Plu Handing Out More A’S Than Ever

Good grades aren’t so hard to come by these days at Pacific Lutheran University.

Nearly 40 percent of the 1997 graduating class are getting their degrees with honors, as was the case with the 1996 class.

In fact, a recent study found that during the 1994-95 school year half of all grades given out were A’s at the 3,500-student private university south of Tacoma.

“There’s a culture of entitlement in higher education that says, ‘Hey, we’re entitled to an A because we’ve paid a lot of money to get into this school,”’ said David Seal, an associate professor of English and chairman of the Educational Policies Committee, which is looking into the matter of grade inflation.

Also, there’s “an increasing pressure on faculty to produce higher evaluations and … pressure on everyone to retain students. It’s easier to pretend everybody’s good,” he said.

The problem is not PLU’s alone.

The University of Washington recently polled its faculty on the matter, and 91 percent responded that grade inflation is a problem.

More than 60 percent of all UW undergraduate grades fall in the highest grading category, 3.1 to 4.0. A 4.0 grade point average would be straight A’s.

While the ideal average GPA is 2.68 from a faculty perspective and 2.84 from a student view, the actual average GPA is about 3.12 at UW, an Office of Educational Assessment study showed.

That’s up from 2.31 in 1964.

At PLU, that average is closer to 3.3, compared to 2.99 in 1974. The school gives about $3.5 million annually in academic scholarships to students who meet or exceed that average.

“Clearly, we couldn’t say that C is for ‘average’ anymore,” Provost Paul Menzel said. In fact, the debate over grade inflation began when average surpassed a B grade.

Menzel said the grade-inflation and grade discrepancy - grades that don’t represent the same effort across departments - aren’t just issues important to academics.

“The greatest danger is that students use those rankings to work on what they most need to improve, and we’re giving them ‘proof’ they’re doing well,” Menzel said. “You get more learning if you have discriminating grading.”