Harry Brighouse wants to know if grade inflation actually exists. Meanwhile, Janice McCabe and Brian Powell argue that, whether or not faculty are inflating the grades, they're certainly inflating their own self-images:
The self-enhancing tendency helps explain why professors believe that grade inflation exists but their grades do not contribute to it, why student pressure and student evaluations influence others’ grading but not their own, and why grades in their classes should be higher but grades at the university level (and other universities) should be lower.
In other words, grades viewed in the rear-view mirror may be less tough than they appear.
One respondent in the CT discussion noted that humanities courses appear to have lost some of their oomph over the past couple of decades. I wonder how our students' work habits--by which I mean employment, not studying--have altered the academic landscape. When Mom the Retired School Administrator and Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt were at UCLA, "working your way through college" was done during the summer or part-time; undergraduates rarely worked full-time during the school year. But many of my students have jobs, and (because our demographic runs towards the non-traditional) many of them have children. Unless they somehow manage to unearth a time machine, most of my students cannot handle the kind of reading load my parents expected in college. It's not that they're unwilling; it's that there is, quite literally, no time. And so, the surveys have to survey rather less than they did forty or fifty years ago.
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