Officials look to halt GPA swelling

Officials at UNC-Chapel Hill have begun discussions of a possible change in the way student grade point averages are calculated.

Continuing national concerns about grade inflation prompted the Educational Policy Committee, a subcommittee of the UNC-CH Faculty Council, to look more closely at ways of curbing the problem.

The committee is still in the early stages of a debate about whether any action should be taken to correct a measurable increase in the percentage of A's awarded at the University, said Peter Gordon, committee chairman and psychology professor at UNC-CH.

"We have begun to explore techniques that give an alternative to the traditional grade point average," Gordon said.

One system being considered would continue to use standard letter grades but also would account for the difficulty of the courses students select and the grading practices of their professors, he said.

"I make the comparison, and it should be a loose comparison, of it to the RPI that's used in college sports," Gordon said, referring to the concept of a Relative Power Index. "You don't just look at the win-loss of the team, you also look at the difficulty of the schedule."

Such a system could benefit students taking difficult classes with harder professors, he said.

"Right now all the incentive for students is to get higher grades regardless of really what that reflects," Gordon said.

"An A in the class where everyone gets an A is the same as an A in the class where only five people get an A."

Provost Robert Shelton said he is familiar with the idea and that he thinks it merits further investigation.

"It's interesting," he said. "I'm always open to looking at new ideas, but you have to be very careful to make sure that whatever you do is done broadly, that you don't disadvantage your students here."

Leah McGinnis, committee member and undergraduate librarian, said the committee has discussed the idea but that it remains in the preliminary stages.

"I can see that there are definite issues there that need to be investigated," she said, referring to the problem of grade inflation. "I can't say at this stage that that's the correct direction to take, but that's something to look into."

One of the biggest problems at UNC-CH is that across the board, grades tend to be higher in the humanities than in the natural sciences, Gordon said.

A type of weighted GPA system might work to account for that imbalance.

"Grades vary widely by department," Gordon said. "It would hopefully reduce the incentives to simply take courses because you expected that the course would be a good way to get a high grade."

Similar problems with grade inflation are occurring across the field of higher education, said Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University.

"I don't know if any major universities are an exception to this."

It's a problem that his own university has begun to address, Mansfield said.

"It's only recently that the faculty (at Harvard) became aware that we were giving 50 percent A's and A-'s," he said.

Last year, Princeton University implemented a quota for top grades. The school is working toward a goal of awarding A's only 35 percent of the time.

In a report released last week, Princeton's Faculty Committee on Grading reported an overall drop in A's awarded from 46 percent in 2003-04 to 40.9 percent during the 2004-05 year.

Whether the idea will ever make it beyond the Educational Policy Committee remains uncertain.

"Before anything would be done to change grading, there would be a tremendous amount of discussion of the proposals," Gordon said. "It would at least take a couple of years to implement."

"I don't think it would affect people now, though I could be wrong."

 

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.