| ASU: An easy A?
Either ASU students are getting smarter or their teachers are getting easier. In the past four years, student grades have soared 6 percent, prompting allegations of grade inflation and concern among some faculty that their grading standards are less than rigorous.
"I don't think the university has taken a good hard look at what grading means," said Bill Davey, president of the ASU Faculty Senate. Grade inflation occurs when student grades are higher than student achievement and ASU's grades are characteristic of a nationwide trend, said Dr. Perry Zirkel, |
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the Iaccoca Professor of Education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Zirkel has studied grade inflation for several years and characterizes it as a societal trend to de-emphasize competition and make people feel better about themselves.
"In most colleges and universities, grades have gone up over the past 20 years, but achievement has remained stable and perhaps even declined," Zirkel said.
ASU administrators deny the university suffers from grade inflation and they point instead to systemic changes over the past few years that resulted in reduced class sizes, stricter admission policies and tenured professors teaching more undergraduate courses. Rudy Campbell, a member of the Arizona Board of Regents which oversees the state's three universities, said he prefers to look at the grade increase as a positive rather than a negative.
"We would not be filling our responsibility if we were not helping students improve with their studies," he said. "It's too small of an increase. There is no indication that we're automatically raising grades. If it were larger, I'd be concerned."
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