When asked last week about grade inflation, Universities New Zealand chief executive Chris Whelan claimed rising marks reflected two decades of effort to lift teaching quality and strengthen qualifications.
"We believe grades are rising as the result of decades of work to improve the quality of teaching, better curriculum design, better assessment design and better support around our learners."
Grade inflation stems from other causes, and the average calibre of students has declined. Attendance has surged over the decades, broadening access. Outside restricted fields such as medicine, engineering and law, universities are less elitist.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s 2022 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results for 15-year olds show reading standards still lag behind the levels of 2000 and 2009. Declines in mathematics continued.
Today’s students have endured the disruptions of Covid.
Grade inflation is undeniably real, eroding trust in universities and their qualifications. Nobody can seriously believe Mr Whelan.
Mr Whelan defends universities in a manner he may not himself find wholly credible. Then again, self-deception is a familiar human trait, especially when our interests, or those we represent, are at stake. The ability to cognate dissonantly is part of our self-justifying human nature.
Research by the New Zealand Initiative has found that As are only a few years away from becoming the most common grade at New Zealand universities. They temporarily overtook Bs during the Covid-19 period and are on track to do so permanently.
The adage "Cs get degrees" may remain technically true, but Cs are vanishing amid the dominance of Bs and the rise of As. Failures, too, are less frequent.
Grade inflation has run rampant for decades across the English-speaking world, with the United States leading the charge.
Twenty years ago, only 25% of undergraduate grades at Harvard were As. Now, the figure exceeds 60%. The commentator lamented that soaring grades were accompanied by students doing less work.
Rather than an A being special, the question now is what kind of A it represents.
Likewise, first-class honours have become routine rather than rare, and "distinctions" less distinguished.
The New Zealand Initiative report highlights pressures on academics, including fears that low pass rates could jeopardise course funding.
As in so many fields, incentives — conscious and unconscious — drive behaviour.
Increasingly, universities behave like businesses: students are customers, presumed to be mostly right, and their satisfaction is vital for short and medium-term success.
Students and their parents shoulder ever-rising fees and expenses, making failure, or even mediocre marks, far costlier.
For teachers, the game-changer was the arrival of student evaluations from the 1970s. Introduced with good intentions, they offered useful feedback and helped redress the long neglect of teaching ability.
The formal significance of student evaluation has risen, and these evaluations play a meaningful role in academic promotion. Staff are incentivised to give better grades and lighten workloads lest they, in effect, be punished by their students.
Initiative report author James Kierstead noted that many academics recognise the problems but remain trapped in a system that penalises rigorous grading.
"When top grades are no longer reliable signals of genuine achievement, the best students are robbed of the fruits of their industry, average students aren’t motivated to work harder, and society as a whole loses out," Dr Kierstead said.
The report concedes there are no easy fixes, but it does outline possible remedies. For a start, Mr Whelan and the universities must admit to these serious issues.
Adding to the complications are the twists and challenges of AI. Graduating students who have abused AI and got away with that risk having even less convincing qualifications.
