Over the past few months, the Main Campus Executive Faculty has been actively working to address grade inflation and disparity across departments. “In the next week or two, all faculty will receive the grade distribution for every class in their departments, and chairs will get the GPAs for each department’s majors inside the major and outside,” wrote MCEF Chair Ian Gale in an email to the Voice.
“The important issue was not inflation, per se, but compression,” Gale said in a subsequent interview with the Voice. He explained that when professors are assigning higher grades, there are fewer grades within the grade spectrum for them to choose from. “That’s the problem. You’re no longer making the same distinctions among students that you were previously,” he said.
In an effort to address the issue across academic departments, the Office of Assessment and Decision Support collected data from the 2014 graduating class comparing students’ grades inside and outside of their majors.
“Part of the impetus was the concern that there were also differences in grading across departments,” said Gale. “We simply asked that more information be made available to faculty so they know exactly where they stand relative to other members of their own department and across departments.”
This information hasn’t been made available to departments for the past several years. When asked whether or not grade inflation was a problem in the history department, Director of Undergraduate Studies Tommaso Astarita was not certain. “The data I have seen is all about the entire university, not by department, and I actually do not know if our department is experiencing the problem to the same exact extent, or less, or more,” Astarita wrote in an email to the Voice.
According to the Dean of the College, Chester Gillis, the main purpose of spreading this information is to raise awareness among faculty members. “It may pique the consciousness of some faculty members who weren’t previously aware,” he said. “Anything that brings it to awareness is helpful. Whether or not it will change things is another question.”
Gillis, however, does not plan to force departments to make any mandatory changes based off of the data. “I’m not going to dictate to them that [they] must change or set a standard,” he said. “I just hope departments become more aware. Internally, they may have conversations based on whether their grading patterns were pretty high or pretty low.”
James Lamiell, chair of the psychology department, does not believe the information will be helpful for his department. “You cannot infer lax grading standards from a grade distribution graph,” he said. “Looking at distributions of grades across majors isn’t in itself enough to raise questions about equity. This kind of standardization is not going to accomplish what it sets out to accomplish. It’s just generally a bad idea.”
On the other hand, government department Chair Michael Bailey believes that departments should be striving toward an equilibrium of grades inside and outside of their departments. “A goal would be fairness,” Bailey said. “It just seems kind of unfair if when a student goes in one direction and he gets all this validation … but if he goes in another direction, he could get really low grades when the difference isn’t his performance.”
According to Gale, another concern is equity in assigning Latin Honors. Because of the difference in grading between departments, students in majors that are graded more leniently are more likely to receive these distinctions. “If you think Latin Honors should go to the strongest students irrespective of choice of major, then you would have to equalize grading across majors,” he said.
Gillis, however, does not believe that differences in grading between departments will affect Latin Honors. “You have to remember the major is only 10 courses and you’re going to have 30 other courses in other disciplines and the core,” he said, “The major will make a slight difference, but statistically, not a huge difference.”
Although Gillis would like to see more consistency in grades between departments, he thinks it would be difficult and could hurt students applying to postgraduate programs when compared to students from other institutions. Grade inflation, according to Gillis, is not just a Georgetown problem—it must be addressed at the national level.
“Yes I would like things to change, however, they can’t simply be unique to Georgetown,” Gillis said, “One thing that can be really problematic about this is that if you really tighten up policy and then our students have much lower GPAs than everywhere else and they’re applying to professional schools … they may not look as strong as other students when they are as strong.”
Photo by Taryn Shaw
