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( INNOVATION ABSTRACTS xo ic
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Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support from the WK. Kellogg Foundation anc Sid W. Richardson Founcitior

 

 

 

LET’S JUNK THE LETTER GRADING SYSTEM

Nothing quickens the pulse and stirs the passions of college-level educators quite so much as controversy
over grading policies. Inevitably, traditionalists point to "grade inflation," citing that more and more
students are making higher and higher grades. [pevitably, they are opposed by the often younger
antitraditionalists who scoff at the importance of grades and argue that intrusion into the individual faculty
member's prerogatives to allocate grades is a "serious threat to academic freedom." Traditionalists end up
being labeled "hard-liners" with "no compassion for students." Antitraditionalists end up being labeled
"corruptors of education," "softies," or worse.

Remedial action usually consists of some committee meekly finding that nothing can be done about
improving academic standards because it is impossible to define "standards" in the first place. Often a
shouting match begins at a faculty governance meeting, some watered-down resolution is passed, and then
serenity finally prevails—again without concrete proposals. In the meantime, many faculty members steer
clear of any public discussion of the matter, fearing that certain colleagues will take it personally; and most
administrators duck for cover, fearing that "tougher standards" will damage enrollment figures or that
specific measures might drive faculty into collective bargaining units.

Yet no one to my knowledge has pointed a finger at the real culprit: the neolithic, heavy-handed grading
system which, in my humble opinion, has afflicted education for decades. The A, B, C, D, F alternatives
encourage enormously imprecise measurements of performance. Ino an atmosphere of decreasing
enrollments and actual intramural competition for students among departments and faculty, there is bound
to be a tendency toward grade inflation. Even in the glory years of swelling enrollments, the letter grade
was not much more accurate than the grading of meat—prime, choice, good and commercial, that
muckrakers even now tell us is fraught with imprecision and inconsistencies.

The only time letter grades appear to be somewhat accurate and fair is when graduates acquire a
cumulative grade point average. Those haphazard A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s come together in some
meaningful decimal figure: 2.5 or C+, 2.6 or B-, 3.5 or B+, 3.6 or A- and so on. All colleges, and eventually
graduate and professional schools and employers, historically have scrutinized the cumulative G.P.A. of
applicants. Unfortunately, however, grades are losing their credibility as meaningful indicators—hence, the
rise in popularity of those ubiquitous standardized tests.

Central to the problem is that instructors first submit grades as letters, which are then computed by the
registrar as numbers. A much more satisfactory method (one which I’m surprised has not been proposed
more often by now) would be for the faculty to submit grades numerically in the first place. At the end of
the term, each faculty member could assign any one of the 41 grades, ranging from 0.0 to 4.0 to each
student. Thus, there would be no need for numerical translation. When a high-C, low-B student deserves a
C+/B- rather than a disparate 2.0 or 3.0, under a new system he could be given what he deserves: 2.5.
When a low-A student is graded at the end of the term, he would not be given a grade which denotes
absolute perfection, 4.0, but would receive the more accurate 3.6, 3.7, or 3.8.

Such a system would be extremely adaptable to courses such as business, mathematics, or science, where
the accumulation of objective test scores can be recalculated easily by the instructors from 0-100 averages to
0.0-4.0 grades at the end of the term. The more "subjective" courses, English or humanities, would lend
themselves to ranking of classes and assigning corresponding 40 numerical evaluations on a scale from 4.0
downward, or to calculating letter grades with either plus or minus suffixes in terms of their numerical
equivalents (C- or 1.7, C+ or 2.4, ete.). Instructors in any discipline opposing the numerical system would
not be compelled to do anything but indicate 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0 or 0.0 rather than A, B,C, D, or F.

The net advantage of this new policy would be sixtold. Firsl, grade inflation indirectly would be
neutralized. Most faculty members admit privately that when a student is right on the borderline between
two grades, and there are no mitigating factors such as poor class attendance, the student usually gets the
higher grade. (It is a good hedge against complaints being filed with student appeals committees and one’s

 

 

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: wo} Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712 9 |