The Issue of Grade Inflation

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The Issue of grade inflation

Introduction
This essay deals with the specific term of grade inflation by working with three texts on that issue seeing grade inflation from different perspectives and discussing terminology. Every country has its own grading system. In some countries from 0-10 in others the scale is 1-5 or 0-20 an there are many others. However, this is by far not the only thing that can be said about grading. The question also is the practical application of the grading scheme. Are more higher grades given or lower? On the first view one might see it as a cultural aspect, which also is true, if one pays attention to the development of grading systems (see for instance the Netherlands, where the best grade 10 is regarded as a perfect result that is hardly achievable). On the other hand grading can become a serious issue for educational institutions if grading does not work properly. This piece of work will not deal with all single aspect of grading problems but will focus on the phenomenon of awarding extremely high grades. In this context the term grade inflation is very popular. However, it needs to be differentiated, because it is controversial, whether every rise in grades belongs to grade inflation and what can be different types of grade inflation.
The aim is to discuss three texts and to ask critical questions about the content and structure of argumentation. This way it will be possible to get a more clear view on grade inflation and its characteristics. It is also important to discuss the extent of grade inflation. There are several countries that deal with that issue of grade inflation. And also in each of these countries you need to differentiate where the extend of grade inflation is the biggest: Is it a...

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...f students could do better when revising their work, it is forgotten that it is time-consuming. That means that they cannot put more effort in another subject, and if in one subject they are scoring higher but in the other lower, then it makes no difference.
To come to a core point of this article, namely students as consumer it is to be said what follows: Elizabeth Boretz presents reasons against the assumption that students just want to receive easy grades without effort. She also presents data on class evaluations and the previously given grades from the lecturer, however these arguments do not allow such a strong conclusion. Surely, it is justified to say students want more but just having high grades. Nevertheless, there are no clues for such a high intrinsic motivation of the students, so that the author at this point puts in too much of her personal opinion.

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