Summary Of The Dangerous Myth Of Grade Inflation

Everyone has had to deal with grades at some point in their life. Currently several faculty members and administrators across America are apparently in an uproar over grade inflation. In order for us to have a clear understanding on what grade inflation really is, we must know what it means. Grade inflation is an artificial increase of average grades systematically over a short period of time. According to a newspaper article in The Boston Globe, grade inflation is a serious problem in higher levels of education (Kohn 153). However, Alfie Kohn, author of “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” has a different take in the matter of grade inflation and strongly disagrees with many claims about it. Throughout his essay, he brings to light to

educators and students that the real problem is not inflation, but instead the real threat are the grades. Kohn’s essay as a whole was successful through the use of compelling arguments and reasoning.
Kohn’s targeted audience for his essay is to educators and students; as he was a former educator, and is now seen as a controversial figure in the educational system.

In “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” he evaluates the existence of grade inflation and provides strong statistical evidence in order to prove his opposition. At the beginning of his essay he provides quotes from Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield and Harvard’s Committee on Raising the Standard to illustrate that even top elite schools believe that grade inflation is a serious problem in our education. He then goes on to inform the readers that after investigating the topic, there is little data to support such claims that grade inflation is a problem. This is because many of the reports that have created self-reports and simply unreliable. He then moves forward by comparing SAT scores with grade, which is examined by “Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing,” a report that was announced by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (155-157). Kohn then transitions by providing four assumptions that seem to the threaten grade inflation. In his conclusion he states, “The relevant research is to arrive at one overriding conclusion: The real threat to excellence isn’t grade inflation at all; it’s

grades.”
One of the main reasons why Kohn’s essay was so successful was because of the evidence he provides and with this he has strong arguments to rebut back with. At the beginning of his essay he delivers a research done by Clifford Adelman, a research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education. In Clifford’s research he examined 3,000 student transcripts from several intuitions and found that there was a faint decline in average grades in the past twenty years. Kohn goes on to say that just because grades are higher now as compared to back then does not prove that grades are inflated. He believes that perhaps students are turning in better assignments, or teachers are becoming more lenient with how they grade assignments then before, or maybe there is a lighter course load, or that students have the option of dropping classes which in return has less damage on a students GPA. As previously cited, Kohn also provides with the readers with “Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing,” stating that students cannot possibly have higher grades because their SAT scores are low. They believe that the SAT scores should reflect on he students GPA. After writing this Kohn rebuts this argument by stating that the president of the University of California did a four-year study of almost 78,000 students and found that the SAT predicted about 13.3 percent of in freshman grades (156). After reviewing this, the reader must consider that these standardized tests are difficult to say whether or not these tests truly measures college readiness and future academic success in a student. If the reader thinks about it the course loads are very different in high school versus college level classes; so therefore, it is difficult to really determine how successful a freshman in college will be.
Along with providing the readers with excellent evidence, Kohn was successfully with sounds reasoning.

He begins his essay with data and quotes from one of the elite colleges in the nation, Harvard University. By doing this he counter arguers to his audience that grade inflation has actually been decreasing over the years rather than rising. Kohn states in his essay, “Even where grades are higher now as compared with then, that does not constitute proof that they are inflated. The burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative explanations” (155). He then goes on to list these alternatives such as; better assignments are being turned in, more lenient teachers, lighter course loads, and so on. He puts the cherry on the cake when he boldly says, “The bottom line: No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A’s for the same work used to receive B’s or C’s. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim” (155). By stating this Kohn makes it very clear to the readers that these critics are wrong because of the mediocre data that they have to support their claims. Another instance where Kohn uses sound reasoning is after he writes about the Henry Rosovsky, senior author of “Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing?” Rosovsky believes, “Students couldn’t possibly deserve higher grades [because] … SAT scores have dropped during the same period that grades are suppose to

have risen” (155). Kohn rebuts this by saying that this is an irrelevant comparison because the SAT exam is “deeply flawed.” He goes on by saying that just because scores are dropping does not mean that you should make an assertion that grades are too high. He then provide three examples as too why these are poor assertions. As stated before he believes that standardized tests are a poor way to measure high school and college because they have two different course works. His second rebut is that the sample size for students taking these tests have grown larger than before because more students are going to college and are required to take some form of standardized test in order to get in. He does this by stating, “The American Academy’s report states that the average SAT score dropped slightly from 1969 to 1993. But over that period, the pool of test takers grew from about on-third to more than two-fifths of high school graduates- an addition of more than 200,000 students” (156). His last reason is that a decline in overall SAT scores is hard to compare with grades that are received at Harvard and other elite institutions. With sound reasoning Kohn was able to illuminate to his audience that grade inflation is not the problem.
Overall Kohn’s essay was successful because he exposes his critics with strong evidence through the use of several studies and statistics and then using reasoning to support his opposition. By doing this he shows educator and students across America, who over look this problem, that grading as a whole and not grade inflation is the real problem.