Month: May 2004

I just read a great essay: How to End Grade Infla­tion by Michael Berube (prof at Penn State).

He humor­ous­ly iden­ti­fies the prob­lem: Eng­lish depart­ments have basi­cal­ly worked on the A/B bina­ry sys­tem for some time: A’s and A‑minuses for the best stu­dents, B’s for every­one else and C’s, D’s and F’s for stu­dents who miss half the class­es or threat­en their teach­ers with bod­i­ly harm.

And then pro­pos­es a clever solu­tion: What to do? If we so desired, we could recal­i­brate grades at Penn State, at Prince­ton or at any col­lege in the coun­try. The prin­ci­ple is sim­ple enough, and it’s cru­cial to every div­ing com­pe­ti­tion: we would mere­ly need to account for each course’s degree of dif­fi­cul­ty.

Every pro­fes­sor, and every depart­ment, pro­duces an aver­age grade — an aver­age for the pro­fes­sor over her career and an aver­age for the dis­ci­pline over the decades. And if col­leges real­ly want­ed to clamp down on grade infla­tion, they could whisk it away sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, sim­ply by fac­tor­ing those aver­ages into each stu­den­t’s G.P.A. Imag­ine that G.P.A.‘s were cal­cu­lat­ed on a scale of 10 with the aver­age grade, be it a B‑minus or an A‑minus, count­ed as a 5. The B‑plus in chem­i­cal engi­neer­ing, where the aver­age grade is, say, C‑plus, would be reward­ed accord­ing­ly and assigned a val­ue of 8; the B‑plus in psy­chol­o­gy, where the aver­age grade might be just over B‑plus, would be grad­ed like an easy dive, ade­quate­ly exe­cut­ed, and giv­en a 4.7.

I have to say, I like it. I don’t think any uni­ver­si­ties are going to go for it, but I wish they would…