GUSA petitions Provost about grade inflation

GUSA released a petition on Monday calling for Provost Robert Groves to address an alleged lack of student input in the administration’s response to grade inflation at Georgetown.

The press release which announced the petition called for greater “dialogue with university administrators concerning recent academic changes proposed by the Provost’s Office.”

The petition raises concerns about the addition of each class’s mean grade to every student’s transcript that was first announced in a Provost blog post on Dec. 25. The petition also references the new Latin honors system that will apply beginning with the class of 2017 and will result in a total of 25 percent of all students graduating with Latin honors, a decrease from 56 percent, 64 percent, 59 percent, and 38 percent of the 2012 graduating class with Latin honors in the college, SFS, NHS, and MSB, respectively.

“The problem is that there was no consultation with the student body at all,” said Guy Mentel (COL ‘14), GUSA secretary for academic affairs.

The petition requests that he “not to take any further action regarding this matter without student input.” When asked if he would be willing to cooperate, Groves said he would be open to student dialogue regarding grade inflation, but maintained that the changes would remain in place.

GUSA members claim that the petition does not contain any specific criticism of the methods Provost Groves has taken to address grade inflation. “We’re not taking a stance on it,” said Shweta Wahal (SFS ’16), chairwoman of the GUSA Senate Intellectual Life Committee. “What we want is to be included in the conversation.”

“The decisions surrounding our grades and our transcripts directly affect us,” said GUSA President Nate Tisa (SFS ‘14). “We think it’s to the benefit of students, the Provost, and the university for there to be solid engagement in this process.”

Provost Groves, who took office in Aug. 2012, said he had little control over the changes made to transcripts and to Latin honors, as the main campus executive faculty had already voted on them by the time he arrived at Georgetown.

“These are things that were in the queue before I got here,” he said. “They were in the implementation stage, in my view,” Groves said. “None of these changes will have 100 percent of the people in strong support of them.”

Groves justified the changes as useful for students and professors to accurately gauge their respective performance.

“In the case of Latin honors, we were entering a state where the majority of students were getting the message that they were doing better than average … on the transcripts, it’s really about transparency, clear signals to all involved about what a particular grade means,” he said.