You're interviewing two Dartmouth seniors for a highly selective post-graduation job. Student A has a stellar academic record: a double major in theater and Arabic with a 3.87 major grade point average. Student B also worked toward a double major, chemistry and mathematics, but doesn't have the grades to match up only a 3.29 major GPA, which you know is worse than average at Dartmouth. Who would you hire?
Before you answer, there is one more rather crucial piece of information to consider: While the difference in GPA between these two students is large, both students are equally average at their majors they achieved exactly the median grades for all of their classes, which combined to equal the average of median grades for all courses in their departments.
Yes, that's right. The gap between the average median grade for our math-chemistry double major and our theater-Arabic one is the difference between a sub-B+ and a just-shy-of A GPA.
I'm not trying to pick on any of these departments, but rather illustrate a College-wide problem that allows a massive divide in our grading system to remain the status quo. When I compiled the data Dartmouth has released on class median grades for every term since Fall 2007 (all classes of 10 students or more), clear and disturbing trends in departmental GPA distributions emerged.
Some departments, term after term, give out higher grades than others and these departments are overwhelmingly in the arts and humanities. Theater classes have the highest medians on campus, with a ridiculous 3.89 average. After that, it's a close succession of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures, music, Russian, studio art, comparative literature, French and Italian, women and gender studies and Jewish studies all of these departments bestow average median grades higher than A-.
At the other end of the spectrum, you'll find mostly departments in the sciences, with a few strict social sciences sprinkled in. Chemistry bottoms out the list with a 3.24 median grade average for its classes, preceded, from lowest to highest, by math, economics, physics and astronomy, anthropology, biology and engineering.
Again, I levy no accusations about the quality of teaching or value of various majors every subject is important. Nor am I attempting to parse the relative difficulty of coursework, although both Kevin Niparko '12 ("The Great Imbalance," Nov. 1, 2010) and Ethan Wang '13 ("Credit Where It's Due," Feb. 3) have made compelling arguments that many science classes require more hours of work than those in the humanities. My point is that there is a huge inequity in grading across academic divisions and departments, a disparity that affects students both while they are at the College and in the years after graduation.
Do foreign language students deserve better grades than equally capable physics majors? Are studio art courses significantly more difficult than those offered in engineering or biology? Of course not. Yet Dartmouth does little to combat the harmful effects of grading discrepancies among these departments. The administration has installed one small safeguard: Since 1998, the registrar has printed the median grades for each course with an enrollment higher than 10 students on official transcripts. In theory, that is supposed to level the playing field when students apply to graduate schools and jobs.
Yet for a number of practical reasons, this does little to solve the problem. Recruiters for many post-graduation opportunities and jobs examine little more than the GPA written at the top of your resume. Even those who do receive official transcripts won't want to spend time discerning which combination of majors and minors is most difficult. Additionally, the transcript remedy has no impact when the College is awarding student honors and selecting students to GPA-based societies such as Phi Beta Kappa or the Presidential Scholars program.
Grade inflation may be inevitable in higher education. But when the current system penalizes some students for their academic choices and creates perverse incentives for others to pick classes based on median grades, the College must undertake comprehensive reforms. Such widespread unjust grading across departments threatens Dartmouth's academic integrity. Without grading equity across departments, our GPAs the clearest indicator of academic achievement ultimately mean very little.
