I love teaching. But I hate grading.
I am not alone in this. Most teachers, instructors and professors — from kindergarten to doctoral classes — embrace the daily work of being an educator: preparing lectures, leading demonstrations, decorating bulletin boards, refreshing lesson plans, helping students during class.
We even enjoy designing assignments, even though those assignments will need to be graded.
But the grading? Ugh.
I invent elaborate schemes to avoid grading. The laundry must be folded. The spice cabinet needs a renovation. Our taxes are due … 10 months from now. Anything but grading.
The novelist Frank McCourt wrote about the psychic weight of lugging around ungraded essays. His solution: He once pitched them into a dumpster and strolled along into a now-leisurely day. I’ve never done anything so cinematic with a stack of student work.
With all of this dread for grading, I had to click on a story this week from the University Daily Kansan by Rylie Oswald Al-Awhad. The headline? “GPAs rise at KU during the pandemic; highest in nearly 50 years.”
(Full disclosure: I teach journalism at KU, where Oswald Al-Awhad is a journalism student.)
The story describes how GPAs among undergraduates jumped during the spring of 2020, when the university suspended in-person classes for the COVID-19 pandemic and instructors scrambled to figure out remote teaching.
The jump took GPAs from 3.17 in fall 2019, the last uninterrupted semester before the pandemic, to 3.47 in spring 2020.
The change of .30 in GPA points is by far the largest at KU since 1974, according to the university’s institutional research. If you, for instance, compare spring GPA records year-to-year, the largest annual increase is .06 points. For fall GPAs, the largest annual increase is .07. The one-semester pandemic bump was four to five times larger than even those earlier and relatively extreme years.
Nevertheless, GPA has been rising for decades. In fall 1980, KU registered its lowest GPA: 2.63. Since then it has been a steady climb, with the large pandemic bump sliding backwards slightly — from 3.47 in spring 2020 to 3.29 in spring 2023.
These GPA numbers are not particular to KU. National research reveals that GPAs have been increasing everywhere, for decades. That isn’t breaking news.
Here is what is new: Today’s incoming university students in Kansas are less academically prepared during this post-pandemic era. Yet they are earning higher and higher GPAs.
Talk to any professor or instructor. They will dump out anecdotes of how students are struggling after the pandemic. Spotty attendance. Shaky study skills. Over-reliance on screens. Struggles to meet deadlines.
