Even
professionally secure faculty like me know to anticipate the possibility of
grade complaints, so when we assess student work, we spend significant time
justifying the grades we assign. This isn’t all bad; it’s important for
students to understand the rationale behind the feedback, regardless of the
grade. It’s not enough to just write “wrong” on a paper without some
explanation. Grading student work—especially, though not exclusively, essay
assignments—is time consuming and not always factored into faculty employment
contracts, particularly for adjunct faculty.
Accounting for
the various levels of respect granted to different kinds of professors and
subject matter is crucial for understanding grade inflation. When students hear
from parents, politicians, and others that some courses of study—it’s usually
in the arts and humanities—are easy or professionally impractical, they’re less
likely to grasp a low grade. Students enter their physics and chemistry courses
expecting the material to be difficult, so are primed for the possibility of
poor performance, which means those professors have some latitude to assign low
grades without backlash. By contrast, students may enter a course in English
literature believing it should be easier than their math classes, or in
African American studies believing it’s more “political” than their business
classes, so if in either case such courses turn out to be more rigorous in
reality than in reputation, student responses can be hostile.
In my English
courses, for example, I emphasize factual accuracy about the content and
historical context of what we read, an emphasis reflected in how I grade
student work (with less attention to prose style and rhetoric and more
attention to logical, evidence-based argumentation and accurate grasp of
subject matter). I don’t go out of my way to assign arduous amounts of reading,
but the reading in my subject area—the British Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is usually challenging and unfamiliar to students, most of whom
are encountering it for the first time.