Weekly Briefing: A teaching-evaluation spat prompts conversations about grade inflation

In this department, ratings for teaching are down. Why? ADVERTISEMENT [Weekly Briefing Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. This department’s overall rating for teaching fell. Why? Something was different when economics faculty members at James Madison University’s business school received their annual evaluations this past summer. Six professors who spoke with The Chronicle said their overall performance scores had dropped from the year before by at least two points on a nine-point scale. The score measures teaching, research, and service. The teaching evaluation is conducted by the head of the academic unit for economics, who leads the department. Faculty members who didn’t achieve an “excellent” rating can miss out on promotions, merit pay, and financial awards from James Madison. “Satisfactory” is the minimum rating needed to remain employed. Five of the six professors with reduced overall scores blamed their lower teaching scores. The reviews, professors said, didn’t take into account factors like instructional methods, evaluating “countable” metrics like class grades instead. Several professors said they were dinged because their students were earning too many D’s and F’s. Those five faculty members appealed their evaluations, saying that they failed to measure their teaching abilities and methods in a valuable way. The professors met with the provost to explain their concerns, but as of this week, the deadline to finalize evaluations had passed, and the business school’s dean had not changed their lower ratings. Charlene M. Kalenkoski, the department’s new academic-unit head, did not respond to a request for comment about the evaluations. The situation reflects two important debates in higher ed: how best to evaluate faculty members on their teaching quality, and the pervasive problem of [grade inflation](. Let’s talk about grades As tenure comes increasingly under attack by policymakers and because of budget realities, more colleges face pressure to better quantify the duties of a professor. At the same time, student grades are going up nationally. Scholars are debating whether professors are working harder to teach effectively and help struggling students, or just making their classes easier. In an interview with our Charlotte Matherly, administrators at James Madison denied the economics professors’ suggestions that their unit head had asked them to inflate grades, and said the university isn’t lowering the bar for students. Still, faculty members who spoke to Charlotte said that the change in their teaching evaluations spoke to a larger problem at James Madison. [Enrollment is at an all-time high,]( and some professors say that quality teaching isn’t valued. They’re being directed to water down grades to graduate as many students as possible, they say. The appeal Several faculty members were dissatisfied after the appeal and the administration’s response to it, so Bill Grant, an economics professor, and his colleagues set out to change the department’s governance document to make the criteria for evaluations more specific. An administrator from the provost’s office is mediating the change process, as the faculty must agree on the document, along with the academic-unit head, dean, and provost. Grant wanted to add a clause that prohibits the academic-unit head from counting a professor’s grading against them, he said. But the unit head has already rejected a passage that read, “The AUH will not use the annual evaluation process to pressure any faculty member to change their grading system or use GPAs as a factor for determining faculty teaching-evaluation ratings, unless there is evidence that the faculty member’s teaching effectiveness is compromised by their grading system.” [Read Charlotte’s full story here](. 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