National debate over grade inflation was reinvigorated recently when officials at Princeton University proposed a drastic measure to limit the number of "A" marks awarded. Meanwhile, some Dartmouth professors have expressed concern about grades, despite the presence of established measures to curb the trend of higher scores.
"Well, I guess there's been a slight increase in the average GPA. And if we don't have a problem, we're approaching a problem," said environmental studies chair Andrew Friedland.
Friedland said he likes to have a spread of grades over students who take his class, and consistently keeps the median grade of his Environmental Studies 2 class at a B.
"I try to use grades to differentiate people in the class. I don't use them as punishments, but I try to reward the very best students with the highest grades," Friedland said.
Although Friedland said he did not feel compelled to raise the grades he gives, some professors said they feel some pressure to give higher grades to meet student expectations.
"Some students expect that if they work hard they will get an A. While hard work is certainly part of the recipe, it's not the only thing," earth sciences professor Leslie Sonder said.
According to Sonder, whose Natural Disasters class had a B-minus median grade last summer, "The problem with grade inflation is that it makes it difficult to compare people's performance, both within Dartmouth, and to compare Dartmouth grades to other institutions."
But, grade inflation is not a new phenomenon for the College. Grades have been rising at Dartmouth since the 1970s.
According to philosophy professor Bernard Gert, grade inflation exists in that Ds and Es are no longer commonly given out.
"We just changed the name of Ds and Es, [which are now] just there almost for flagrant non-application, but the normal grade scale is from C up," Gert said.
Gert, who has been teaching at Dartmouth since 1959, also remembered a time approximately 30 years ago when the College encouraged the practice of raising student grades.
"There was an official encouragement of grade inflation, because Dartmouth students were complaining that things were unfair because their grades did not reflect their standing vis-a-vis students at other schools," Gert said. "About five or 10 years after that, there was a worry that this advice was taken too much to heart."
In 1994, the faculty reacted to rising grades by voting to include the median grade of most classes on student transcripts, a practice Gert has recommended to other institutions. Sonder agreed that the median grade reporting system has been helpful in curbing the grade inflation trend on campus.
Gert said the system works because "an A in a course in which everybody gets As is no better than a B in a course in which everybody gets Bs."
Earlier this month, Nancy Malkiel, Princeton's dean of the college, proposed a measure which would restrict the amount of A-range grades to 35 percent of the total grades distributed, a decrease from last year, when 47 percent of grades at the school were As or A-minuses.
As for instituting new grading systems, Gert warned that the way professors judge student performance becomes an ingrained practice that new policies are difficult to change.
"You just develop internal standards, and I would think those internal standards are what determine how you grade. And it would be extremely hard to change that," Gert said.
