elitism of merit, of Jefferson’s “virtue and talents,” in combination with its relentless drive toward equality. It wants to include everyone, but to do this accurately and well, it must discover and nourish the merits that distinguish individuals within that “everyone.”
Americans can be aroused against an elite, as we have seen in the rise and reign of Donald Trump, but they are not determined enemies of all elites. Grade inflation disgraces our schools and universities today. It was born and it thrives not by demand of the American people but through the feckless administration of American education by our present-day liberal elite.
Harvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
