Admirable, but there went the grading curve. At Stanford these days, less than 10 percent of the students receive anything below a B grade. Are students smarter? Nah, that’s Gen X myth No. 8. It’s time, say many faculties suddenly discovering the joys of standing upright, to restore some meaning to the grading system. Last week Stanford’s faculty took the bold step of voting to restore the F. Predictably, the gesture was misnamed; the F will henceforth be termed an NP, for ““no pass.’’ Call it what they might, it was an admission that policies had grown too vacuous. ““Many of the faculty truly felt comfortable bringing things back to a more central position,’’ said Gail Mahood, a geology professor and overseer of the changes.
Under Stanford’s current policy, students who fail a class receive an NC, for ““no credit,’’ which appears only on in-ternal records, not on the students’ official transcripts. Much of Stanford’s campus shrugged off the change. Few students truly deserve to flunk, and besides, says engineering professor Jeffrey Koseff, those teachers who aren’t giving C’s and D’s aren’t going to start handing out NP’s. Mahood argued that the policy will restore the honor – and frequency – of the C grade by placing it again in the acceptable middle range.
More controversial was Stanford’s decision to scrap its ask-no-questions withdrawal policy. That had allowed students to drop courses right up to the time of the final exam – without blemishing their records. Now they will have only until the fourth week to drop the course. Some students and professors contended the change will stifle the educational risk-taking that Stanford encourages. ““College is basically the last time that you’re going to have a chance to try out a lot of these things and explore,’’ said student leader Nawwar Kasrawi.
But Kasrawi evidently thinks that exploration must be risk-free. A student might dare to take a class in biochemistry – not a gut course even at prestigious West Coast universities – and evidently expect to be rewarded with at least a guaranteed B. This is the spirit that made America great?
Ivy League colleges are also tightening grading standards. At Harvard, where less than 20 percent of the students had an average of B- or less, administrators reduced the period for students to drop courses. The college may also consider such remedies as requiring grading on the curve, effectively meaning low grades for some students. ““It’s a little draconian and therefore probably won’t take place,’’ says Harvard administrator Dean Whitla. Harvard is also pondering what’s to be done about some humanities professors who give higher grades than those teaching the harder sciences.
While elite private universities seem most guilty of grade inflation, public colleges are wrestling with the issue, too. The University of Virginia’s law school recently adopted a ““Be Mean’’ policy: it requires professors to give their classes an average B grade, meaning fewer A’s. No doubt some students will sue.
Skeptics say that professors and colleges have much to gain from grade inflation. ““A lot of institutions have felt pressed for students,’’ says Whitla, not including Harvard, of course, among them. ““They don’t want to give out lousy grades.’’ Others claim grade inflation goes arm in arm with high tuition. Says Norman Wessells, provost at the University of Oregon: ““The students are telling us, “I pay so much to go to school here – you can’t give me D’s and F’s!’ ''
Consumer fraud can take many forms.
