Action Against Grade Inflation, Cheating on SCW Agenda
Estie Neff
Issue date: 5/5/09 Section: News
To "B" or not to "B" - that is the question.
In response to recent concerns of grade inflation at Stern College for Women (SCW), Dean Karen Bacon established the SCW Task Force on Grade Inflation, a committee comprised of faculty members culled from various academic departments of the college. The goal of the task force is to set narrower standards for grading policies in order to clearly define the meaning of letter grades, which was not done sufficiently in the past.
"Grading standards and policies are insufficiently clear to faculty and students," related Dean Bacon. "This 'fuzziness' has led to inflation in the grades that are assigned."
The dean noted that this issue is one that affects many institutions of higher education. She highlighted data published by Duke University in the 1990s that "suggested that the median grade on their campus was almost an A minus."
According to a 1997 article in Newsweek Magazine, Duke is not the only educational institution bitten by the grade inflation bug. Newsweek cited research collected by Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, which showed that the number of students with an A-minus average rose from seven percent to 26 percent from 1969 to 1993. During the same span of years, the number of C students fell from 25 percent to nine percent.
The article listed several other leading universities, such as Stanford, Dartmouth, Williams, and Harvard that also saw evidence grade inflation. Newsweek suggested that these universities "have…tinkered with their systems in order to make transcripts more meaningful to graduate schools and employers." However, the surge in student performance has had the opposite effect, causing outsiders to doubt the credibility of an A or B on a student transcript.
Grade inflation is defined as an upward bias in the grades for academic courses. This inflation is usually attributed to the difference between the teacher's ideas of what a grade represents versus the general definition of that grade.
In response to recent concerns of grade inflation at Stern College for Women (SCW), Dean Karen Bacon established the SCW Task Force on Grade Inflation, a committee comprised of faculty members culled from various academic departments of the college. The goal of the task force is to set narrower standards for grading policies in order to clearly define the meaning of letter grades, which was not done sufficiently in the past.
"Grading standards and policies are insufficiently clear to faculty and students," related Dean Bacon. "This 'fuzziness' has led to inflation in the grades that are assigned."
The dean noted that this issue is one that affects many institutions of higher education. She highlighted data published by Duke University in the 1990s that "suggested that the median grade on their campus was almost an A minus."
According to a 1997 article in Newsweek Magazine, Duke is not the only educational institution bitten by the grade inflation bug. Newsweek cited research collected by Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, which showed that the number of students with an A-minus average rose from seven percent to 26 percent from 1969 to 1993. During the same span of years, the number of C students fell from 25 percent to nine percent.
The article listed several other leading universities, such as Stanford, Dartmouth, Williams, and Harvard that also saw evidence grade inflation. Newsweek suggested that these universities "have…tinkered with their systems in order to make transcripts more meaningful to graduate schools and employers." However, the surge in student performance has had the opposite effect, causing outsiders to doubt the credibility of an A or B on a student transcript.
Grade inflation is defined as an upward bias in the grades for academic courses. This inflation is usually attributed to the difference between the teacher's ideas of what a grade represents versus the general definition of that grade.
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