The ad hoc committee on grading practices and grade inflation released its proposal to address grade inflation at the College on May 11. The proposal, sent out to faculty, outlines a strategy to curb grade inflation by adhering more strictly to the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings system of awarding As for excellence, Bs for “good master” and Cs for “acceptable mastery.” The proposal hopes to incentivize faculty to adhere to stricter grading policies rather than mandate department-wide medians or curves or limit the number or percentage of particular grades that may be awarded.
The committee also advocates ending the non-recording option and changing the process for promoting faculty.
The proposal was first obtained by website Dartblog on Wednesday. The Dartmouth later obtained a copy.
The ad hoc committee was formed jointly by the Committee on Instruction and the Committee on Organization and Policy to address grade inflation early in winter term, committee chair and biological sciences professor Mark McPeek said.
McPeek said the committee essentially formulated its policy recommendations at its first meeting, as most members were well-versed in the issue.
“The fundamental principle of the proposal is simply to start holding faculty accountable for the kind of courses that they teach and the rigor of those courses,” he said.
McPeek said the committee has found that either students are given higher grades than they deserve or that the level of rigor in courses has fallen in recent decades.
“I am as guilty as everyone else of giving grades that [do not conform] to the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings,” computer science professor and ad hoc committee on grading member Thomas Cormen said. “Going forward, I will have my grades conform to the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings.”
Cormen said that while some believe that today’s students themselves are smarter or say that teaching has improved due to increased emphasis on undergraduate education at the College, he was not able to provide an opinion on either.
“We need to make our courses more challenging as students are able to handle more of a challenge,” he said.
McPeek emphasized that the proposal includes no recommendations for curving grades or mandating a certain grade distribution, as Princeton University did for a decade before reversing the policy in October 2014. He also said that the proposal does not intend to level out grades between academic disciplines, as the differences between comparatively high-grading fields and comparatively low-grading ones have remained consistent since the 1970s.
“We could really care less if the grades are higher in one discipline or another,” he said.
Cormen said that the proposal does not recommend limiting the number of As that can be given out, in part based upon the experience of Princeton, his own alma mater.
“They found that students were competing with each other too much for this limited resource of As,” he said.
Cormen said that he is in favor of students learning cooperatively rather than in competition with each other.
In addition to the recommendation to adhere more closely to the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings system, the proposal also recommends making public data available relating to grading practices both past and present to ensure that graduate schools, employers, students and faculty understand the changes to the College’s grading system.
Additionally, the report calls for the abolishment of the non-recording option, as it allegedly promotes laziness in certain courses. The proposal also suggests that course syllabi have more clarity around grading expectations to reduce the amount of questioning from dissatisfied students regarding their performance, and that the College lift the five-student minimum course enrollment requirement so that faculty will not be incentivized to create easier courses in an effort to attract more students.
The proposal also discusses faculty promotion practices and reporting policies between academic departments, the registrar and the Dean of the College’s Office. It recommends that departments offer reports to the registrar on grade distribution with regard to historical trends and that academic unit chairs consult with their associate deans each fall term to relay information on the rigor of courses offered within that unit.
When a faculty member applies for a promotion or tenure, he or she must submit a dossier of various qualifications. The proposal recommends including a requirement that these dossiers should include information on the faculty member’s use of the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings system and assessments of the faculty member provided by colleagues within his or her department. The report proposes that evaluations for non-tenure-track faculty be carried out in a similar fashion.
Faculty would also be required to discuss their grade distributions and adherence to the Dartmouth Scholarship Ratings system in a yearly meeting with their associate dean and to report their grading standards and grade distributions each year as part of the Faculty Record Supplement.
Near the report’s conclusion, a portion is dedicated to students’ extracurricular involvements, and the proposal suggests that students limit these involvements to focus more fully on academics.
Students, Cormen said, are helped in the college admissions process by having a long and varied list of extracurricular activities, and many continue to pursue similar activities after matriculation.
He said that he has seen many students who have numerous time-consuming extracurricular commitments. Some, he said, have the equivalent of a full-time job.
“It does make us wonder sometimes if there are students who think of Dartmouth as, ‘Well, I eat here, I sleep here, I do these extracurriculars and, when I have time, I do my coursework,’” he said. “Maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s a huge exaggeration.”
English professor Thomas Luxon said that he feels the idea that students are overcommitted to their extracurriculars is a simplification of the issue. He cited seniors working on theses who do little but their research and writing as one example of students who have fewer extracurricular responsibilities and many academic ones.
“It’s an overgeneralization from student to student, and it’s also probably an overgeneralization for any single student, term-to-term,” Luxon said.
The proposal contains a section responding to potential concerns others may have with its recommendations, including the frequently raised issue of admission to medical, professional and graduate schools. The proposal cites research on Dartmouth graduates applying to medical schools, conducted by biology professor and former pre-med advisor Lee Witters, that found that, in the years 2002 and 2014, one student in each year with a GPA of 3.7 gained admission to no medical schools, while one student in each year with a GPA of 2.4 gained admission to at least two. On average, admitted students’ GPAs were only about 0.3 higher than those of the average un-admitted student.
“Having a higher GPA will marginally help you, but that is not the determining factor for anything,” McPeek said.
Witters was not availableto comment for this article.
Going forward, the proposal is largely in administrators’ hands, McPeek said, as few elements would need faculty approval to be enacted. All faculty evaluation procedures are overseen by academic deans, not by faculty members, meaning that administrators can make changes to its promotion and tenure-granting policies without a faculty vote.
Luxon said while he believed the data compiled by the committee were useful, he did not fully agree with the committee’s findings and he thinks there should be a discussion surrounding the report’s conclusions.
Luxon also called for more student involvement in the process, citing potential student anxiety over the prospect of decreased grades.
“Students have way more anxiety about grades than is healthy, and I know that as you start talking about grade inflation, that just feeds the anxiety,” he said.
Luxon also called on professors to make syllabi clearer in regards to expectations and grading standards.
John Damianos ’16, who served as a member of the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” presidential steering committee, said that, on the whole, his initial reaction to the report was very positive.
“The idea here is to say something has gone wrong in the grading system — let’s bring grading back to where it should be,” he said. “It makes common sense to say an A is going to be for excellence. That is very intuitive. I think they researched it very well.”
He added that he believed the report could have gone more in depth in its analysis of potential stress and mental health concerns for students.
In the section addressing potential concerns, the proposal rebuts criticisms regarding students’ mental health by stating, “Stress is a part of life. We cannot remove stress from our students’ lives.”
Damianos said the committee should have pursued questions such as which elements of Dartmouth’s intellectual and cultural environment may contribute to students’ stress levels and potential ways to mitigate those factors.
“My prediction is students aren’t going to be satisfied with the answers they gave,” he said.
Correction appended (May 28, 2015):
A previous version of this article said thatWitters declined to comment for this article. The article should have stated that Witters was not available to comment.
