APRIL 2002JOURNAL OF MARKETING EDUCATION Exploring Achievement Striving as a Moderator of the Grading Leniency Effect

Graduate and undergraduate students were asked to rate hypothetical teachers in a full-factorial, full-profile conjoint task. Teacher attributes of grading leniency, workload assigned, enthusiasm, and real-world orientation were manipulated. Achievement striving, a subscale of the Type A personality scale, was found to be inversely related to the ten-dency to give higher evaluations to lenient-grading teachers at the undergraduate level but not at the graduate level. Addi-tional analyses and implications are discussed. In private conversations with colleagues, we have heard dis-paraging comments about other teachers getting high evalua-tions from students mainly because they are “easy graders.” Some have suggested that a “grading leniency effect, ” that is, the tendency for students to give higher evaluations to teach-ers who give higher grades, accounts for the significant grade inflation observed at the college level over the past 20 years (Archibold 1998). Thus, as teaching evaluations are increas-ingly used in faculty evaluations and tenure decisions (cf. Tong and Bures 1989), teachers may inflate grades to improve their ratings. Although it may seem obvious that grading leniency affects evaluations, the empirical support for this effect is mixed, impeding faculty or administrative efforts to take cor-rective action. Some recent articles in the business education literature suggest that no grading leniency effect exists (e.g., Bilimoria 1995; Webster 1990), while other empirical articles in the same literature suggest the opposite (Clayson an