All together now: this is not how it works

Today's New York Times prints a letter that offers one of the most common excuses for grade inflation:

Yet rather than professors' being more lenient today, couldn't one explanation be simply that the students are brighter?

With more young people competing for spaces at the top colleges, and fewer being admitted solely on the basis of family connections or socioeconomic class, it is possible that the caliber of the students has simply increased.

As I've said before, this argument is riddled with holes. Most seriously, it presumes that standards for achievement are somehow fixed in granite, when, in fact, they move according to the overall performance of any given student cohort. When one of my good friends matriculated at Princeton, he discovered that everyone in one of his classes had been class valedictorian. If instructors consistently face that caliber of student over time, they will unconsciously revise their requirements for exceptional achievement; thus, to use my favorite example, if you can reliably assume that most of your students have mastered Standard Written English, then mastery of Standard Written English comes to define acceptable achievement--a "C." Similarly, if your students normally enter with the ability to close read a text, then the ability to perform a competent close reading falls under the heading of acceptable performance, not exceptional performance. This basic point remains true both over time and across institutional differences. While it's reasonable to expect that there will be more "A"s at Princeton than, say, Fourth-Tier Directional State--that is, more students who can achieve over and beyond the instructor's minimal expectations--there shouldn't be that many more "A"s, because an instructor at Princeton and an instructor at F-TDS will have different definitions of "exceptional." Similarly, to use the letter-writer's point, if students are getting smarter over time, then the instructor's criteria will eventually change to reflect that improvement.

Moreover, when the writer invokes "socioeconomic class," she sidesteps a different issue: how high tuition rates have the unintended side effect of pressuring faculty to inflate the grades. (The recent CoHE article on Princeton, which I discussed earlier, made this problem explicit.) Students--and their parents--don't want to shell out $20,000 per year for "C"s.