An added complication for grade inflation is that grades are translated to grade points, which are averaged into a meaningless number.
Over the years, I’ve come to the practice of giving grades A, B. C and F (no D) with + and -.
This is because there is indeed a gap between failing (F) and exhibiting some small degree of mastery. The median grade in my lower division courses tends to be about B-. About 5 to 10 percent of a section fails — it can vary higher.
Roughly things work out as
A 20%
B 30%
C 40%
F 10%
This still provides plenty of discrimination, I think.
A student who earns a C- from me tends to be pretty satisfied with it. But this is partly because I work hard to let folks know what I expect and that what I expect is challenging but reasonable.
Very often, I find myself admiring the student who struggled to earn a C+ more than any one else in the class. I make sure that such students know this — sometimes with emails after the grades are submitted.

Over the last 31 years, my small “liberal arts” college has gradually become a community college, although it still maintains the fiction that it is liberal arts. The average student is one who would never have attended college, even 15 years ago. In the last 15-20 years, while the grade inflation at the college has increased students’ average GPA, my grades have decreased remarkably. In most undergraduate and graduate classes, my average GPA ranges from 2.0-2.4, even after 2-4 students have dropped the classes because they were failing. In a recent graduate class, 10 of 18 students failed the course. Although that class was an outlier, I have many classes in which there are no grades of A, 2-3 grades of B, 3-4 grades of D and F with the remaining grades being Cs. Thus far, no one from the administration has approached me directly to admonish me. BUT, what my department administrators do is this: they allow the students who fail my courses to take the course online from Phoenix University. I guess it’s a win-win-win for everyone but me: The college still keeps the student and gets the money for the rest of his/her program, my dept. chair doesn’t have to admonish me directly, and the students gets his/her A for the course. Now that word has gotten out about Phoenix, some students will enroll for my course, attend the first 2-3 classes, fail the first two quizzes (that they had no intention of passing), drop the course because they are “failing,”, and then have their advisor appeal to my chair to take the course online at Phoenix.
I have 5 more years to go. Unlike Dr. Lang, I will likely be permitted to survive at the school for this period of time. But, the academic fraud will continue.

Mark,
I have been following your work for a while, and I am glad you contribute so much to the subject.
Indeed these statistics are reason to be concerned. But it’s like a dirty little secret and everyone is going along with it. Alas, since a College Education is an experienced good no one really knows the value of it until after it has already been received. (more on the cost topic here: http://j.mp/m5jYKD)
We put a lot of trust in professors to properly grade people, but I noticed during my college years that grades were not necessarily reflective of true individual ability or potential. They were more like a poor snapshot Polaroids.
Certain professors were not willing to pass judgment on a student as being a “Failure” so the C grade was an easy way to deal with it.
It’s a disservice when you look at the poor quality of writing most former students now posses. They need to be able to read and write effectively, but most importantly they need to adopt critical thinking, a skill that usually develops along side the process of reading and writing.
Giving out wishy-washy grades sends mixed signals to impressionable students who have a false sense of confidence when leaving college.
And I agree on your point about getting colleagues on board. If not, the teacher that is actually doing their job providing well grounded grading methodologies without a “fear of failure” will be ostracized by the student body as a “hard” teacher and avoided at all costs.
Academic teachers could learn a lot from coaches and trainers, because when they do a poor job, someone on the field can get hurt bad. Can’t we just train these students to do better and honestly tell them when they are not?

Here’s my rationale, Prof. Lang. For me to give students a grade out of a scale significantly lower than that of colleagues everywhere else becomes a stigma on the students’ record. Unless an entire department commits to lowering the inflation, a single professor must match the general scale. For what it’s worth, I tried to get a department-wide grading curve in pace many years ago.

Bauerlein’s commentary is both encouraging and infuriating. He’s right to give the problem of grade inflation, which is crippling higher education, further exposure, but his cavalier reference to his own complicity (“In a humanities class, a ‘C’ counts as a lost case. I am just as guilty of the practice as most, but at least my colleagues and I usually admit it”) is extremely offensive.
Perhaps I’m overly sensitive, having been persecuted and then forced into early retirement because of my refusal to give Cs to subliterate students–who in some of my courses were in the majority–while my colleagues behaved like Bauerlein and his colleagues.
Teachers who treat C as the new F are committing academic fraud. Fear and trembling over complaints from students and administrators is no excuse for betraying one’s profession. Grade inflation is the result of simple cowardice.
Frederick K. Lang
Professor Emeritus of English
Brooklyn College,
City University of New York