To the Editor:
Re “Confessions of a Grade Inflater,” by Frank Bruni (Opinion, July 14):
After 41 years as a full-time professor at the University of Southern California, I empathize with Mr. Bruni’s predicament of being under pressure to inflate his students’ grades. Yet the most agonizing moments of my teaching career — spanning freshman seminars to doctoral and executive education — have come when I was facing the spreadsheet of final composite scores, rank-ordering my undergraduate students to assign letter grades.
I have painfully watched some of my best student thinkers — not necessarily my best test takers — fall victim to the tyranny of numbers. Some deserved a solid A, but lifeless figures, invoked in the name of resisting grade inflation, forced my hand. I still repent of it; one of my best former students, Jose, who stayed in touch with me, has heard my confession multiple times and has graciously forgiven me.
I believe that my best teaching happens in my freshman seminar on technology and the environment, graded pass/no pass. Freed from fear for their grade-point average, students engage fiercely, collaborate and challenge me and one another. Socrates is said to have observed that he could not teach people anything, but only make them think. No spreadsheet or final grade can ever measure that.
Let’s figure out a way for undergraduates to enjoy their learning and challenge themselves and their professors without dreading a final grade — at best a weak indicator of their potential.
Najmedin Meshkati Los Angeles The writer is a professor of engineering and international relations at the University of Southern California.
To the Editor:
We must be cautious when decrying grade inflation. The common assumption is that rising grades reflect diminishing faculty standards. However, because elite schools now matriculate a much smaller, hyper-selective fraction of applicants, student capability has vastly risen. Unless exams are deliberately engineered to be harder, grades reflecting true accomplishment should naturally increase.
Having recently retired after teaching master’s and undergraduate students at Yale for over 30 years, I can make an apples-to-apples comparison. My exam questions evolved over the decades, but they did not become easier. Would it make sense to artificially award lower grades for the same level of achievement today just to preserve a decades-old distribution curve? If we refuse to do so, it is not because grades are inflated; it is because quality has improved.
Gaboury Benoit New Haven, Conn. The writer is an emeritus professor of environmental chemistry at the Yale School of the Environment.
To the Editor:
Frank Bruni identifies a symptom, but mistakes it for the disease.
Grade deflation might restore some rigor to university education, but it treats grading as a calibration problem when the deeper issue is atmospheric: We’ve built an education system in which students and their families are customers, learning is transactional and “success” has been reduced to a score.
Here’s my invitation to Mr. Bruni and anyone else working with young people: Stop fixating on grades, and start inviting students to define and live their own vision of excellence.
Benjamin Zander, the conductor and educator, famously gives every student an A on the first day of class. Not because they’ve earned it, but because now their job is to become the person who does. We use a version of this at the Flight School, the community I lead for young people navigating the transition to adulthood outside traditional institutions. It’s not permissiveness. It’s a different kind of rigor — one that challenges students to know what they know, without relying on others to validate it.
Capping A’s might hit the target, but it will still miss the point. Grades can measure only what’s measurable. The learning that matters most — awareness, aliveness, courage — rarely is.
We’ll forget most of what we learn in a classroom. But the knowing remains. The real assignment is teaching to that.
Abby Falik Berkeley, Calif. The writer is a founder of the Flight School and a visiting fellow at Stanford.
To the Editor:
Frank Bruni is right that grade inflation has drained the A of meaning, but I’d locate the solution elsewhere. Capping A’s at a fixed share of each class treats the grade as a scarce commodity and revives norm-referenced grading — ranking students against one another rather than against clear, shared standards. That comparison-based approach is its own distortion: A student’s mark ends up depending on who else is in the room.
The harder, more honest fix is defining what A-level work actually looks like across a department and grading against it. Such transparent criteria would also ease the uncomfortable grading conversations Mr. Bruni describes, turning a disputed mark from a personal negotiation into a shared look at the evidence.
Nor is this only a college problem. In my work preparing future teachers, I regularly hear how mentor teachers fold homework, participation, timeliness and behavior into grades — things that don’t measure what a student knows and can do. The answer is clearer standards, not tighter quotas.
Howard Yank Camas, Wash. The writer is an emeritus faculty member of the College of Education at Portland State University.
To the Editor:
Awkward conversations between students and professors aren’t the only consequence of giving a student less than an A. The complaints escalate, involving the department chair and often the dean of students. Hours are wasted, as students, and sometimes their parents, haggle and whine until they receive that holy grail, an unblemished A. My husband’s chairman finally instructed him to do what he had to do to stop the time-wasting.
I taught as an adjunct instructor for 22 years, and so my position was much more precarious than that of my tenured husband. If my students thought that their grades were not sufficiently high, then their evaluations of me tanked, and I could be fired, with no recourse. Even when students plagiarized, I was supposed to give them a chance to rewrite their papers, with no penalty.
Needless to say, we are both delighted that we are no longer teaching. But I have one question for Frank Bruni: Do any of today’s students ever receive a C?
Barbara Barran Brooklyn
To the Editor:
The appropriate answer to grade inflation is not grading on a curve, deciding before a course begins what percentage of students can receive an A. That policy confuses rank in class with mastery of subject.
Rather, the problem can be solved simply by adjusting transcripts to include not only a student’s grade but also the average grade for all students in that section of the course. This way grade inflation is exposed and rendered pointless.
Steven M. Cahn Old Greenwich, Conn. The writer is a professor emeritus of philosophy and former acting president at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the author of “Towards Teaching Philosophy.”
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