Letters to the Editor: A college professor on the pressure to inflate students’ grades

To the editor: Karin Klein’s opinion piece on grade inflation was right on target. A is indeed for average.

I became part of the problem as an adjunct professor at a prominent Midwestern private university. My choice was to give students in the graduate school either A’s or Bs — a C grade meant that a student’s employer would not pay tuition, which is another factor supporting Klein’s grade inflation observation.

I solved this conundrum by putting it squarely in the students’ court: They had to write a term paper for consideration of an A grade. Earning a B required passing an iterative class-administered test.

In other words, students learned from each other to pass the test. Perhaps a side benefit of my approach was to teach teamwork.

My evaluations by students were great, which I took as a success. Now I wonder.

Merrill Anderson, Laguna Beach

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To the editor: My father taught remedial English as an adjunct instructor at UC Santa Barbara in the early 1970s. During high school, I would compare my writing to the student compositions he graded. I realized I was college-ready.

Dad graded the papers using the accepted curve — C for average, B for good, A for excellent. I rarely saw a red A. No student challenged his letters.

When I matriculated at the same school a few years later, my grades on the 11 papers I wrote my first quarter averaged Bs and Cs. I got a few A’s if I hadn’t typed the paper the night before. I ruefully accepted the judicious grades and tried harder the next quarter.

More students now roll through K-12 with inflated grades, minimal book reading and class-wide honors, then they find out if their standardized test scores merit circumvention of a university’s remedial language requirement. Nationwide, 40% to 60% of first-year college students now require remediation in English, math or both. My dad could easily teach full time now if he were alive.

My husband contracts with a large Silicon Valley company and interacts with loads of young tech smarties. Their skill sets typically do not include competent writing or communication. It’s eye-opening and unsettling.

Mary MacGregor, La Quinta