Rose Horowitch is on a hot streak! I first discovered her work via a Google News notification for the wildly popular The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, and I have since then been keen on her new releases. Her latest piece, How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University, offers a striking insight into the course evaluations by college students and their implications for professors.
College grade inflation can be attributed to the influx of AI chatbots among college students. Professors are well aware of students’ use of this technology, which lowers their motivation to spend sufficient time on assignments. Obviously, this can impact their grading of students.
They could be thinking: At the end of the day, this novel technology is almost infallible and way more intelligent than I am; if it did this work, why should I even bother putting so much time and energy into reviewing it? This could result in more A’s. Additionally, detecting AI-generated cheating is challenging – even anti-plagiarism tools struggle to help.
But there’s a caveat. It’s easy to think of AI chatbots as the reason for the inflation of A’s in college. However, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. Horowitch’s article, titled The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A, paints a different picture: In 2011, 60% of all grades at Harvard were in the A range, which represents a 33% increase from 1985; additionally, this number rose to 79% in the 2020-21 academic year at the same institution.
Chatbot AIs hadn’t proliferated in the world in 2011. Horowitch highlights that students have become more anxious than ever, and as a result, professors have eroded their prior “meanness” during assessments to help students cope with their new realities.
Moreover, as I have recently been reminded by the book Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (2010), things have greatly improved since the 1800s. However, the media and the negative bias don’t allow us to see this. (I also learnt about this from Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018).) Recent generations have had access to abundant information, and this should improve their general intellect and, in turn, their college performances.
Another aspect that Rose’s article has revealed is the faculty’s interest in protecting their jobs. It is evident from the article that course evaluations are often unhelpful in improving instruction, which should be their core function. Professors, therefore, play it safe by giving favourable grades to students.
In return, students give them higher ratings during course evaluations. A study cited in the article found that students score male professors higher than their female counterparts, rate attractive teachers more highly, and even reward instructors who bring in cookies.
Adjunct professors also depend on course evaluations for promotions – it is a primary factor of consideration for their promotion. This type of bias affects how professors approach grading.
From a personal experience, college grades have gone up, but not equally with the work that students put in to earn such high grades. The majority of my college student friends who care about the quality of instruction have repeatedly aired out their grievances. They believe that “active learning” isn’t fostered in college these days.
Personal confession: I have sometimes not paid much attention to course evaluations. I find myself completing the task because it’s a requirement by my university, failure to which I’m not eligible to sit for final exams. Not because I care about helping my lecturers improve their instructions. Additionally, I honestly don’t believe that deans and lecturers review and utilize our feedback to enhance instruction.
At the conclusion of last semester, I reflected on my studies by highlighting my favourite unit (Management of Public Enterprises) and how my lecturer delivered the instruction. Such open-ended, honest, and voluntary reviews can be more beneficial than what the school currently offers. The challenge is how to organize an entire institution to provide such a detailed, honest review.
