UNC passes resolution to increase transparency in grade reporting

In April 2010 the faculty council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill passed a resolution on “Enhanced Grade Reporting” in an effort to provide more information on grading policies to accompany undergraduate transcripts.

UNC sociologist Andrew Perrin, who led the faculty discussions on transparency, said he doesn’t believe Princeton’s grade deflation policy is “the most effective way to handle this in the long term,” though he applauded the University’s efforts. The UNC resolution instead tackles what Perrin sees as the greatest issue with current grading practices: a lack of transparency.

“Essentially I don’t actually think ‘inflation’ is the most significant problem,” Perrin said in an e-mail. “The bigger problem is systematic inequality in grading standards between disciplines and between instructors within disciplines. That’s why our approach is to provide greater transparency to students, faculty and transcript consumers.”

The resolution urges the UNC registrar to report the context of grades, such as the distribution of letter grades in the course and the percentages of majors taking the class. It also urges the development of a system in which the university would distribute information to its professors about their grading practices relative to their colleagues’ both in and out of their departments.

Other schools have also aimed to increase transparency in transcripts. Dartmouth includes the median grade for each course on students’ transcripts, while Columbia includes the percentage of students in the course who received an A. Reed College, at which the average GPA is a 3.20, includes explanatory cards along with its transcripts, as does Princeton.

However, Cornell’s past efforts to combat grade inflation show that providing additional information may in fact contribute to grade inflation. In 1998 the university began posting median grades for courses online, but found that more students enrolled in the courses that had higher median grades, further compounding the problem.

“Our analysis finds that the provision of grade information online induced students to select leniently graded courses,” two Cornell professors and one professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in a statistical study of the system.

Even if other colleges and universities have not taken Princeton’s approach to curbing grade inflation, they have nevertheless acknowledged that grade inflation is a problem and reacted to it. Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel said in an e-mail that she continues to support these measures.