Yesterday's editorial explored the ways that Indiana University, Princeton University and Cornell University seek to address the problems of grade inflation and grading variability among disciplines and professors. Because of these difficulties, schools across the nation have been struggling to devise an accurate method of assessing what students learn during their time in college.
At the University, President Teresa A. Sullivan said any centralized grading policy would have to be supported by the Faculty Senate because it is these faculty members who are evaluating students in the classroom. Thus far, the University has not taken any steps to create an overarching policy or to provide potential employers or graduate schools with supplemental information about courses at the University.
In October 2008, though, the Spanish department took the battle against grade inflation upon itself. The department had used a grading scale different from that of the rest of the University for its lower-level courses in the past, only awarding students A's if they scored at least 95 percent on an assignment instead of the usual 93. But when it became too confusing to differentiate between lower-level and upper-level courses, the department decided to apply the scale to everyone.
Department Director of Undergraduate Studies Gustavo Pellon said the rigorous grading scale encourages diligence among Spanish majors, making them more competitive in an increasingly difficult job market. Many students, however, take issue with that claim. Although well-intentioned, the policy ultimately provokes resentment among students who feel their job and graduate school prospects may suffer as a result of lower grades and pale in comparison to those of University students in other disciplines.
What may be more useful is finding another way to quantify students' progress during the course of their undergraduate careers. For example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment is a measurement tool that evaluates students upon entering and exiting college. But many students, particularly those at top-tier universities, likely would score in extremely high percentiles to begin with, thus leaving little room for improvement as far as the test is concerned. Such an outcome makes it difficult to assess the "value added" of the college degree in question.
Although not a sound means to evaluate undergraduate performance, standardized tests can be used to demonstrate a student's abilities relative to his peers. Many graduate schools are thus placing more emphasis on tests like the GRE, Sullivan said. The tests provide an even playing field for comparison purposes and are independent of grade inflation and variability among schools and disciplines. But there are drawbacks similar to those of the SAT. First, a single test cannot always accurately capture a student's abilities and is taken during a period of a few hours. Consequently, the score may not well reflect four years worth of learning and self-improvement.
For her part, Sullivan is reluctant to interfere with grading policies by way of binding top-down policies. Problems can arise, however, when action is taken unilaterally by a department and others do not follow suit: The Spanish department's strategy makes sense from an internal perspective, but can disadvantage students when they are compared to peers who face different grading scales.
To strike the best balance, the Faculty Senate ought to take up the issues of grade inflation and variability and attempt to create flexible yet standard guidelines to reduce the amount of guesswork for employers and graduate schools. The approach need not reform grading scales or cap the number of A's awarded in each class, nor should any benchmarks be used to penalize professors for grading as they see fit. The strategy could be as simple as implementing a system similar to Indiana University's or that used by many law schools: providing extended transcripts that include information like course grade distributions. The ultimate goal is to clarify what a GPA truly measures and to search for ways to ensure that the numbers make sense.
After all, too much rides on this one number for it to get a free pass.
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