Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on a topic that is fundamental to education, but is discussed either hesitantly or not at all. The article, by Beckie Supiano, asked sixteen educators, some from the college side and others from the high school side, to weigh in on what an A grade means or should mean.
I was one of the sixteen and told Beckie that it was an inspired topic. That wasn’t surprising, because a few years back she interviewed me for an article she and Eric Hoover did on what fairness in college admission looks like. Both of those articles capture my love for philosophical discussions that defy a simple answer.
Very few topics in education are more contentious than grades, with the possible exception of homework. Decisions about grading impact every classroom teacher, every student, every class, and every school or college.
Grades also impact the college admissions process. It can certainly be argued that one of the factors influencing places like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cal Tech, and UT-Austin to return to requiring test scores is that grade inflation has made A’s on student transcripts ubiquitous. The currency of selective admission is that the rarer any talent or quality (or grade), the more valuable it is–and vice versa. A’s aren’t as impressive when everyone has them.
I am far from convinced that adding test scores to the admission equation actually helps locate the “diamond in the rough” and produces a more diverse student body, but I get that having test scores as an additional data point is useful is distinguishing among applications with similar grades. Whether the addition of test scores leads to better decisions or just easier decisions is a different question.
There are two approaches to grading that parallel two approaches to admission. There is the formulaic approach, where the final grade is objective and totally driven by numbers. The other is holistic. As a classroom teacher I have always fallen into the holistic category. My ultimate question is assigning grades has been “What does this student deserve?” The holistic approach can be criticized as subjective, but assigning a grade for a piece of work or a course is an exercise in professional judgment.
So what does (or should) an A mean? A tempting answer is that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, you know A work when you see it. My answer to the Chronicle was that as a classroom teacher of philosophy at the college level and public speaking at the high school level I have always believed that a B should be relatively easy to get, assuming that a student makes an honest effort and meets the minimal expectations of the course. A’s should be rarer and harder to obtain, representing depth of understanding and a different level of insight.
That train may have already left the station. Nearly 80 percent of the grades awarded at Yale during 2022-23 were either A or A-, and Yale is not an outlier on that front. The question is whether students admitted in an environment where only five percent of applicants are successful have a right to expect A’s based solely on their ability to be admitted. And what happens to those students when they begin to make grades lower than A for the first time?
Those questions are particularly relevant as we work with students whose academic and emotional growth were impacted by the Covid pandemic. During the pandemic many schools were generous with grades in recognition of all that students were dealing with, including hours in front of screens trying to do school. We have seen a fragility in many of those students. As they encounter less-forgiving grading standards, does that contribute to the increase we are seeing in student mental health concerns?
It is important for faculty members to have discussions about grading philosophy and what grades mean. That doesn’t mean that every teacher or course need to be on the same page. At my school any student who doesn’t receive an A for Glee Club is doing something wrong, and that’s okay. What you don’t want is a perception that two instructors teaching the same course have wildly different grades. Our English Department annually did a table-reading exercise to ensure that there was rough agreement in grading essays.
Schools also need to ensure that there is alignment in grading. Several years ago the daughter of a colleague was making straight A’s in regular-level courses, but was told she couldn’t take honors-level courses. That seemed wrong to me, even if it is the case that the expectations in regular-level courses are different. Either the student should have been given the opportunity to see what she could do at the honors level or she shouldn’t have been getting straight A’s in regular courses.
I just attended a conference where the subject of school profiles came up. The college folks at the session complained that too many high school profiles don’t contain information about grading scales or grade distributions. A friend who has just moved back to the college side of the desk told me that he has read 40-50 applications in the past couple of days, and none of the school profiles contained context about grade distributions. A counselor friend remarked that her school and many others were hesitant, and perhaps embarrassed, to reveal just how many A’s they were giving out.
There are two other consequences of the number of A grades we see today. One is that they have rendered moot a classic question about college admission, Is it better to get an A in a regular-level course or a B in an Honors or Advanced Placement course? My students used to chuckle grudgingly at my attempt at humor, which was that they wanted students to take the Honors/AP course–and get the A. Today that’s no longer a joke.
The other is the extinction of the “gentleman’s C.” It’s now the gentleman’s A-.