Pre-registration season is the academic equivalent of a biannual Christmas. Classes look good on paper and people actually get excited debating which course to take with what professor. Strategically positioned when midterms are mostly over, course selection captures students when their pessimism is at a low and for about two weeks, the pedagogical world seems just about as pure as it ever will.
For most students, this ideal of learning for learning’s sake never actually lasts in practice. There’s a remarkable amount of academic seriousness around the time of midterms and finals—my Midnight Mug coworkers and I could measure it in lattés—but when library habitation drops outside of these periods, my guess is that the number of pages actually read on campus drops with it. It’s not particularly cynical to say the average student has more immediate concern for grades than the state of his or her education; it’s a product of the system. The problem is that the system, which is designed to reward achievement over all else, no longer accurately measures the one thing it’s meant to. We end up leaving college with only a meaningless number attached to our names forever: the GPA.
The obvious irony is that to certain people, like job interviewers or law school admissions officers, the GPA means a hell of a lot. The numbers are easy; a person with a 3.89 is better than a person with a 3.88, who’s better than a 3.87, and so on. Better at what? Life, I guess. Because it says just as much about who picks an easier professor or takes unchallenging courses as it does about who has mastered English or Accounting or Science and Technology in International Affairs. And forget GPA being a universally standard comparison between colleges. Harvard holds finals after Christmas break, with two weeks of study time intervening, which my interviewer suggested was enough to learn any class you may have dozed through during the semester. Some schools, it seems, will go the extra mile to make sure their students’ GPAs stay high. And some won’t.
This standardization issue could be solved with a simple tool; I’ll call a “path-specific average GPA.” It would work like this: for every class at the school, the registrar determines the average grade of all the students in that class when you took it. On your transcript, all of these average grades are worked out into a GPA, too: the GPA you would have gotten if you were the middle-achieving student in every one of your classes. With that number on it, anyone reviewing your transcript could see how your GPA compares to this “average” GPA and an A in a class where the average student got a C suddenly looks a lot better than the same grade in a class where a poor student got a C. This provides more incentive for professors to grade across the entire 4.0 scale because they don’t have to feel guilty or worry about as many complaints over giving a B- when it still lifts your GPA above the average in the eyes of the forces who control your future; a 3.00 GPA can suddenly look stellar if the average student on your track was pulling a 2.10. It also makes any school who fails to add this measure to their transcript look awfully suspect.
Even this proposal is far from perfect, however, because it is a compromise solution: it allows the current system to stay intact, but with a more accurate measurement. It is first of all dangerously close to simply grading on a curve, which is inherently inappropriate because it measures relative instead of absolute knowledge—an A should signify that you’ve mastered the subject matter at hand and if everyone in the class has, they should all receive an A with no ill consequences. More importantly, it keeps the focus of the GPA external rather than internal: your four years of college are boiled down to a number that has significance only for someone else, never for you. Grades, at best, would inform us students exactly how we’ve done and be a sign of how we can improve. Instead they make us, the recipients of the grades, more concerned about how others will view them; we get little if anything of value to ourselves from them.
It should be impossible for anyone to get through college without receiving a poor grade on a paper here or a test there, if only because things entirely unrelated to school make it impossible to do well on everything. If a school is truly dedicated to a liberal arts education, it would be of greater value for its students to receive an accurate assessment of how much they’ve learned rather than a rubber stamp that they’ve done enough work for a professor’s satisfaction. Of course, if Georgetown alone were to do this, it may hurt its graduates’ competitiveness in the job search or the graduate school application process, unless we garner a near-universal reputation for being the school with “real grades.”
I’d like see this change, but don’t let it begin with just me.
