Resisting the Detrimental Effects of Grade Inflation on University Faculty and Students through Critical Communication Pedagogy

Abstract

Despite university faculty’s efforts to maintain rigor and high expectations in their classrooms, grade inflation continues to rise. While numerous factors exist to explain this problem, the primary contributor is the ubiquitous pressure of neoliberal forces on the university. Neoliberalism has inculcated society, namely undergraduate students, to resist the belief that the university is a place in which they collectively gather to learn, think, be challenged, grow through failure, and build character. Rather, students now largely believe that they university is merely a business from which they purchase a product—a degree. This producer-consumer mindset has created a deleterious situation for both students and faculty. Students believe that they are merely purchasing a degree; and, they demand that high grades accompany that degree. To them, high grades, coupled with their degree, are the currency with which they purchase a career. Because of this prevalent ideology, faculty are placed in a perilous position because they feel internal and external pressure to reduce the rigor of their courses and/or artificially inflate the grades that students earn. Although all faculty feel the pressure to conform to this neoliberally driven practice, it is especially troublesome for tenure-track, non-tenure track, and other contingent faculty because their continued employment is, often to a large extent, dependent of student ratings of teaching effectiveness.

This chapter will address these issues through the lens of critical communication pedagogy (CCP) by offering ways in which faculty can resist the neoliberal pressure to engage in grade inflation by teaching students about the neoliberal system which has inculcated them to believe that profit, success, and individualism are the only measures of a meaningful life. Following CCP, I will discuss how instructors can challenge students to resist neoliberal hegemony, hold high academic standards for themselves, and tie learning to outcomes that affect their futures—power and their response to it. Overall, I will argue that in order for tenure-track and contingent faculty to be able to resist the pressure to inflate grades, they must work to teach students to resist neoliberal ideology that instills the thought processes that lead to grade inflation. In so doing, students may begin to learn to engage in resistance behaviors to neoliberal power structures that marginalize them.

Keywords: neoliberalism, grade inflation, critical communication pedagogy, hegemony