After The Herald reported recent Office of Institutional Research data regarding the grade distribution at Brown last week, our grading system has come to the forefront of campus conversation. With over half of all students receiving As, our skewed distribution of grades indicates inflationary trends, especially when compared to the proportion of As given out a decade ago.
In a recent column, Sam Hillestad ’15 argues that the very existence of a grading system is ill-suited for Brown and should be done away with. He claims sampling bias is fully responsible for the increase in As — a statement that is simply untrue. While one may argue about the strength of the correlation between grades and intelligence, grades serve as one of two potential signals: an indicator of one’s performance on an absolute basis, in which percentage cutoffs are set, or a measure of one’s success relative to his or her peers. Because Brown uses a mixture of these two systems across concentrations in a combination of curves and cutoffs, it’s fair to say grades accomplish both goals here at Brown.
If one accepts that to be true, then the claim that students are simply smarter than they were a decade ago, as supposedly evidenced in lower acceptance rates, lacks factual support. This statement could only carry weight if Brown had a uniform grading system based on percentage cutoffs across concentrations, acting as a measure of academic achievement independent of how others perform. Insofar as Brown makes use of curves that gauge students on a relative basis, a common system across economics courses, there must be more to the 53.4 percent of As than increasingly intelligent students on a standalone basis.
Given this, the high preponderance of As at Brown diminishes the very purpose of grades as a means of differentiating oneself through success. Unless Brown plans to shift toward the London School of Economics system, where marks are entirely awarded based on numerical scores, something must be done to preserve the integrity of grades.
At present, the lack of pluses and minuses fails to do just that. Scaling the proportion of students who received a letter grade to 100 percent of the proportion of all grades and treating As, Bs and Cs as 4.0, 3.0 and 2.0 gives us an average undergraduate GPA of above 3.6 — an A-minus average across the student body. With so many students attaining high grades, how can one set himself or herself apart through academic performance? It becomes increasingly difficult to do so, and the brightest students often fail to distinguish themselves.
Hillestad believes recommendation letters from professors and a GRE score can subsitute for a GPA and grades for those who want to exhibit their academic success. Yet the very purpose of these instruments is to augment grades to give graduate schools and employers a more holistic sense of our achievements and capability, not to replace them. Asking institutions to use written-word evaluations and a single test score, as opposed to four years of performance, to make hiring and acceptance decisions is impractical.
Hillestad claims there should be a focus on intrinsic value of knowledge, not an “archaic” grading system. But this makes little logical sense. How does one measure the intrinsic value of his or her Brown education if we do away with grades? Should it be the tuition we pay? Should it be how we’re ranked against other universities, which would be even more arbitrary than grading? Grades serve the essential purpose of signaling the efforts made and critical thinking skills utilized by students during their undergraduate educations. They allow us to be compared on a more normalized basis. Graduating with honors or high marks bestows a deserved sense of pride and rightfully positions students well in the search for a job. This should not be done away with just because we don’t go to Princeton.
To remedy grade inflation, which limits differentiation and makes these signals harder for graduate schools to realize, a plus-minus grading system would serve Brown well. At present, professors are incentivized to give students the benefit of the doubt on the margin because the drop from grade to grade affects students’ GPAs significantly. Moreover, we treat students who score perfectly or near perfectly — a sign of mastery of the course material — analogous to those who score in the low 90s.
The same can be said for the rest of the letter grades, and the ultimate result is students of appreciably different skills and coursework quality receiving the same recognition for their classwork. Introducing pluses and minuses would resolve this issue and allow top performers to set themselves apart, perhaps even with an A+ counting as 4.3 like at other peer institutions, while making the drop-offs among letter grades less daunting for professors and students alike.
Like Hillestad, many will argue the issue lies not with Brown’s system, but with the outside world of graduate schools and employers who are GPA-centric. Nevertheless, failing to remedy the current system will do more harm than good in the long run. With the current inflated average GPA and increasing allocation of As, GPA will become less of a differentiating factor and more of a minimum threshold for hiring. Students will then have to compete more intensively on items that aren’t based on merit, such as ability to find internships and build work experience. A plus-minus system, in addition to providing the aforementioned benefits to students and professors, would offer an additional means for successful students to set themselves apart.
While Brown undoubtedly emphasizes learning over grades through the generous satisfactory/no credit system, with no officially computed GPA and the lack of a Dean’s List, a plus-minus system is still necessary to alleviate the pressures placed on professors and to allow top performers to truly set themselves apart. Our current grading system has led to an environment in which the average student is a near-top performer, a paradox in and of itself.
The last time a plus-minus system was proposed in 2006, it was struck down before reaching the faculty. All four students on the College Curriculum Council voted against it, and the proposal fell short by one vote. Students at Brown should undoubtedly have a say in such a proposal, but it should be through direct democracy across the student body rather than four representatives speaking on an issue that necessarily affects every undergraduate. Given the decade-long increase in distribution of As at Brown, the discussion of our conversion to a new system is a conversation worth having.
Jay Upadhyay ’15 is an economics concentrator.
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