Who Best to Tame Grade Inflation?
There has been much high-blown rhetoric lately about the problem of grade inflation in American higher education. All across American campuses, deans and college presidents lament the problem. Such attention, though, focuses mostly on outlining the extent of the problem rather than offering concrete strategies for alleviating it. In most cases, expressions of concern are more ritual statements by administrators who want to show that they are concerned about grade intlation. Ritual acknowledgments of the problem, however, are seldom accompanied by any concrete solutions. This is mostly due to the fact that grade intlation is a direct result of the policies which the recent generation of administrators have pursued with unrequited vigor: the relaxation of admissions standards for certain classes of students, the treatment of higher education as a consumer commodity in which the paying customer demands a marketable grade point average, and the steady erosion of professorial authority in r
