I wonder whether it's a really bad idea

to let my students in on the fact that I read this blog

Election Day Special: Friday Five on a Monday!

All politics this time--what else would we be thinking about?

The Republican mayor of San Diego changes his mind on Prop 8

Nate Silver's final pre-election take on the cellphone effect

From Errol Morris, People in the Middle for Obama--I'm always interested in how Morris moves between documentary and advocacy


My Wife Made Me Canvas for Obama; Here's What I Learned

Finally, don't worry: my opinions aren't likely to influence my students'.

How to find a paper topic: general principles

This post is a call for collective wisdom. I'm not teaching this year, but a former student wrote to see if I had any general advice about choosing a topic for a paper. I told him that I'm not used to answering that question in the abstract; I usually talk about the process with specific references to an assignment I've given and the readings for a course I'm teaching. However, I like to attempt formulating useful advice that applies to contexts other than my own classroom, so I said I'd take a shot at my own answer and then put the question to you, my wise and delightful and, may I say, attractive readership. Let loose in the comments! My answer, below, has in mind an advanced undergraduate assignment in English, but you don't have to limit yourself to that case.

Here was my first shot at an answer:

1. This page from Purdue is a decent starting point. It basically takes the idea of a good thesis and works backwards to some tips on finding a topic.

2. In my humble opinion, however, that page might be too quick to tell the writer to rely on his or her own thoughts. Much of originality comes from borrowing, and as long as reading outside sources is not forbidden, I recommend doing some reading as early as possible in the process. Seeing what published critics have said about a text can be a good way to find out what issues and questions are settled and which ones still provoke useful exploration. I am not suggesting a full research process, just the idea that research and topic generation can happen simultaneously.

3. Finally, I think that at this early stage, decisiveness is good in itself. You can leave yourself room to change your mind, but lots of topics can create good papers if you devote a lot of time and creativity to the process, leaving yourself space to rethink your own ideas and have other people react to them. Picking a topic early, even if the choice involves a little bit of forced decisiveness, can focus your attention in useful ways. I learned this primarily by means of a graduate seminar outside of my field in which the professor made every student choose a play to write about almost immediately (before we had read most of them) and write a project proposal only a few weeks later. It felt crazy at first, but then we all had a solid couple of months to research and execute the papers, and that was fantastic. Sometimes it's worth forcing the issue.

More on the obscured ceiling

I've fielded some questions, on and off the blog, about my post last week on obscuring the ceiling--that is, on the ways we sabotage our own performance to avoid the pain that might come from discovering our limitations. Off the blog, an alumna asked what we do with this knowledge. In the blog comments, Katherine wrote that the post "reminded me of what people invariably say when you talk about applying for something: 'What's the worst that could happen?' This obviously implies that rejection is the worst that could happen, and that rejection isn't that bad. In fact, as you point out (without being flippant) rejection really IS the worst thing that could happen." Hilary wrote in response, "I would say then, Katherine, that the worst thing is not rejection, but a paralyzing fear of that rejection that keeps us from trying, learning and growing." And then Hilary added two questions for me: "who defines the ceiling (and, relatedly, success)? and is the ceiling ever actually a ceiling?"

Hilary has already hit upon the primary thing I would say in response to the alumna who asked for actions to take to avoid self-destructive obscuring of ceilings. I'm working all of this out for myself, but my sense is that the key lies in redefining the "worst that could happen," as in the question Katherine quotes.

Rejection is not the worst that can happen. Failing to know the best you can do, wasting your time, missing an opportunity to get valuable responses to your best ideas: these are worse. To paraphrase Yeats--Adrienne Rich reminded me of this notion in a reading last week--the worst case is failing to have the courage of your own thought.

Hilary's questions establish the ways in which having the courage to reveal your ceiling becomes a complex and fluid process. Who defines your ceiling? You do, you must, but you will do well to incorporate the honest criticism of trusted others. And is the ever ceiling actually a ceiling? Yes, in some ways--even Bolt isn't running the hundred in eight seconds--but in most circumstances, most of us have plenty of space to grow. Perhaps the best thing about refusing to obscure your own ceiling is the discovery that it's harder to hit than you imagined.

Rejection is not the worst that can happen.

Obscuring the ceiling: how good students strategically sabotage themselves

How is a procrastinator like Usain Bolt--in a bad way?

After I wrote this post about Usain Bolt on my sports blog last week, Grinnell alum Hung Pham initiated a conversation about the post in which Pham used the idea of obscuring the ceiling to describe what I was commenting on in Bolt's pre-finish line celebration in the 100-meter dash.

Obscuring the ceiling is what I think Bolt successfully did in his race: I argued that by celebrating before the finish line, Bolt let everyone imagine how much faster he might have run--and those imaginings have, in fact, credited him with being even faster than he is. If obscuring the ceiling can make perhaps the fastest human who has ever lived seem faster, it is a powerful tool indeed.

Pham's phrasing helped me articulate something that had nagged at me since I praised the power of Bolt's maneuver: I've seen this before. And after a few days, I got it. Obscuring the ceiling is what a lot of my students do--and a number of people I know in other ways, but I think of this phenomenon primarily through my teaching.

To the best of my memory, when I started teaching about 15 years ago, I thought of student motivation like this: every student is more or less self-motivated, and every student has positive and negative external forces that affect performance. That is, I imagined intrinsic factors to be neutral or positive--at worst, the absence of positive motivation. What surprised me, therefore (and I've seen it surprise other new teachers), is the extent to which students will actively sabotage themselves in all manner of small and large ways: doing work well but handing it in late, making flamboyantly bad choices about time management, and so forth. I slowly came to realize that many of my students were choosing to incur penalties consistently so that I never got a chance to judge their best work in a straightforward way. That was the point. If you never try your hardest, nobody can ever find your limits. Like Usain Bolt, you have obscured your ceiling.

When I started articulating this idea, Molly Backes, an alumna of Grinnell's education program, pointed out the similarity of my thinking to Martin Covington's failure quadrant, which, as she put it, goes something like this:

* if you try really hard and still fail, you feel the worst
* if you try really hard and fail -- but you have an excuse, like
your grandmother just died -- you feel less bad
* if you don't try at all and fail, you feel better
* if you don't try at all and you have an excuse, you feel best

Another alumna pointed me to Homer Simpson's more concise formulation: "trying is the first step toward failure."

I had brought up this subject through the words of Malcolm Gladwell, who put the point yet another way in an interview with Bill Simmons, discussing sports:

Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

I return to the subject now because the exaggerated glorification of Bolt's run has reminded me of the profound effectiveness of obscuring the ceiling. If the fastest runner in history can make most people think he is even faster by obscuring his ceiling, how tempting must it be for the rest of us to use the same method when we can protect our self-image?

We are starting to understand how to avoid the temptations of obscuring the ceiling: valuing the produce of work rather than the aura of talent, seeking the lessons of failure instead of making excuses, trying to improve even upon apparent successes.

I have only begun to recognize and struggle with the means of obscuring ceilings within myself, and I feel I have even farther to go in understanding how to help my students find, reveal, and shatter their own ceilings

Comments are most welcome. Especially critical ones!

(This post is crossposted at Sports Guy Talkin' Crazy Again.)

Book review: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I started reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion after Tyler Cowen called it "one of [his] favorite social science books." I can see why: although some of Cialdini's points have become relatively commonplace since the book's initial publication in 1984, Influence still provides an engaging blend of social scientific scholarship, anecdotes of Cialdini's undercover ventures as a "compliance professional," and something like the self-help genre in Cialdini's advice on resisting each of the compliance techniques he describes under the headings reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

I'll supplement this main review post with some snapshot reactions to a few of Cialdini's points that prompted me to think of specific tangential issues. For now, two overarching thoughts:

First, this book provides a valuable counterpoint to works of behavioral psychology and economics that emphasize the internal biases that affect individual decision-making. Although those works sometimes address social factors and Cialdini sometimes touches on the classic behavioralist issues (loss aversion, endowment effects, etc.), Cialdini's focus on influence and compliance is still refreshing.

Second, the more practical side of Influence, especially the information that flows out of Cialdini's undercover work, raises issues akin to those of publicizing methods of picking door locks. Cialdini is handing out the keys to human consent. Cialdini's direct advice is almost entirely defensive--he tells the reader how to ward off the tools of compliance, not how to deploy them--but it is easy enough to imagine ways to gain influence. For one example, I am highly confident that the techniques Cialdini describes, carefully applied, could help professors positively influence students' evaluations of their courses--an extremely valuable skill. I leave the reader to consider the implications of that possibility.

Conclusions, part II: so what?

Can we do better than "so what"?

Last week, I posted some thoughts about teaching the art of the conclusion--that is, about explaining the elusive something more that teachers often ask their students to provide. Here I continue my search for the language and examples that will help my students write conclusions. The next and probably final installment of this series will address the journalistic kicker, a subject Michael raised in the comments last week.

Today, however, I ponder the question, "so what?" When I was a student, I saw many teachers tell students that papers should convey answers to that question. When my undergraduate thesis adviser, Patricia Meyer Spacks, received a set of term paper drafts that disappointed her, she gently explained what she was looking for and wrote on the chalkboard in dramatically ungentle four-foot letters, "SO WHAT?"

When essays do find ways to answer the question, the effects can be wonderful. Take, for example, this striking little essay by Phillip Davis about the neurological effects of reading Shakespeare. Having set up a series of problems at the beginning of the piece, Davis shares a few data points in the middle, and about two-thirds of the way in, he writes--as its own paragraph--"so what?"

Davis answers the question powerfully, with a series of insights that expand in scope until they culminate in this final paragraph:

It is early days. But I am getting a greater sense of how and why Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality, making me feel more alive in more unpredictable mental ways when I read or see his work. I am also getting a sense of an underlying shape to experience, as though the syntax in front of my eyes were keying into mental pathways behind them, and shifting and reconfiguring them dramatically in the theatre of the brain.

Yes, that will do nicely as the something more.

All this said in favor of the "so what" approach, however, I must come to an anticlimax: in my own teaching, I have not found that asking "so what?"--or suggesting that students ask it of themselves--does much good. The question may be too vague, or it may be too hard to unburden it of its commonly dismissive inflection: "Yeah, well, so what if it is?"

My current idea is to revise the "so what" approach in two ways: first by switching the language to "and what does that mean?"--with the suggestion that the best essays will find ways to answer the question multiple times. And what does that mean? And second, I want to make the function of the conclusion more concrete by saying that it releases the pain the introduction has inflicted--an approach I'll explore when I come to ponder introductions within the next week or two.

A cliffhanger!

On conclusions and addictive thoughts

I'm working on a series of posts in which I seek new ways to talk to college writers about the nature of introductions and conclusions. Today, a first musing on conclusions.

David Carr recently published in the New York Times this astonishing bit of his new book The Night of the Gun. Carr's piece has from the beginning the advantage of ready-made biographical drama, as it recounts his recovery from addiction to become a successful journalist and father. It surpasses other, superficially similar narratives, however, by adding moments such as this one:

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

Carr's ability to relate his own story but also step outside it and theorize it--and for all its engaging concreteness of word and image, this is a bit of unabashed theory--gives the reader a quick prompt to consider questions of gender, genre, and narrative structure that reach well beyond the essay's interesting but relatively ordinary musings on the uncertainty of memory. The passage strikes me as an example of what we teachers of writing have in mind when we tell students that an essay's conclusion should add something more, something that teases out the implications of an argument without simply changing the subject.

I feel the difficulty of describing the goals of critical essays using the example of a bit of memoir. If you would like to ponder the translation of similar subject matter into academic prose, have a gander at this review essay covering a number of new books on brain science. Let's ride this post out on a quotation:

Instead of recalling the experiences of both pleasure-filled high and painful withdrawal, the addict's memories may be overwhelmed by the powerful neural connections previously created by the drug. Only if memory is a matter of reconstruction of latent physical traces, not direct recall of past events, Changeux argues, could these kind of drug-induced long-term compulsions occur.

Listening to college

Over at The Quick and the Ed, an exceptionally interesting policy blog, Education Sector policy manager Kevin Carey has posted his thoughts about a presumed competition between audio courses such as those produced by The Teaching Company and free videos of Yale courses. (One could use other examples to make the point: Barnes and Noble has started its own line of audio courses, for example, and Berkeley and MIT have also made courses available online.) I always enjoy Carey's posts and generally find them convincing, but I think he misses the key issues when he assumes that the university courses can displace the commercial versions. (I feel the difference between these formats acutely today, as it happens, because I gave the first of three lectures I will give in this summer's Adult Community Exploration Series at Grinnell; in format, ACES is roughly a shortened, free, live version of a Teaching Company course. I have spent a lot of the past week adapting materials from my college courses to the ACES format and therefore pondering the transformations that process involves.)

I have listened to some of those Teaching Company tapes and have also listened to some of the online college courses, especially a Berkeley course in economics. I enjoy both formats but find them fundamentally different. Aside from the quality of academic content (which is generally strong in both modes), the appeal of The Teaching Company's courses lies in their ability to make the listener feel included in the world of the course. The lecturer speaks directly to the customer who buys the Teaching Company course, carefully contextualizing the materials for an intelligent but nonspecialist audience. The lectures are self-contained; the listener may feel inspired to read some primary materials, but such reading is not expected or required. The Teaching Company sells the feeling of full membership in an excellent lecturer's audience for the price of about a hundred dollars, depending on the course.

A university course, however, offers that sense of inclusion only to students who have done preparatory work for each class, and even for online observers who do that work, the experience of the free university courses is fundamentally alienating. The professor addresses the students in the room, takes care of the normal housekeeping that a college class requires, refers to events and people and gestures that are inaccessible to the online observer. I come to these classes having spent all but one year of my adult life in college classrooms, and even I find the format prohibitively unsociable. Such courses provide valuable guidance to exceptionally determined and disciplined students--a goal I support enthusiastically--but for better and for worse, they will not replace the more broadly welcoming format of The Teaching Company.

The strangeness of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Only this year did I stop to ponder the opening lines of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:


You know Dasher and Dancer
And Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid
And Donner and Blitzen.
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?


Hold on: these kids "know" the likes of Comet but might have forgotten Rudolph? And you can't say they're just working up to knowing the big one because they would have to "recall" the acknowledged "most famous reindeer." Nonsense and bollocks and humbug.

But we let that pass. Here's the part I've been thinking about more:


Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
Rudolph with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?
Then all the reindeer loved him ...


My first thought was that this is a prototypical nerd's fantasy, the dream of a world in which gaining the favor of a parent or teacher results, instantly and without explanation, in attaining the love of one's peers.

Maybe there's something to that reading, but I've come to a more universal one that I like better: that the song is less about the child's perspective than the adult's--the parent's. This is the fantasy of beholding a child subjected to laughter and name-calling and transforming the social world into one of approval and love. What power could a parent or teacher desire more, and what power is less attainable?

At this moment, the Santa myth meets the Christmas story in a beautifully complicated way: Santa's approval of Rudolph involves the God-like prevention of social wounds; the Christmas story has God subject God's child to the world's woundedness. And at some level, they both raise the problem of preventable even: until a moment of dramatic redemption, Santa and God both allow suffering they ostensibly have the power to stop.

The Rudolph story may gain its greatest complexity and interest, and its strongest connection to the more complicated mythologies of Christmas, when we imagine Rudolph going to bed Christmas night, exhausted and happy and loved, and wondering what will happen if the next Christmas Eve brings a clear sky.

A bizarre argument for arts education

I'm a big fan and proud veteran of public-school programs in the arts, especially music. Because I wish school arts programs well, I hope they enjoy better supporting arguments than this one, offered by Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland in the Boston Globe. (Winner and Hetland teach at Boston College and the Massachusetts College of Art, respectively.)

Starting with the big question, "Why do we teach the arts in schools?" Winner and Hetland argue, in brief,

1. The common claim that the arts make students "smarter" (or higher achievers) in other subject areas has not held up to scrutiny.

2. However, arts classes are valuable in another way because their teachers tend to use techniques that develop "life skills" such as critical self-examination more than teachers in other classes.

3. This "arts-like approach" can be adapted to teaching other subject areas.

That last step is the kicker: if the only demonstrable benefits of the "arts-like approach" can be exported straightforwardly out of the arts classroom, why should we bother with the arts classroom as anything but a transitional space, where certain (not very revolutionary) teaching techniques are examined and extracted until the arts themselves become wholly unnecessary?

Again, I write as a supporter of arts education, but the logic of this article, ostensibly in support of the cause, constitutes one of the most effective attacks on it that I have encountered.

The informal economics of class size at Grinnell

I was involved recently in an Internet discussion of the effects of class sizes in public schools. If you have followed such discussions, you can guess how this one went. When data from studies finding very small effects resulting from very large investments in smaller classes came up, the teachers in the discussion protested mightily, offering tales of the difficulties of teaching huge classes in the present system. My own teaching experience also leads me to think of class size as an important factor. Here, however, I want to sidestep the normal policy debate to share my experience watching students negotiate the marketplace of course registration at Grinnell.

For starters, let's note that Grinnell students tend to be a politically liberal bunch who chose to attend a school that aggressively advertises the smallness of its classes; I'll wager almost all of them, if asked in abstract terms, would say that they value small classes as a policy objective and a personal preference.

Now here's what I mean about the marketplace of course registration. Let's say you have 50 students who can choose between two sections of the same class. The students choose in order, always knowing the current enrollment of each section. For whatever reason, they believe that the teacher of Section A is preferable to that of Section B.

We can model this easily. If the students all believe that class size is the only value worth considering, the two sections will each end up with 25. (#1 will chose Section A because the sizes are equal and the teacher is preferable, then #2 will go to B, #3 to A, and so forth.) If the students all believe that teacher quality is the only factor worth considering, you'll see 50 in section A and 0 in section B. More likely, you would actually see some kind of weighted preference, where students consider both factors and begin to choose section B as section A gets bigger--a 40-10 split would indicate a weaker preference for small classes than a 30-20 split.

In other words, the bigger the variation in freely chosen class sizes, the more weight students are putting on teacher quality relative to class size. The enrollments in the sections give you a lot of information about the population's values.

Viewing the choice from this perspective reveals that students tend to accept fairly large differences in class size before they let it trump perceived teacher quality. That's why every secondary school I know of (public or private, in any social setting) tries to make switching sections extremely hard. We can't know what choices students would make, but the barriers to switching imply a widespread assumption that left to their own devices, the students would choose exactly the model that some libertarian economists propose: bigger classes with the best teachers.

At Grinnell, students can often make exactly that kind of choice among sections or (more often) among classes that perform the same function in their course plan. Based on what I've seen, I would say that Grinnell students value perceived teacher quality much more than class size, to the point where most will readily become, say, the 21st person in the desired section rather than the ninth in another. I have seen students make switches because they value lower class sizes, but only in the most extreme cases by Grinnell standards (switching from, say, a section of 40 to one of 13), and even in those cases, very few students make the switch. I'm sure there are contrary anecdotes out there, but having seen a lot of preregistration numbers, I'm confident in asserting the general pattern.

I don't mean to imply that the Grinnell model would apply to other educational situations. I understand the problems with that translation. But I find this situation interesting because it involves a set of people making decisions that don't seem to match their abstract values.

On Grade Inflation

Two unrelated events have called my attention to grade inflation recently. One was a post on Grinnell Plans from a current student who had seen a chart demonstrating the upward drift of Grinnell's grades over the last decade. Essentially, the overall mean GPA has risen from roughly a B grade to roughly a B+ grade--a large change for such a short time, and as I understand it, a fairly typical change over the same stretch in many colleges and universities. The second was a detailed post by Steven Willett on NASSR-L, an email list populated by a couple of thousand people interested in Romanticism, mostly graduate students and professors in the field. Willett is a contrarian and a traditionalist who frequently attacks the state of his profession on the list; in this post, he resisted arguments minimizing the existence and consequences of grade inflation by citing a range of studies on the issue. One of those studies caught my attention because it resisted the moralizing I find tiresome on both sides of inflation debates and offered some insight into the mechanisms of grade inflation. This is Willett's quotation of the summary of that study, by Donald G. Freeman, published in 1999 in the Journal of Economic Education:

"My hypothesis is that, given equal money prices per credit hour
across disciplines, departments manage their enrollments by 'pricing'
their courses with grading standards commensurate with the market
benefits of their courses, as measured by expected incomes.

"I analyzed grade divergence using a cross-section of 59 fields of
study from a recently published survey of college graduates by the
National Center for Education Statistics, A Descriptive Summary of
1992–93 Bachelor’s Degree Recipients: 1 year later (NCES 1996). The
survey tracks 1992–93 college graduates to determine outcomes from
postsecondary education, including returns to investment in
education. Using this sample, I found evidence consistent with the
economic explanation of grade divergence: Graduates from high-grading
fields of study have lower earnings than graduates from low-grading
fields of study. This is true even when controlling for factors such
as student ability and experience" (344-45).

Fascinating! Other bits from Willett's post (drawing on other sources) flesh out some of the details underlying this hypothesis: music and education departments tend to give particularly high grades, for instance, and the latest wave of grade inflation has affected the humanities more than the hard sciences, but English and biology in particular more than mathematics. It seems to me that the place of education among particularly high-grading disciplines deserves a good deal of consideration--and has perhaps received such consideration that I simply haven't read. I'll extend that disclaimer to what follows; my speculations may be supported or contradicted by research I don't know. This isn't one of the books I'm writing.

So here's a starting point. Grade inflation is real, across the board in higher education. Giving higher grades produces higher evaluations for teachers, when other factors are controlled (other studies show). Grade inflation varies by discipline. Grade inflation comes in spurts, one of which occurred roughly around 1970 and one in the last ten years.

I find Freeman's hypothesis--that departments whose majors generally earn little money compensate by awarding high grades--fascinating and largely supported by my intuitions. However, I am prompted to look for further explanations for three reasons. First, a bad reason: Freeman's hypothesis does not match how I've seen professors talk about their grading. I call this a bad reason because of the obvious potential for self-deception or deceptive self-marketing here. The second is that there are some exceptions to the rule that I know off the top of my head: when I was at Penn, the ultra-prestigious Wharton School (business) had a reputation for giving high undergraduate grades, and indeed, a web search confirms that its introductory course has a mandated median grade of B+ in each section, which is especially high for an introductory course, where grades are generally lower than in advanced courses. Similar cases abound in related areas, such as the most prestigious law schools, where students with the highes expected earnings get very high grades. The third reason is that the logic of expected earnings does not apply to institutions; the most prestitgious colleges and universities, whose graduates have the highest expected salaries, have experienced grade inflation along with everyone else. For all these reasons, I suspect Freeman is largely correct but that other factors are also in play.

(Side note: I feel no professional self-interest in this issue. My grades are a little lower than average for Grinnell, as I suspect my department's are, and student comments about my grading reflect that. I am neither an apologist for today's grading levels nor an indulger of nostalgia for yesterday's lower ones. I do want to understand how and why my profession employs grades.)

I offer three hypotheses about those other factors:

1. The growing emphasis on revision allows students in some courses to receive higher grades given the same talent, application, and academic standards. I claim no original insight here, but I mention this factor because so many discussions of grade inflation assume that higher grades must imply better student work or lower academic standards. Allowing students to earn higher grades through revision, however, allows teachers to award higher grades while still feeling that students have received honest feedback on their work. Since many pedagogical studies support the learning outcomes of revision-based writing, this can produce a kind of guiltless grade inflation. I'll come back to this point.

2. Elite colleges and universities can use grade inflation to shift employers and graduate schools from statistical evaluations of transcripts to a self-serving prestige market. If every college and university enforced a strict 2.0 median grade, evaluators would compare transcripts by using implicit prestige adjustments--perhaps a 2.5 GPA from a highly selective institution would be roughly equivalent to a 3.1 at a less selective institution. I've seen the application of this kind of unofficial adjustment many times. If practically everyone graduates from Harvard with honors, however (as is the case), then Harvard has created a situation where most of its students cannot be outperformed in transcript reviews. Shifting all grades close to 4.0 forces evaluators to discount grades themselves, thus increasing the importance of the instutional reputation. Harvard has a great deal to gain from grade inflation, and less selective institutions can only play along--if UMass intentionally lowers grades as Harvard inflates them, UMass only hurts its graduates even more relative to Harvard's. Colleges and universities that have the highest stake in maintaining the importance of institutional prestige also have a strong incentive to keep overall grades high. And the least selective institutions are facing pressure to keep marginal students enrolled (to maintain government support based on enrollment levels).

3. The recent inflation of grades coincides with a significant weakening of tenure. Most college courses are now taught by people who are not tenured or tenure-track. Teachers who are untenured but on the tenure track (including me, for whatever that's worth) may feel some pressure to use high grades to raise the level of student evaluations, but that pressure is limited by the relatively large sample of evaluations and many other factors that go into tenure reviews. I would find a reputation for low standards much more dangerous to my tenure prospects than slightly lower average teaching evaluations. I know circumstances vary, but I think the key here is graduate and adjunct teachers whose piecework employment depends heavily on the student evaluations of any given semester. Such teachers often see their professional lives in the hands of administrators unconstrained by full review processes, administrators who need to care a great deal about student and parent satisfaction and not as much about teachers' other contributions to their institutions and professions. If grade levels are a small but significant factor in student evaluations of teaching, piecework teachers are extremely vulnerable to giving higher grades out or real or perceived self-preservation.

Taking all these factors into consideration, I offer my own hypothesis about the grade inflation of the last decade. We are seeing the confluence of multiple, independent incentives that all point in the direction of higher grades: a dramatic increase in reliance on teachers with tenuous employment, defensible mechanisms of raising grades without changing underlying standards, and institutional incentives for every kind of institution to keep overall grades high.