Partly True

Grade inflation - a mark of human kindness is actually about executive pay. Let's see if what the author says is actually true of academic grades.

Grade inflation, - as well as executive remuneration and audits, are the inevitable product of benign human nature, of pleasant social interactions and of self interested commercial ones. But some institutional structures invite grade inflation and others resist it.

Why has the grade point average of American college students, like English A-level scores, been rising? Why has executive remuneration outstripped the earnings of other employees? Why have audit standards been falling? The answer to all these questions is the same. Grade inflation occurs whenever one group of human beings is asked to comment on the performance of another.

• The "Lake Wobegon effect" (named after the fatuous Garrison Keillor’s mythical prairie town where all the children are above average). "Dedicated instructors sympathise with their students, effective boards support their chief executives, good accountants not only count the profits but make an effort to understand the business....But no complex maths is required to see that if people are picking numbers that are, on average, above the average of everyone’s pick, that average will steadily increase."
• The second component of grade inflation is Goodhart’s Law (when an aggregate becomes a target its significance immediately changes). "Students will focus on the particular skills on which they are measured. [And that's a bad thing?--pkd]...People learn to do the things that are required of them, and so it is with examination performance. The only antidote to Goodhart’s Law is the balanced scorecard – use different indicators and change them frequently. [But if we want to teach certain skills, we test them on those!?--pkd]"
• Grade inflation is also the product of competition. Competition improves performance and mostly this is good: it leads to lower prices and shorter queues at the checkout. But the process has perverse results when the product is performance measurement, and the buyer is the person whose performance is being measured. If Professor Nice gives all his students As, and Professor Nasty gives all her students Cs, then students will prefer to enrol with Professor Nice. Not only does this increase the average grade, but it puts pressure on Professor Nasty to conform. [Too true.--pkd]