The existence of the “Lake Wobegon Effect,” in which every child is above average, has grown sufficiently troubling at the University of Minnesota that one professor has a plan to press faculty to rethink their penchant for awarding top grades too readily.
The proposal, by Christopher J. Cramer, professor of chemistry at the Twin Cities campus, would discourage grade compression, or the trend in which grades become disproportionately concentrated in the A and B range.
“People have been arguing for 40 years about what to do about it,” Mr. Cramer said. “It’s led to an intolerable status quo.”
The distribution of grades varies widely within the university. For example, more than 62 percent of students enrolled in introductory courses in the College of Education and Human Development earned A’s last fall. In the College of Science and Engineering, where Mr. Cramer teaches, the proportion was about 28 percent. The result, he said, is that top students in his college are disadvantaged when people outside the university review their transcripts.
Under Mr. Cramer’s plan, which will be considered by the faculty’s Senate Committee on Educational Policy, a student’s transcript would note the grade he or she earned in a course along with the number of students and the percentile range who earned the same grade in that class.
If, for example, one student out of a class of 20 received a B and it was the highest grade, the transcript would read, “B, 95 to 100.” And, if in another class of the same size, every student received an A, it would read, “A, 0 to 100.”
Mr. Cramer hopes that including the percentile range will give faculty members reason to think twice if they are handing out top grades like candy. “If you’re really awarding all A’s are you proud of that?” he asked. In such cases, he added, “we’ve abrogated our responsibility as educators to distinguish between excellent, average, and good students.”
His proposal has encountered resistance. Some faculty members have raised concerns that, if adopted, Mr. Cramer’s idea would punish good students who happen to be part of a particularly talented cohort of students, or whose more-practical disciplines require all students to master a discrete set of skills before moving on in their studies.
Trends That Skew Grades Higher
Both Mr. Cramer and critics of his plan agree that grade compression has been encouraged by tenure and promotion incentives and by pressure from students. But others, like Thomas F. Brothen, a professor of psychology, say newer trends are also skewing grades higher.
Mr. Brothen cited the improving quality of students entering the university. As better-prepared students enter the university, a greater percentage of students will tend to earn high marks, he said.
Data indicate that the quality of students is indeed improving. Ten years ago, 16.2 percent of students entering the Twin Cities campus graduated in the top 5 percent of their class in high school. In 2011, nearly 26 percent did. Their scores on ACT tests also showed improvement over that period.
Mr. Cramer is not persuaded. “If you belive in meritocracy, there are Gaussian distributions in almost every large class,” he said, referring to the bell-shaped, normally distributed curve. “It just is a given when you have a significant number of students. It ought to be possible to rank a certain faction of students as outstanding.”
Besides, he added, if grade compression at his institution or at elite private colleges is reflective of the better quality of students entering them, then less-talented students must be going elsewhere. In that case, some college somewhere ought to be awarding more C’s, D’s, and F’s.
But such examples are hard to come by, and concerns about grade inflation are common nationally, said Karen Hanson, the university’s provost.
“I’m not certain there’s more grade inflation here than any place else,” she said, adding that she thought the discussion at Minnesota was healthy.
She also noted that her former institution, Indiana University at Bloomington, had made similar efforts to place a student’s grade in the context of the class but ran into technical barriers. Other institutions, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell University, have attempted, with varying levels of success, to include contextual information about grades on their students’ transcripts.
Ms. Hanson and Mr. Brothen also stressed that grades are inexact tools. They are one bit of information about a student that should be considered, she said, along with the rigor of a course or a discipline, or the life circumstances of students...
“There are lots of features of talent, motivation, and accomplishment that aren’t captured by a single letter grade,” Ms. Hanson said.
