Little progress has been made since the initial spring term release of recommendations made by the ad hoc committee on grading practices and grade inflation. The committee, emphasizing the concern of grade inflation at the College, had recommended harsher grading practices and the elimination of the non-recording option, among other suggestions in its 16-page report.
Committee chair and biological sciences professor Mark McPeek said the College has not informed him about any ongoing plans related to the committee’s recommendations.
Susan Ackerman, religion professor and committee member, said the group presented its recommendations to the Committee on Instruction, and any future action is in its hands.
Meredith Braz, College registrar and Committee on Instruction member, said in an email that the Committee on Instruction did not meet over the summer to discuss the recommendations.
McPeek said he hopes the College is working on the issue, saying that the College should always be considering the level at which the faculty is teaching students.
“When 60 percent of students can get As, one has to ask oneself, why are we at that level?” McPeek said. “And why is it that 30 or 40 years ago, As were at 20 percent of grades?”
Committee member and government professor Lisa Baldez said the data gathered by the committee shows that grade inflation is present in all departments at the College.
Faculty should consider whether their classes are appropriate for a college level course, McPeek said. If not, they should ask themselves how to make it more rigorous, by increasing the intensity of the material and what is expected of the students in the course, he said.
“Most of what we propose is just the deans and the administration changing their behavior about how they do things,” he said.
Baldez said faculty should clearly outline what they expect of students.
“If you’re very clear about the steps that students need to take and what they need to show, then you can be confident in whether or not a student actually deserves the grade that they have gotten,” she said.
Student Assembly president Frank Cunningham ’16 said while he agrees that students must deserve the grades they earn, he does not agree with increasing the rigor of the College’s academic offerings.
“What is it going to look like when this increase in academic rigor comes into existence here at Dartmouth, and what is it going to do to the mental health of the students?” he said.
Cunningham said that students already struggle to balance their academic workload with other aspects of college, including social lives and sleep schedules, and raising the academic intensity of classes will have a negative effect all of these aspects.
Ackerman said the purpose of the committee was not to discuss how to increase academic rigor at the College. Instead, she said the problem facing the College is that the median grade has become an A minus, which means it is difficult for faculty to appropriately reward good work, and students are unaware when they are not performing well.
“If we’re not giving grades at the lower end, we’re also not suggesting to students that they’re not doing adequate work,” she said.
She said the goal of the committee was to encourage Dartmouth faculty to use the grading scale according to the goals of the grading scale. She said the College should raise awareness about the grading scale and some small steps have already been taken in this direction.
The Class of 2019, for example, was given materials about grading practices during Orientation, which had not been included in past years’ Orientation programming, she said. She hopes the deans of faculty will speak to faculty members about grading practices and suggested that faculty members turn in an annual report that includes a section on grading.
“We have not recommended what I would refer to as more absolutist kinds of measures, like a faculty member can only give a certain number of As,” she said.
These practices have been tried at other institutions and failed, she said.
“If every student in a class deserves an A, every student should get an A”, Ackerman said.
McPeek and Ackerman said there has been a mixed reaction to the proposal.
“There was a substantial [amount], maybe even a majority, of the faculty that was supportive of it, and there were a few that did not like it,” McPeek said.
He said he has heard from a number of alumni who agree with the proposal, because they are not in support of the direction grades have taken and the resulting consequences.
Baldez said when they presented their recommendations, faculty raised questions about how to interpret the committee’s data and how to react to it.
“I hope that these discussions will continue and we will keep working on this as a faculty,” she said.
The committee also suggested removing the non-recording option.
According to the Office of the Registrar’s website, the non-recording option is in place “to support and encourage students who would like to elect courses that may pose greater than usual academic risk.”
McPeek said he thinks the College created the non-recording option in 1967 as a failed attempt at preventing further grade inflation.
He acknowledged the logic behind the NRO, but he concluded that the majority of students abuse it.
“There’s a very high-minded and legitimate reason for having that on the books, saying that students can sample classes that are outside of their comfort zone,” he said.
The problem is only a small fraction of students are using the NRO for this purpose, he said, instead choosing to use it as a safety measure to prevent grades they are not happy with from appearing on their transcript.
