Spotlight is published periodically by the Office of Assessment and Continuous Improvement in the College of Education to highlight promising practices in assessment and continuous improvement.
This edition of the Spotlight examines the return of the Bluebook, engages in a discussion on grade inflation, and explores steps for connecting students’ vision for their future with a pathway to get there. To be included in a future edition of the Spotlight, please contact jeremy-penn@uiowa.edu.
College of Education Mission, Vision & Values
Mission Statement
The College of Education advances education and mental health in Iowa and beyond.
Vision Statement
The best educational and mental health outcomes for all.
Values
Practice integrity. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of honesty, transparency, and ethics. We use our resources efficiently and effectively.
Affirm academic freedom. We freely seek and share knowledge. We are responsible to our disciplines, students, profession, and institution.
Foster belonging. We welcome everyone with respect, care, and dignity. We value access and opportunity for all. We encourage rigorous and respectful dialogue.
Unlock the boundless potential in each person. We build collaborative relationships, meeting people where they are. We challenge and improve systems to empower people to become their best.
Improve continuously. We pursue excellence by learning and improving everything we do.
Contributors
Prepared by Jeremy Penn.
To share a promising practice in a future edition of the Spotlight you are using in your classroom, in your program, or in your department, please contact jeremy-penn@uiowa.edu.
Classroom Assessment
The Return of the Bluebook?
Peter Allen, in the 1979 film, All That Jazz, sings:
You might need it some other rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again
High-waisted jeans, wallpaper, and silent walking (which, before earpods were widely used, was just called “walking” are examples of trends and practices that were common or fashionable, only to disappear and then later reappear once again in a similar form. Using Blue Books for in-class written essay examinations appears to now be a member of the ‘what’s old is new again’ club as instructors seek strategies for minimizing students’ use of Artificial Intelligence in assessment.
For those unfamiliar, Blue Books are stapled packets of 8 blank, wide-ruled writing paper (for sale from the UI Bookstore for $0.55 each). In the most common usage, students are asked to purchase and bring a Blue Book to class on examination day. The instructor hands out the exam instructions and essay questions or prompts and then allots students time in class (often the entire or a significant portion of the class period) to handwrite their answers in their Blue Books. At the end of the allowed time, the instructor collects the Blue Books, then scores and provides feedback on students’ answers, returning them to students in a future class meeting. While producing benefits for eliminating the use of Artificial Intelligence, using handwritten Blue Book exams come with challenges, such as preparing students who are unfamiliar with the process, creating good essay or question prompts, and efficient and effective scoring. Some tips for effective use of Blue Book exams include:
- Ask students to bring blank Blue Books to collect a week or two before the scheduled exam. This allows you to flip through them, then shuffle them up and hand them out to students randomly on the day of the exam to prevent ethically challenged students from putting formulas, notes, or reminders in their Blue Books prior to the exam.
- Ensure you have enough Blue Books ready to go prior to the day of the exam and keep a few extra Blue Books available to sell (at cost) to students who did not purchase their own Blue Book. Keep track of the names of which students brought in their own Blue Books so you know which students should be charged.
- Alternatively, consider asking your academic department to provide Blue Books for exams throughout the semester. They can often be purchased with a bulk discount.
- Remind students that they will need a writing implement on the day of the exam. Have a cup with a few extra pencils available for students who forget to bring one. Feel free to charge for pencils (at cost), too.
- Provide clear instructions and guidance on expectations for the exam. Common instructions include using legible handwriting, reminding students that no outside sources are to be used during the exam, and explaining where the student’s name and student ID number should be placed on the Blue Book.
- Explain to students if or how the use of non-standard grammar will affect their score. Unless the course is explicitly about written communication, it may be best to focus on the students’ reasoning and content rather than on grammatical conventions, although instructors may wish to point out it is not possible to provide a good score to writing that is unclear, confused, or nonsensical.
- Determine if you will allow students the use of scratch paper during the exam. Some students like to create outlines or compute calculations on scratch paper prior to writing out their final answers. If you will allow scratch paper, provide it yourself to ensure it is blank and collect it at the conclusion of the exam.
- Carefully plan the essay questions / prompts to ensure students have sufficient time to complete their answers. Remember that writing by hand is slower for most students than typing. Try writing out the answers yourself and see how long it takes you, then multiply that amount of time by 2 or 2.5 to estimate how long it may take most students.
- Announce the use of Blue Book exams early in the semester so students who have disabilities have enough time to work with the Office of Student Disability Services to receive appropriate accommodations.
- As with all open-response items, use rubrics to support fairness and increase efficiency in your grading of students’ responses. Rubrics can be created and scored in Canvas (ICON) for ease of providing feedback and recording grades by creating an assignment in your ICON course with no submission.
- If you do come across a response that is illegible, consider asking the student to read aloud their response to you for scoring.
Using Blue Books for in-course essay exams can be one way to reduce students’ use of artificial intelligence in assessment. The University of Iowa’s Exam Services offers additional resources and support for creating high quality exams for in-person courses, including scannable multiple-choice exams, and resources for supporting proctored online assessments for hybrid or online courses.
College Data
Grade Inflation in Undergraduate Programs
In fall 2024, undergraduate students at the University of Iowa were 1.49 times more likely to receive an ‘A’ in comparison to undergraduate students in fall 2014. In fact, in fall 2024, 54.33% of 114,283 grades in undergraduate courses at the University of Iowa (not counting courses that were graded pass / fail or students who withdrew from a course prior to receiving a letter grade) were an A+, A, or A-. In comparison, in fall 2014, 36.57% of 108,302 grades in undergraduate courses were an A+, A, or A-. Looking back almost two more decades, in 1996-1997 (my first year as a college freshman!), the average undergraduate GPA was 2.81 and the average graduate GPA was 3.61. In 2023-2024, the average undergraduate GPA was 3.25 and the average graduate GPA was 3.81, an increase of 0.44 for undergraduate students and 0.2 for graduate students over 27 years (for details, see: Fall 2024 Profile of Students Enrolled).
Grade inflation – defined as the increase of grades without an associated increase in students’ achievement – is not unique to the University of Iowa, is not unique to higher education, and is not a new concern, with some evidence it was discussed as long ago as the 1890s. While it is possible some amount of the increase of grades could be explained by increases in students’ performance (there is some evidence, for example, that from 2004 to 2019 undergraduate students increased the amount of time spent preparing for class and had more interactions with faculty), the big jump in UI undergraduate GPA from 2019-2020 (3.09) to 2020-2021 (3.23) suggests other factors, such as the pandemic, alignment with K-12 grade inflation, pressure from students, alignment of grading practices with other instructors, and institutional momentum, likely also play roles in the increase in grades over time.
Is Grade Inflation a Problem?
Grade inflation is an important problem for two reasons. First, if the trend continues as it has over the last ten years, by 2034 some 81% of all undergraduate grades would be an ‘A’. This sort of extreme compression of grades would essentially turn all courses into a pass / fail where an ‘A’ is a pass and any other grade is a failing grade. This model – where the only the top score is acceptable – is used widely across other feedback systems, such as Amazon reviews (where any score below a five is considered failure), Uber (where scores below a perfect five require an explanation and where drivers who receive top scores earn more money), and Airbnb (where a perfect score is required across all rating areas to earn a perfect score from a guest).
Second, having all grades essentially the same limits their ability to communicate anything meaningful. Ideally, grades should communicate to the student and to others the extent to which the student achieved the learning goals of the course, their degree program, and the institution they attended. The compression of grades into a very narrow range decreases their ability to clearly communicate information about students’ learning because all students’ achievements look the same. This is particularly problematic at a time when it is increasingly important for students and institutions to elucidate the value – particularly the skills, knowledge, and dispositions – its programs provide to students, communities, graduate programs, and employers.
What Can be Done about Grade Inflation?
One obvious strategy to address grade inflation would be to give lower grades. Unfortunately, this would likely produce confused and angry students, particularly if only some instructors gave lower grades, and could affect attrition and degree completion rates. Further, lowering all grades simply because grades seem “too high” is just as arbitrary as raising all grades because they seem “too low.” And efforts that suddenly lowered grades would be unfair to the students who happen to be enrolled in courses at the time when grades were lowered, as they would receive lower grades than their peers from the year before even if they had similar levels of learning.
One strategy some instructors have used to address grade inflation is to give students two grades – one ‘inflated’ grade to the registrar, and one to the student that represents their ‘actual’ level of achievement. While a creative solution, it feels disingenuous to give students different grades for the same level of achievement and provides no benefit to communicating students’ learning to employers or graduate programs.
A method that is sometimes used to decrease the drift in grades over time is to maintain a collection of “anchor papers,” or collections of student work from past assessments across various levels of achievement, that can be reference points for comparing current levels of achievement with how grades were provided in the past. Before grading new work, instructors return to these anchor papers (or other samples of student work) and reflect on how the knowledge, skills, and abilities represented in them match expectations for the current class. One challenge for using anchor papers or reference work is the rapid change of content and expectations over time.
A more dramatic solution for grade inflation would be to drop the current 5-letter grade system altogether in favor of a new grading system that resets expectations and allows a wider delineation of student achievement. This would be similar to how test development companies create a brand-new scoring scale when developing a new version of a test so users of the new scores will not confuse the new scores with the old scores. While some instructors and schools have tried this, without broad acceptance such massive changes face tremendous implementation barriers such as pressure on instructors to always give out the top score, no matter what that top value becomes.
Perhaps the strategy most accessible to instructors, given the current context and our lack of ability to singlehandedly change the whole grading system, is to be more deliberate and intentional when describing expectations for student learning and in giving high quality feedback – including appreciation for their efforts, coaching on how they might improve, and evaluation that indicates if their performance is good enough – to students about the extent to which they are meeting those expectations.
Grade inflation is likely not going away any time soon. We can work to address it (I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to address it at jeremy-penn@uiowa.edu) to the extent possible. But most importantly, in the meantime we must continue to consider how we can better empower students to more effectively share their learning with others, particularly when seeking jobs or applying to graduate degree programs.
Promising Practice
Intentionally Connecting Students’ Vision for Their Future with a Pathway to Get There
Tim Alvarez, retired President of Otero College and former Vice President for Student Affairs at North Dakota State University, shared a powerful way for building a relationship with new students. Rather than asking students their major, he asked students, “What difference do you want to make in the world?” This question challenged students to think beyond the stereotypical view of each major – business majors working in businesses, education majors standing in front of a classroom, nurses chatting bedside with a patient – to consider how the skills, knowledge, and abilities they are developing in their programs will empower them to achieve the vision they have for themselves and their communities. This question challenges students to think about and find the pathway that will allow them to achieve this vision and acknowledges the truth that a degree with a specific major is only but one of many steps required to achieve that vision.
Cathy Day writes in the Chronicle about working with a student who wants to become a screenwriter who believes that simply adding a screenwriting minor to her degree program will directly lead to a career in screenwriting. Sure, adding a screenwriting minor to a degree program will help the student develop the knowledge and skills necessary to write screenplays. But becoming a professional screenwriter requires many additional steps beyond the completion of a minor, such as working as an intern, completing job shadows, connecting with successful screenwriters, joining a writing club, and becoming a published writer. Day laments the fact that, too often, our programs focus only on knowledge and skills while ignoring these other critical steps in the pathway to career success.
When I was an undergraduate student in the 1990s, I had a friend who really wanted to work for ESPN. He loved sports, particularly college sports, and wanted nothing more than a career that allowed him to travel and work in broadcasting college sporting events. He pursued a major in communications and broadcasting in college, but somehow, he saw that the pathway to the career he wanted extended beyond the doors of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. After completing his degree, he spent most fall weekends in his car driving to whichever college town was hosting ESPN’s GameDay that weekend (this was before there were dozens of games broadcast every Saturday) where he would knock on the door of the broadcasting trailer and volunteer to spend the day filling-in with whatever work they needed: hauling cables, driving a boom truck, or even just holding a microphone on the sideline to collect the sounds of the game. After a season of doing this, the crew hired him on for the next season (still mostly driving on his own), but after the second season he became a full member of the crew and started traveling on ESPN’s dime. He is now the manager of a sports broadcasting crew for ESPN and has worked or attended many of the top sporting events in the world including the college football championships and several Super Bowls.
There’s no doubt that my friend’s learning in his major was critical for achieving his dream. But there’s also no doubt the pathway to that success required more than a degree with a certain major. It is this pathway to success, the unwritten and hidden practices and activities, that are critical for students, particularly first-generation students, as they seek to achieve their vision for the future. Therefore, this promising practice is to intentionally build opportunities in the curriculum to make those pathways explicit.
One way I try to do this in the first-year seminar I teach is by bringing in guest speakers who represent the various careers that might be of interest to students and ask them to share their twisty, rocky pathways into their current role. Other strategies mentioned by Day in her article include connecting students with mentors and encouraging in-field experiences such as internships. She pushes students to do these things by giving them assignments that require them to do it (although I do not necessarily recommend assigning students to drive a beat-up Corolla 1,236 miles from Lincoln, NE to Tempe, AZ to volunteer to stand on the sideline during a broadcast of the Arizona State vs. UCLA game!).
Helping students identify a vision for their future selves and then lighting the pathway to achieve it is at the core of the mission of all higher education institutions. Therefore, the next time you are tempted to ask a student their major instead consider how you might change the conversation to help them begin to see and chart out the pathway to their desired future.