What happens when the grades archaeology students receive do not reflect their abilities?
Grading assignments is one of the worst parts of being an archaeology professor. The main reason why I dislike grading is because I know in my heart that grades are no predictor of career success in cultural resource management archaeology. I am an excellent example of someone with less than stellar grades in college who ended up having a 20+ year career in archaeology.
As an undergraduate, all I ever wanted to do was archaeology. I loved archaeological field school and knew this was a job I could do for decades. But I thought the classroom setting was a waste of time. Why talk about archaeology when we could be out doing it? I wrote a blog post once evaluating how much of my college career helped me as a CRM archaeologist. NOTE: It was far from 100%.
As a result, I put the minimum into my coursework and classroom participation. I sat in the back. Took notes. Learned to speed through all the course readings and wrote insightful, but bare bones, logical essays. I earned B’s in almost every anthropology course. Once, a professor laughed at me when I told the class I wanted to be an archaeologist after graduation because he just didn’t see me making it in the field.
He was almost right. After finishing at Boise State University, I spent a year adrift, trying to find a job in archaeology. My university gave me absolutely no career guidance. I’d never been told that CRM archaeology existed so I didn’t even apply for an archaeological technician position until I’d been out of college for a year. At the same time, I realized I would need a Master’s if I wanted to have a long career in archaeology so I started applying to graduate programs too. It took a few months but I started getting permanent field tech offers around the time I learned I’d been accepted to a couple MA programs. I went for the Master’s knowing I could get back on the CRM job market once I finished the MA.
While I was a solid ‘B’ student as an undergraduate, I transformed into an ‘A’ student in grad school. I was still putting in 60-70% effort in the classroom, saving most of my efforts for my Master’s research and fieldwork, but these nominal inputs started earning me the top grades in every class. Years later I found the same thing to be true as a PhD student. Through all my education I learned that skimming every reading, making a few thoughtful comments in class, and writing clear, logical papers was enough to earn the highest marks as a graduate student.
In fact, I’d been in college long enough to notice that the classes seemed to be getting easier. I was reading the same articles and doing pretty much the same assignments when I was a PhD student in 2014—2017 as I was during my Master’s program back in 2002—2005. And, I noticed the undergraduate assignments I was grading as a graduate student instructor in the 2010s were much easier than they used to be when I was an undergrad in the 1990s. School at all levels in anthropology appeared to have gotten easier or at least remained unchanged from the time I started college in 1997 until finishing my PhD in 2017. It’s true that I got better at school during that time. But I noticed the word counts on undergraduate essays, the size of weekly readings, and assignment requirements definitely loosened during that time. And late work was not only accepted but many students actually planned on turning in their work late and expected to get full credit. Why was this so?
DISCLAIMER: The perspectives in this blog post are no reflection of my employer. They are my own thoughts and do not reflect the way other professors feel about this topic.
Grade inflation and higher education
I’m not the first person to realize these changes in higher education. Researchers have found that undergraduate grade point averages (GPAs) had been on the rise for decades. Data shows GPAs went up 0.10 points from 2000—2016 (https://www.gradeinflation.com/). The median GPA has gone up 0.36 points over the last 30 years (https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/grade-inflation-trends-and-causes/). According to some, an ‘A’ is the new ‘C’ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/grade-inflation-makes-a-the-new-c-participation-trophy-quiet-quitting-hiring-2c480b80). Those studying the subject explain how, as a college degree became a commodity, there was more pressure to “give the customer what they want.” And 21st century students want diplomas because those diplomas give them access to better jobs after graduation. Higher GPAs help students graduate because they are much less likely to fail classes.
Grade inflation in universities is a complicated issue for which there are several causes. The post-World War II G.I. Bill helped millions of veterans attend college, a space that was previously reserved for specialists like doctors and clergy, or the wealthy. The post-World War II increase in undergraduate students coincides with the first burst of grade inflation, but GPAs appear to have remained relatively level until higher education underwent dramatic changes between the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1960s, changes to student loan requirements opened the floodgates on student loans making college accessible to millions more Americans. In the 1980s, governments decreased spending on higher ed which forced schools to look elsewhere for funding. These changes pressured universities to admit as many students as possible, using tuition to replace lost government funding.
All of this was veiled as opening access to higher education while increasing student choices and unburdening stagflating government budgets, but universities leapt at the chance to increase tuition, expand their offerings, and give students what they wanted (e.g. a good experience and a diploma). Universities went on a spending spree to attract students that included hiring professors and opening new departments but also ballooning university infrastructure. At the same time, employers could require college degrees for jobs that formerly didn’t require a degree because now there were millions more college-educated people to employ. Americans noticed that a college degree appeared to be the primary pathway to gainful employment and higher wages. The number of college-educated Americans exploded. So did college tuition.
With millions of additional students paying billions more in tuition, universities had discovered a seemingly never-ending source of revenue and employers could rely on a steady flow of college graduates. Most jobs that paid livable wages needed degrees and universities were the only places that sold them. Employers could use college degrees to justify the wages they were paying to working class employees. They could also use imaginary “skills shortages” to justify degree inflation, ever increasing the hurdles employees needed to jump across in order to access high wage jobs. Universities could as use the “skills shortage” to create more certificates, programs, and degrees that students could buy. The system seemed to be working until the 2010s when we started seeing the cracks in the system more clearly. The fact that colleges weren’t teaching graduates workplace skills was one glaring problem. Exploding student debt was another problem (which stands at $1.74 trillion in 2024). Despite all this education, employers couldn’t even be sure of what college graduates had actually learned because of grade inflation.
Why wouldn’t professors want to create rigorous classes designed to prepare their students for the workplace? To be fair, many degrees are extremely rigorous. Engineering, mathematics, pre med, computer engineering. Those majors are known for having courses designed to weed out “undeserving” majors (e.g. Those who do not score well on assignments). These are also majors that have a long line of students willing to undergo the strain and stress involved with completing those degrees because they know a diploma in those fields will allow them to access higher paying jobs after graduation. The rest of college majors (ahem, anthropology) had to do something to keep enrollments in a world where students are fixated on the “wealth premium” associated with the employment options that come with their degree.
I’m not saying anthropology, across the board, made its courses easier. Even if that was the case, runaway tuition prices would have negated most of the “wealth premium” derived from an anthropology degree when student loan debt is added to the equation. Also, I believe most tenure track professors do not want to make their classes easier. We anthropology professors believe in using our classes as pathways towards learning about human cultures and we do not think college should be easy. However, most college classes are not taught by tenure track professors or even instructors with a PhD.
When your archaeology professor isn’t a professor
Around 70 percent of college instructors are adjunct faculty and they teach about half of all college courses (https://blog.cengage.com/spotlight-on-adjunct-faculty-in-2024/). These instructors of record are professors, but their institutions do not consider them the same thing as tenure track (TT) professors. Half of all adjunct faculty receive no medical benefits and 25% live below the poverty line. Adjuncts typically teach through contracts at more than one institution and patch together part time gigs to support themselves. The number of adjunct faculty in the United States has risen sharply over the past few decades, nearly replacing tenure track faculty in lower division courses.
The proliferation of adjunct professors has diminished the agency of tenure track professors since universities are more than willing to replace TT faculty with contingent ones if TT faculty complaints get to loud. Adjuncts also help the university teach more students than it otherwise could with TT faculty alone, adding tuition revenue without having to hire permanent instructors or offer benefits. This whole situation makes academia a very precarious place for all professors. It also provides motivation for instructors to teach for positive reviews as much as they do for learning outcomes.
While growth-oriented universities have numerous reasons for adjunctifying their teaching staff and inflating grades, students also provide additional pressure to accelerate these trends. Who wants to get less than an ‘A’ in a college course? Nobody. Students are not willing to accept a less than stellar mark in a class, using the ‘C’ they earned as a learning event that could given them insights on what they can do to become a better scholar, and I don’t blame them. When I was an undergrad, I knew that my grades were considered a reflection of how well I had done. There was no way to let the world know what I had learned or what kind of student I was other than the fact that I’d earned the highest grade possible.
Also, who wants to spend more time than necessary on schoolwork? Not me. Definitely not 19-year-old me. I worked 30—40 hours a week when I was an undergraduate. For me, college was just an obstacle keeping me from becoming an archaeologist and I just wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Rigorous classes take a lot of time investment and I was not in the business of investing more than the bare minimum in my college classes.
Like all undergraduates I was focused on the outcome of my undergraduate studies—a college degree. The degree was the only reason I was there. It was all I cared about. However, I also wanted to get the degree with the highest GPA which is fortunate since my undergraduate GPA played a huge role in getting accepted to a Master’s program. Many grad programs have a minimum GPA for admission, usually somewhere around a 3.0—3.3. Undergraduates know this. Professors also know that students who go on to graduate school are used to scoring the highest mark. Anything less than an ‘A’ in a PhD program is tantamount to failing the class. Even though your PhD GPA is almost meaningless, most students expect and strive for an ‘A’ and walk away from their PhD with a 4.0.
Finally, students are going into debt to get these degrees. Who wants to borrow $30,000—$80,000 to go for an undergraduate degree where they get less than a 4.0? Who wants to borrow upwards of $120,000 for a PhD where you get less than a 4.0? I’m sure there aren’t too many Americans out there willing to do that, so students expect to get ‘A’s’ regardless of how much/little effort they put into each course.
Professors still control grade inflation
Despite all these pressures, professors are still the ones evaluating student performance in their classes. They make the assignments. The instructor of record is ultimately responsible for submitting the grades to the university’s registrar’s office, which is how your transcripts are built. Therefore, professors control grade inflation. Why do they let it happen? I can think of several reasons:
(NOTE: I teach at an R1 university and I do not do any of the following things. In my classes, you have to bust you’re a$$: Reading long, boring articles. Participating in class discussions. Writing essays. Doing quizzes. Working on group projects. My classes run the gamut but they’re designed to prepare students for careers in archaeology, which isn’t easy. Each semester I have students who completely fail my classes and it does affect my course evaluations. But I want students to get their money’s worth. However, I can understand how the following things happen in higher education.)
Less rigorous classes: One of the easiest ways to make sure everyone does well in your class is to make it easier. I can also see how this is a way adjuncts can make their workload more manageable. For an adjunct teaching 4—8 classes at several universities in a single semester, anything that makes your workload lighter is welcome. For TT faculty, making your class rigorous can free you up to spend more time on research or senseless campus committees and other forms of “service.” Your department chair or dean isn’t going to ask you why the grades in your class do not reflect the bell curve that is typical of human performance. They’re too busy fighting to keep the university president from eliminating anthropology so they can expand the business school’s new AI program, which will dedicate itself to helping generative AI eliminate all the jobs of everyone who graduates from that university as well as everyone who works at the institution. University of Skynet anyone? Your students aren’t going to ask you to make the class harder. They’re working 2 or 3 jobs and shoehorning school into the little blocks of time they have. They don’t want to spend more time on school. Basically, nobody is asking professors to make classes harder.
Less rigorous classes means better evaluations and happier students. Students can do better when they have easier assignments. Less rigorous classes makes things easier for professors too. I can see how this would contribute to grade inflation.
Risk aversion in higher education: What does your university fear second most? Bad press. (They fear losing money more than anything else.)
What is the fastest way to spread bad news? You guessed it. The internet.
Students complaining online about hard classes is one thing. The university might not care. In fact, they may think being known for rigor will improve their ranking in the U.S. News & World Report. Students complaining online about getting bad grades because of discrimination or that rigorous classes are traumatic to students does the opposite. That kind of complaining can bring an inquisition with university administrators, calls to eliminate the professors that cause trauma, and gets blasted all over other media painting the institution in a bad light.
Universities don’t want their brand tarnished. The institutional investors betting money on universities don’t want anything to keep them from delivering “returns on investment.” Discrimination is something that will definitely get looked into. If you teach at a risk-averse university (which is every single one of them), why take chances? Why not make sure you’re never in the firing line?
To be clear: There are professors in the United States who do discriminate against BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, women, students who learn differently, and every other sort of human identity you can imagine. I’ve taken classes from professors who blanket refused to give any student of color a grade higher than a ‘B’. Back before social media, complaints about that sort of behavior fell on deaf ears. Now students can blast that sort of thing far and wide. This news will get around to those who invest in universities and those investors may withdraw their financial support. This is what scares universities.
It is good that students have the power to unveil discrimination amongst professors. However, there is also the potential that students can make baseless claims of discrimination. Of course, anything is possible. Those who are just acting out because they didn’t do their homework but still want an ‘A’ might just do that. So, once again, why take a risk?
Student claims = truth: This one builds on my previous comment. In the world of hyper-social media, claims are taken as truths. Universities find themselves in a tough position when dealing with controversy. They move very, very slowly. Waiting for the university to act upon accusations makes them look like they don’t care. Cries for justice will crescendo while the university investigates. Similarly, they could be violating their professor’s rights if they act too quickly. That could get them in legal trouble. What to do?
During the investigation of serious accusations, professors might be placed on leave. That means no teaching, no science, no engagement with what is their life work. All of this will put serious strain on any research lab or project. Things are even worse for adjuncts who will probably be let go, either immediately or at the end of their contract. Another desperate PhD will take their place. Their adjunct career is probably over.
When it comes to something like a grade dispute, the university is probably going to side with the student unless there is strong, clear, undeniable evidence against them. But what if you don’t have clear, undeniable evidence? What if it’s just “he said, she said” testimony? Again, why take a risk?
Professors are afraid: All of this adds up to professors being afraid of losing their job over a stupid grade in a class. If you’re TT, you’ve beaten extraordinary odds to land that job. Why risk your career over a student complaining about a grade? If you’re adjuncting, you want to land a TT job. Why risk it over a student complaining about a grade? The market will expose that student’s lack of abilities when they are unable to do their job and get fired or laid off. Why should you be the one to expose this lack of abilities?
At the end of the day, 99% of your students are just going to do their work and follow instructions. Less than 1% of your students will vacuum up 50% of your time and effort in every class. It is that one student who threatens lawsuits and “goes straight to the top” of the college’s administration over a grade in an archaeology class that is just going to make your life difficult. Why not just get that 1/100 student out of your life so you can dedicate your efforts towards the other 99 students who want to learn and are willing to put in the effort it takes to get a college degree? Why not design a class that reduces the risk of that one student even materializing? Why not?
Society believes grades are real: Ultimately, this is the real motivator behind grade inflation. Students, professors, and employers think grades are real. They think the scores earned in a college class are a true reflection of a student’s knowledge and abilities. Professors think these grades are an evaluation of how much the student learned in their class. Employers just have to trust that these are facts when, in reality, none of this is true.
How do you know if a recent graduate is going to be a good CRMer?
The only hope an employer has of evaluating a student’s abilities is through the extracurricular projects they did while they were a student. Something like an honor thesis based on original research or writing a short article for a regional archaeology newsletter. Publications by undergraduates are always good indicators that they are driven to do archaeology after graduation since technical writing is paramount for a career in archaeology. Writing also gives you an idea as to how they have internalized, applied, and synthesized the information they were taught.
However, other projects can provide important insights. Volunteering with a local museum or avocational archaeology group. Doing community outreach like teaching a community education class on archaeology or bringing archaeology activities to local public schools. Volunteering for a conference or, better yet, presenting a poster or paper based on original research. Not every student is able to do a research publication or conference presentation, but most can squeeze in some volunteering in the 4—5 years they are in college. While working 30—40 hrs./week, I didn’t have time to do an honors thesis. But I managed to co-teach a community ed class on Idaho archeology as an undergraduate student. I also submitted some of my class papers (the same ones that were considered ‘B’ work) to essay contests, winning a couple.
Volunteering in a professor’s lab does not always mean students are learning workplace skills. Many professors use free undergraduate labor to fuel their own research. Students spend hours counting potsherds, doing flotation, and cataloging artifacts but never really learn anything useful to a CRM company. Oftentimes they do the tedious work but don’t even get to contribute to technical reports or other publications coming out of that lab. It can be even worse when they work for graduate students because most PhD students don’t do a good job of supervising or mentoring the undergraduate students who are helping them get their dissertation research done. A PhD student is just using the undergrads to do work they don’t want to do themselves. This free labor is portrayed on as their own in subsequent publications and the world never thinks about who actually did the labor that produced that work.
Volunteering in a professor’s lab is only useful for CRM if the undergraduate got to contribute to the final publications in a meaningful way. Otherwise, just acknowledge they spent some time processing samples as a symbol that they want to do archaeology after graduation. Don’t assume they learned anything about archaeology in that lab unless they get their names on technical reports coming out of that lab.
Most importantly, these extracurricular activities are ungraded. There is no grade for an undergraduate research project. It’s pass-fail. Just like there are no grades in CRM, there is no grade for actually doing archaeology.
Grade inflation doesn’t matter in a world where grades have low intrinsic value
Grade point averages are going up in college, which means their value is diminishing. An ‘A’ means ‘Average’ in a world where everyone gets an ‘A.’ The value of a high grade in college is not keeping up with the price every student is paying for their education, but students, professors, and employers want the opposite to be true. They want every ‘A’ to have a high value. I’d like to believe employers also want grades and GPAs to reflect the skills and abilities of those they are employing. But, many employers have given up on GPA as a reflection of a new hire’s abilities. Nobody ever hired me in cultural resource management archaeology because of my GPA. Graduate schools was the only place that ever cared about my GPA. If my GPA was inflated because everyone else was getting ‘A’s, the grad programs to which I was applying shouldn’t have been putting too much value into those grades either. My grad school instructors knew the game higher education was playing and admitted me to their program partially based on GPA.
When it comes to CRM, however, I was hired for having a college degree and relevant skills. My knowledge, skills, and abilities were conveyed through my resume and my reference letters. I didn’t even put my GPA down on my CRM resumes.
I know it’s hard to ask undergraduates to do more in college but I am starting to see the value of an undergraduate thesis in the scheme of things. In a world where everyone gets an ‘A’, that honors thesis is the only true product a student will create. Similarly, a Masters or PhD student’s thesis/dissertation and research project is the best reflection of their abilities. These documents and reference letters let an employer know what they can do.
It is unlikely that grade inflation will retract any time soon. Adjunctified anthropology programs can’t cut back on grades. Their instructors do not have enough institutional support or political power within the institution. Adjuncts need those good evals to keep their jobs. Tenure track professors are probably just as powerless since course evaluations are important to our merit promotions and tenure cases. Students are the ones who are in a true Catch-22. They will learn more from rigorous classes but harder classes might lower their GPA, which they need to go on to graduate school. I feel like universities don’t care either way as long as students keep paying tuition.
Employers are the real loser in this equation since they are the ones who have to “use the force” when trying to figure out if a new hire is going to work out or be a bust. I feel like cultural resource management archaeology companies will need to take a more hands-on approach to training future archaeologists if they really want to know which students are good and which aren’t. Until CRM starts collaborating with universities, they’ll just have to keep risking it.
I’d like to hear from you. Write a comment below or reach out to me if you have anything to say.
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