Inflation watch: A look at three major Faculties at the University of Western Ontario

Grade inflation has become the ‘elephant in the room’ of education. Few people want to admit that it is there, and even fewer want to discuss it. In the next few posts, I’m going to discuss it, first by exposing the extent of grade inflation at my home university, and then by pointing readers to other websites that lay bare the statistics. I invite readers to comment on these statistics and to point me in the direction of more statistics from their own institutions or elsewhere. In this post, I give the ‘results section’ of my mini-study of grade distributions at Western over the past 20 years, and in my next post I present the ‘discussion section.’ Meanwhile, I invite readers to comment with their own interpretations of these statistics.

In Ivory Tower Blues (ITB), we presented some of the grade inflations statistics from Western and several other Canadian universities. Here I will systematically compare the three largest undergraduate Faculties. First, however, a bit of historical context is in order.

The “unofficial” grade guidelines at Western dating back to the 1970s are presented in the first table. Apparently, there were inflationary pressures at the time, and my recollection is that these were circulated in the Social Science and Natural Science Faculties (they may have been used in other Faculties and departments, but those with a longer institutional memories will need to identify them). I was handed these guidelines when I began teaching here, and they were compatible with what I had found at two other Canadian universities in the 1970s and early 1980s, although they are a bit higher than traditional standards in the British system where only about one third of grades would be As and Bs (Firsts and Seconds). Allowing higher grades in more advanced courses is an issue that  I will discuss in future posts.

I would like readers to make note of two things in the above table. First, the percentage of As and Bs awarded in first-year courses should not exceed 40%. Second, other courses, except for a small number of 4^th year and Masters (500-Level) seminars, should not exceed 50% As and Bs.

Now, let’s see how well Western has done in keeping to these guidelines, beginning in early 1990s, and every five years to the present (08/09 – these statistics are available online to faculty at Western from the UWO Databook for each year since 1991/92 at http://www.uwo.ca/ipb/databk01/toc_text.html).

The following tables give the grade distributions at Western, first for the overall selected Faculties, and then for the departments within those Faculties with the lowest and highest grade distributions over time (choosing which departments had the ‘highest’ and lowest’ distributions over this range of years is a bit arbitrary, which I will explain in my next post).

In each cell, the first percentage is for As and Bs combined, and the second, in parentheses, is for Fs.