A survey of the Special Collection's library reveals a little known feature of Dartmouth academic history: the most recent College grading policy dates to the early 1950s.
"We just don't seem to have one any more," said Provost Barry Scherr, who has been at Dartmouth since the early 1970s.
Now, instead of a top-down policy, grading is handled largely by individual instructors and somewhat at the departmental level.
This disintegration of policy corresponds directly with grade inflation: the overall College GPA has increased by an average of .01 per year over the last 25 years, and this trend appears to have begun in the 1960s, a decade after the publication of Dartmouth's last official policy.
Indeed, Dartmouth's Institutional Research Office put out a statistical report in 1971 outlining a decade of grade inflation.
Not only has no centralized College policy existed for some time, but even departments shy from standardizing grades internally.
History department chair Mary Kelley said her department has no written or unwritten policy and that, as far as she knows, there has been no discussion of moving in that direction. "We are all too much individuals for anything like that," Kelley said.
In as much as College grading criteria does exist, the Organization, Regulations and Courses handbook encourages instructors to grade based on how well students have mastered the course material.
Perhaps because mastery is so subjective, the ORC guidelines appear not to play too important a role in actual grading. Out of seven department chairs interviewed by The Dartmouth, only two even mentioned the ORC when asked for their departmental grading criteria.
Rather, when pressed for unofficial policy beyond individual professor choice, five out of seven department chairs referred to departmental, college or national norms.
In 1915, by contrast, Dartmouth felt there was a need to standardize grades both over the years and by department. If for no other reason, the College saw it as necessary for receiving certain honors that GPAs have the same meaning from student to student. The College used grades to measure each student's rank within a course.
Dartmouth considered "medium" quality work the level of work done by the middle 50 percent of the class. According to the Committee on Instruction at the time, this middle 50 percent should receive the letter grade C.
As of 1951, the College still maintained that C was the dividing point between work that was "average or better" and that "below the average."
Such grading policies required only that professors judge each student's approximate rank as compared to others. If the student performed above the average, he earned a C+ or higher.
With current ORC suggestions, assessment depends on the level at which professors determine each student to have "mastery of the course material." If all students have "excellent mastery of the course material," the ORC suggests they all receive an A.
In the past, As were reserved for truly distinctive performance, said Provost Scherr.
Today, the idea that a professor might set their median grade at a C+ was laughable to Government department chair Dick Winters, who said, "I've never had to respond to that!"
To the same suggestion, Classics department chair Roger Ulrich said, "It's hard to talk about a hypothetical that's never happened before." Ulrich has been at Dartmouth since 1969.
