University Times

As Pitt recruits more undergraduates with sky-high SAT scores and hypertrophic high school QPA's, some professors have noticed increasing shock, disbelief and anger among students who earn lower-than-A grades in their courses.

Indirectly, the profs say, students' indignation can translate into grade inflation, as faculty face the choice: Appease students by awarding high grades, or risk negative teaching evaluations.

"This is really getting to be a problem," said David Brumble, who's served on the English department faculty since 1970. "We're getting more and more Honors College students — don't get me wrong, I'm delighted by the kids I'm getting in my honors classes — but these are kids who are used to getting nothing but A's and A-pluses.

"Just because they're bright, though, doesn't mean they have mastered acquired skills such as writing," Brumble noted. "I see them in my Introduction to Shakespeare class, and a fair number of them don't write very well. I'm the one who gets to tell them, after their high school teachers have been praising them for the last four years, that they really need to work on their writing. It comes as a shock to them when I give them a C on a paper. Some really get incensed."

That attitude can extend to students' parents, Brumble found when he served during the late-1990s as associate dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"I recall one conversation in particular with a parent, who made it very clear to me that the family was paying a lot of money in tuition, and they expected their child to get good grades," Brumble said. "By that, they didn't mean that the student ought to be doing better. What they meant was: 'Look, we're paying a lot of money for this, and we expect a good transcript to show for it. How dare you give my child a low grade?'"

Biological sciences professor Iain Campbell, a 37-year veteran at Pitt, said he's noticing "an awful lot of students who think they're a lot better than they are."

Richard Tobias, of English, remembered students' responses to a question on his teaching evaluations last term: What grade do you expect to get in this course?

"Half of the students wrote that they were expecting to get an A," said Tobias. "The other half said they expected a B. I ended up giving several C's and two D's to that same group of students."

Tobias, a Pitt English department faculty member since 1957, said he's seeing more undergrads who, upon receiving a C on a paper, respond: "This is the first C I ever got in my life!"

David Pratt, a chemistry faculty member here for the last 32 years, said: "Many students today seem to believe, 'There's this safety net that is going to catch me, no matter what I do in class.' I think that's different from, say, 10 years ago.

"I have to be careful about this, because I'm going to sound like a grumpy old man," Pratt added. "It's just that I'm seeing more students whose high expectations aren't connected to reality. Occasionally, when I'm forced to fail a student, the student will say to me: 'What do you mean you're giving me an F? I didn't get an F!' "I'm not sure where this comes from, and I'm not being critical. It's just an observation. What's important about this, from the faculty point of view, is that we should be aware of these attitudes and make a greater effort to engage students into really thinking about the course material. It makes teaching more challenging."

Michael Kolar, a professor in mechanical engineering, said the attitude of today's students reflects a change in society. "I really believe the world is different from when I was growing up. Parents these days are having one, maybe two kids, and they lavish attention on them. That is the child's only experience. There isn't a sense of achievement apart from parents' praise, which may be exaggerated. They develop an expectation that their teachers will follow that pattern."

Kolar, who has been at Pitt since 1986, said earlier generations of professors tended to be harder graders. "A few years back, when several of the engineering faculty took early retirement, I think we lost many of the hardest graders," he said. "We had one professor, who even won a teaching award, who was very tough. If he had a 9 a.m. class, he'd lock the door at 9 and not let anybody in, and he counted attendance toward the grade."

Professors said it can be tempting, even for senior faculty, to award higher-than-deserved grades. ("It's much more pleasant to run a class when you're handing out all A's and B's," Brumble observed.) Where students' "grade expectations" really threaten to produce grade inflation, they said, is among young, untenured faculty members.

"What really matters," Pratt said, "is being fair with students, making sure they understand what you expect of them and that you respect them. If you can do that, the grade issue should become less important. But that can be hard to communicate to a junior faculty member who doesn't have a track record and confronts these kinds of pressures" to award high grades.

— Bruce Steele and Peter Hart