Grade Inflation In Education

Grade inflation is an issue where instructors give passing grades to students that do not deserve them and this is an issue that can be seen going on in colleges and universities across the country. Teachers do this for multiple reasons whether it be to keep their jobs, to fill their classrooms, or to keep from having to clash with students about a failing grade. This is an issue in schools due to the fact that grade inflation ruins a school's reputation and leaves students that did not deserve the grades, going out into the work field without knowing what to do. This has been happening in a few classes that I know of on BCCC and the Board of Trustees needs to find a solution to this problem. Scholars have looked into and researched grade inflation
An issue, stated by Saltoun Ebin, is that teachers face is keeping enrollment numbers higher. Teachers may inflate grades in order to keep students coming to their classes because some students tend to take classes they feel is an easy pass. Their enrollment numbers determine their job security which is one other reason that instructors could inflate grades.Their job security ultimately decides their money and paychecks. Schuman states that it could be, that it is not something the teacher wants to do, but something that the students push them to do because students tend to complain and bombard teachers when they receive failing grades and this causes more stress for instructors. Zuckerman and Saltoun Ebin agree that it’s also the students that lead to this because they’re spoiled and can’t take the failing grade, but would fight with a teacher and cause them more stress until they let up and pass them. Students are so used to passing that they have been taught to be spoiled when it comes to grades, so some instructors find it easier to pass students because they depend on students for their classes and their job and their
Many of the courses that participate in doing this are online classes, but some on campus class do as well. One course in particular come to mind when looking at this topic. An online Sociology course of mine was a course that gave students one assignment to do a week and at the beginning of the semester students were told to write responses to each chapter we discussed. Students were supposed to write detailed responses telling the instructor what they learned and make it enough for the instructor to know that they read the chapters. However, going through these posts, you could see that some of them were only two to three sentence long posts which could not possibly tell a professor that a student read and understood the chapter, yet these posts were being graded with 80’s and 90’s. This is obvious grade inflation because despite telling students what she wanted to see, she graded minimum work with high passing grades. This is a course that is considered an “easy A class” for students to take, and these courses make it so the students don’t have to do work or even read the material but still pass when they don’t deserve