Brown Considers Modifying Grading

Faculty and students at Brown University will debate today whether to add pluses and minuses to its grading system, after 46.7 percent of the grades given in its last academic year were ‘A’ marks.

And while more than 85 percent of the faculty and graduate students support the change in grading policy according to a 2002 grade inflation survey, a recent Brown Daily Herald poll found that 70 percent of Brown undergraduates oppose the change.

The Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) is hosting a forum this afternoon in an effort to voice student opinion before the faculty votes to amend the grading system.

Brown’s current curriculum, implemented in 1969, does not have distribution requirements and allows students to take courses pass/fail or with whole-letter grades.

Brown’s College Curriculum Council proposed last semester to add pluses and minuses to the curriculum but agreed to hold off a vote pending discussion between faculty and students.

Brown Dean of the College Paul B. Armstrong ’71, a proponent of plus-and-minus grading, said that the “compression of grades at the top” had eroded meaningful communication between faculty and students about the quality of student work.

“When you have so many grades in the ‘A’ category, the faculty cannot give students a clear sense of the differences in their work,” he said.

He added that 96 percent of the faculty already give students pluses and minuses.

But on the final grade report, the only options given to faculty are whole-letter grades.

Brown’s registrar reported that 46.7 percent of grades awarded were ‘A’s, 24 percent were ‘B’s, 4.6 percent were ‘C’s, 2.6 percent were no credit, and 21.3 percent were ‘S’ for satisfactory, according to Brown’s Office of Institutional Research.

More than 85 percent of Brown faculty and graduate students supported the addition of pluses and minuses, according to Brown’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning.

According to the report, the survey was conducted to address a growing concern among faculty about the “perceived impact of grade inflation on classroom conduct and its erosion of grades as a meaningful measure of learning.”

But 70 percent of undergraduate students oppose the change in the grading system, according to a Brown Daily Herald poll taken last month.

One of the organizers of today’s forum, Tristan M. D. Freeman, a member of UCS, said the students were overwhelmingly against the addition of pluses and minuses because it would increase competition.

“A lot of students at Brown feel that adding pluses and minuses would increase competition for grades, especially in hard sciences,” he said.

Armstrong, however, said that most faculty were skeptical that the change would lead to greater competition.

“Competition has become even more intense than it might be with pluses and minuses because there is no other acceptable grade than an ‘A,’” he said.

Freeman added that faculty seemed most concerned about specificity in grading.

“The arguments all hinge on the ‘B+’ grade,” he said. “The faculty want to be able to distinguish the student with an 89 from other ‘B’ students.”

But grade inflation is not a problem unique to Brown.

In a letter sent to faculty in January this year, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 acknowledged grade inflation as a problem in the College.

According to his letter, ‘A’s accounted for 23.7 percent of all grades given to Harvard undergraduates last academic year—the highest level since 1999-2000, and the second-highest level in the last 20 years.

An additional 25 percent of grades awarded last year were A-minuses, according to Gross’ letter.

Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. ’53 said that grade inflation makes pluses and minuses more important.

“Pluses and minuses offset grade inflation, because from the standpoint of a professor, you can make more distinctions,” he said.

Pluses and minuses, according to Mansfield, “separate the best from the rest.”

Armstrong said that the polarization between faculty and students about plus and minus grading was “unfortunate” and that he hoped for dialogue and understanding at today’s forum.

—Staff writer Kathleen Pond can be reached at kpond@fas.harvard.edu.