Forthcoming in Public Affairs Quarterly.

ASSESSING GRADING

CHRISTOPHER KNAPP

Moral philosophers have lavished attention on the ethical dimensions of conduct in certain professions – most notably in health care and business. But we have not been nearly so circumspect about the ethical dimensions of our own professorial conduct. The literature that exists on the ethics of research and teaching is, in comparison, limited.1 And courses in the ethical issues that professors face are rare; rarer still are requirements that aspiring professors take them. This neglect has left professorial ethics, as Michael Scriven put it, “a terra incognita of formidable dimensions and fascinating prospect.”2

One aspect of professorial conduct that is of particular moral significance is our practice of grading students. Clearly, the grades we assign students matter to them a great deal. And because they perform several important social functions, grades matter to many outside the academy as well. Indeed, the significance of academic grades explains why the recent rise in grade point averages has attracted such attention in the popular media.3 But

1 Some highlights of the literature on professorial ethics include the essays in

two volumes edited by Stephen Cahn – Morality, Responsibility, and the University (Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1990) and The Monist 79:4 (1996) – as well as his Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986); Kristen Schrader-Frechette, Ethics of Scientific Research (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); Michael Davis, Ethics and the University (London: Routledge, 1999); David Shatz, Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); David Carr, Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching, (New York: Routledge, 2000); Peter J. Markie, A Professor’s Duties (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994); May, William F. (ed.) Ethics and Higher Education (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Richard DeGeorge (ed.), Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Kathie Jenni, “The Moral Responsibilities of Intellectuals” Social Theory and Practice 27(3): 437-454; John Passmore, “Academic Ethics?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 1(1): 63-78. Audi, Robert. "On the Ethics of Teaching and the Ideals of Learning," Academe 80(5): 27-36.

2 Michael Scriven, “Professorial Ethics” Journal of Higher Education 53 (1982): 316.

3 See, for instance, Alicia Shepard, “A’s for Everyone!” The Washington Post June 5, 2005: W19; “Grade Inflation” Talk of the Nation, May 4, 2004; “Grade Inflation Is Not a Victimless Crime” The Christian Science Monitor May 3, 2004: 9; Michael Berube, “How to End Grade Inflation” The New York Times Magazine May 2, 2004: 32; Randy Cohen, “Grading Reality” The New York Times Magazine Oct 26,

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even this public spotlight on our grading practices has not, as of yet, generated much in the way of serious philosophical treatment. Although some university administrations and faculties have begun to fashion policies to curtail or reverse the rise in their students’ grades4, there has been virtually no discussion by philosophers of the ethical issues concerning our grading practices that increasing grade point averages have brought to light.

Grade inflation per se is not the principal focus here, however. There are more fundamental problems with the grading practices at most colleges and universities in the United States. Our current grading practices are unfair; they contribute to the unjust distribution of desirable positions; and they harm our students, our institutions, and our society. Making good on these claims is the first goal of this paper. It begins with a description of our grading practices, and then analyzes the unfairness, injustice, and harm they produce. It then proposes a solution to these problems in the form of an alternative grading system: institutions should adopt a grading system that assesses students’ performance relative to the performance of their peers. That is, institutions should abolish the practice of attempting to assign grades that correspond to an absolute standard of intrinsic merit: faculties should stop trying to give ‘A’s to all and only “A-level work.” Instead, our evaluation should simply communicate how the quality of a student’s work compares to the work submitted by other students in the class. The last two sections of the paper contain a defense of this proposal. The first part of the defense shows how this alternative approach to grading would avoid the moral problems our current practices face. The second part shows how the most likely objections to it fail. 1. OUR CURRENT PRACTICE

The most striking thing about the grading system in many universities is just how unsystematic it is. Typically, the institution sets the notational system, such as the common ‘A’-‘F’ scale and leaves it to the individual faculty members to determine what, precisely, those symbols mean. Little, if any, effort is made to settle on a faculty-wide, or even a department-wide, understanding of what information any particular grade should convey about a student’s performance. Nor do new instructors typically have serious training on how to evaluate their students’ work, or on how to represent that evaluation by assigning grades. Since the practice of ascribing these symbols to

2003: 28; Stuart Rojstaczer, “Where All the Grades are Above Average” The Washington Post, January 28, 2003: A21.

4 Princeton University’s recent adoption of guidelines for grade distributions is perhaps the most notable example. For details, see http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/index.html

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student work is left to individual discretion, it is no surprise that those practices vary significantly from instructor to instructor.5 It is worth pausing to appreciate the extent of this variability. One dimension of variability is what aspects of students’ performance grades measure. Some instructors assign grades solely on the basis of how well a student has mastered the relevant material. Others, however, have a more capacious sense of what grades assess. Some instructors take the earnest effort a student exhibits into account, giving higher grades to students who work hard, come to office hours for extra help, or submit early drafts of their work for comments. Some instructors will take a student’s educational or socio-economic background into account. If, say, the instructor knows that one student attended a public high school in a poor urban community and that another attended a private preparatory school, the former’s grammatical and word usage errors will count against his paper grade less than similar mistakes will count against the latter’s. Even a student’s attitude or behavior in class is something that grades sometimes reflect. If a student is on the borderline between two grades, some instructors will decide what grade to give her by reflecting on whether she approached the class discussions with open-minded enthusiasm or cynical disdain. A second dimension of variability is whether grades reflect the intrinsic merit of a student’s performance or the relative merit of a student’s performance. An instructor who uses grades only as a measure of intrinsic merit has, for each particular assignment, a sense of what constitutes ‘A’-level work on that assignment, what constitutes ‘A-minus’-level work on that assignment, and so on. The grade any particular performance deserves depends solely on how the work compares to those standards. Alternatively, when an instructor uses grades only as a measure of relative merit, he or she determines in advance what percentage of students will receive each grade. For instance, the instructor might decide that the top 10% of submissions will receive an ‘A’, the next 10% will receive an ‘A-’, and so on down to ‘D’. Then the instructor ranks all the work actually submitted by the relevant comparison class, and the grade any particular student’s work deserves is simply a matter of where in that ranking the work falls.6 Most instructors use an amalgam of both approaches. We typically endeavor to give ‘A’s only to work that we deem to be of the highest quality, and to do so is to embrace grades as reflective of the intrinsic value of a student’s performance. But it is unlikely that anyone’s internal sense of what

5 This variation is nothing new. Max Meyer documented similar diversity

nearly a century ago in his “The Grading of Students” Science 28(712): 243-250. 6 Lawrence H. Cross, Robert B. Frary, and Larry J. Weber report empirical

evidence of variation with respect to what grades measure and the use of intrinsic vs. relative merit standards in their “College Grading: Achievement, Attitudes and Effort” College Teaching 41(4): 143-148.

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constitutes A-level work is wholly independent of the quality of the work that is submitted to him or her by other students in the college or university. This, of course, explains why it is rare for instructors at less selective institutions to give only low grades. Moreover, when professors give novel assignments and devise new test questions, their conception of what constitutes excellent performance on those assignments or tests is likely to be informed by how the students in the class actually perform. Thus, even those who grade students on the intrinsic quality of their work are also grading them on the quality of their work relative to the work done by their peers. Similarly, instructors who use grades to communicate the relative merit of students’ work are apt to incorporate their standards of intrinsic merit into their grading practices as well. When one sets a curve for an assignment, for instance, it sometimes happens that adhering strictly to the predetermined percentile cutoffs for grades would require giving different grades to students who receive the same raw score. One must decide, therefore, whether to raise or lower the cutoff. One obvious way to make this decision is to rely on how well the class performed on the assignment – if the class did very good work then one would lower the cutoff and allow the cluster of students who received the same score to receive the higher rather than the lower grade. Yet a third dimension of variability is the one that is most familiar. Notoriously, some instructors frequently give their students the highest of possible grades and others rarely do; some instructors give a fair number of ‘C’s each semester, while, for others, assigning a ‘C’ is a rarity. It may be that some of this variation in grade distribution from instructor to instructor can be explained by the differing quality of the students’ performance in different classes. But it is safe to say that this cannot possibly explain all the variation that is observed. Semester after semester, the median grade is higher in some classes than it is in others largely because different instructors have different ideas about how good a student’s work needs to be to qualify for any particular grade.7 Grading practices vary not only across instructors, but across disciplines as well. Generally speaking, humanities professors employ laxer and/or less relativized grading standards. For instance, last year at Binghamton University, over half of the grades humanities instructors gave were in the ‘A’-range, and only 7% were below a ‘B-’ or lower. By contrast, only 30% of the grades science and math instructors gave were ‘A’s and 28% were ‘C+’ or lower. The number of ‘A’s given in two of the most popular programs – English and Economics – differed by a factor of 3. Humanities instructors are also apt to have a more capacious sense of what grades

7 Given the complexity of the evaluations that some grades represent, one

wonders whether instructors themselves clearly understand how the grades they assign were determined. Gregory Weis, for one, has his doubts. See his “Grading” Teaching Philosophy 18(1): 3-13.

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measure. This is evinced by the fact that math and science instructors largely rely on objective exams to assess student performance, leaving fewer opportunities to take effort, attitude, and the like into account. 2. THE CASE AGAINST OUR CURRENT PRACTICE

All this variation in grading practices is wrong. To see why, it will be useful to keep in mind how objectionable it would be to use inconsistent grading practices within a single course. Imagine, for instance, a professor of a large lecture class who scores all the assignments for a semester on a 100-point scale. The students press her on how their course grade will be determined from their assignment scores. She directs them to the syllabus, where she has indicated how much weight each assignment will carry in the determination of the final grade. The students, however, are not satisfied; they want to know how the 100-point scores will be converted into letter grades. She responds that the answer depends on what discussion section a student is enrolled in: those enrolled in one section will have their assignment scores put in order, and the top 10% of scores will receive an ‘A-’, the next 10% a ‘B+’, and so on down the line to ‘F’; in another section a far less demanding standard will be used, according to which 50% of students will receive an A, and no one will receive below a ‘B’; in yet a third section the same lax standard will be used, but those who appear to be trying hard will have their grades raised; and so on for the remaining sections. It is not hard to imagine the students’ outrage, and few of us would find their indignation out of place. Grading one’s students according to different standards and criteria strikes us as perversely unfair, and threatens to undermine the meaning of the grades assigned. But if grading students according to different standards and criteria is so clearly unacceptable within a course, we must wonder whether it isn’t also unacceptable across courses. As we think through our moral objections to inconsistent grading practices when they occur within a course, we will find that many of them apply with no less force to inconsistent practices across courses. That is, many of the same considerations that make our hypothetical professor’s grading policy objectionable make variation in grading policies across instructors and departments objectionable as well. The remainder of this section is dedicated to substantiating these claims. By thinking through what kind of things grades are and what functions they serve, we can get a clear understanding of why we reject our hypothetical professor’s inconsistent grading, and this will enable us to see the moral case against the variation that our current grading systems allow. A. The Expressive Function of Grades

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In our hypothetical example the students were treated consistently and, arguably, fairly, within their sections. Why isn’t this sufficient to make the professor’s grading policy permissible? One reason arises from the fact that grades are, in part, awards for one’s academic performance. This is so, at any rate, for those grades that are considered “good” grades; and it might be fair to say that “bad” grades are conceived of, if not as a punishment or stigma, then at least as the withholding of the award of a “good” grade. The term “award” seems most fitting here because this aspect of grades places them somewhere between what Joel Feinberg called “prizes” and “rewards.” 8 According to Feinberg, the expressive functions of prizes and rewards overlap – they are both used to express admiration, appreciation, or ‘recognition’ of an esteemed trait. There are, however, two important differences. First, for prizes “only one competitor wins (barring ties)” whereas, people who possess the relevant merit to different degrees may all deserve a particular reward. Second, the conception of desert used in the context of prizes is “nonpolar” in the sense that there is no corresponding conception of ill desert that governs what is due to those who are not the winners. The conception of desert governing rewards, however, is polar: some of those who do not deserve a reward for a particular trait deserve punishment for lacking it. Saying that grades are partly conceived of as “awards” signals that grades share the expressive function of prizes and some rewards. Grades are not “prizes,” however, because several students of differing academic merit may nonetheless all deserve an ‘A’. And grades are not obviously “rewards” because it is not clear whether poor grades are punishments. That some people do so conceive of them is evident in the practice of punishing plagiarizers with an ‘F’ in the course, rather than simply giving them an ‘F’ for the assignment on which they plagiarized. But it is not clear that this way of thinking is sufficiently widespread so as to be part of our shared conception of what a grade is; even if it is, there are serious questions concerning whether this way of conceiving of grades is defensible. Awards are earned in the context of a competition. And with respect to grades, there is a tacit understanding that courses comprise bona fide academic competitions. That is one important reason why, in order to treat students justly, it is not enough to merely treat them consistently within their sections. When a professor applies different policies to students within the same course, we see this as unfair partly because the students are participating in the academic competition that the course comprises, and fairness in judging competitions requires that each participant be judged by the same standards.9

8 See Joel Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert” in Doing and Deserving

(Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1970): 55-94. 9 The requirement of consistency may be derived from the requirement that

the rules of the competition be designed so as to “gauge excellence at the skill which is the ostensible basis for the competition.” (Feinberg, op cit, p. 65) If substantively

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This aspect of the unfairness of the professor’s inconsistent grading policies supports the claim that inconsistency in grading practices across courses is also objectionable. Quite plainly, there are academic competitions that span students’ entire undergraduate careers. The most basic and ubiquitous signs of this are the official computation of overall grade point averages and the class rankings they produce. For just as a high course grade is partly an award that a student earns on the basis of his or her academic performance in a course over a semester, a high GPA and class rank are partly awards a student earns for his or her academic performance throughout his or her undergraduate career. And GPAs are not only awards in themselves; they are also the basis for a whole menu of other awards, honorific designations, and prizes that universities and colleges typically distribute when a class graduates. Although we may not often talk of it in this way, these practices imply that each graduating class is in an academic competition that begins when they start their undergraduate degree and finishes only when they complete it. Once we recognize that courses are part of larger, university-wide competitions for GPA, rank, honors, and prizes, we see that fairness requires that all the participants in these competitions be judged by the same standards, and hence that inconsistency in grading policies across courses is unfair. B. The Cognitive Function of Grades Grades are not only awards; they are also speech acts that communicate an instructor’s evaluation of students’ academic performance. They share this role with other modes of communication at professors’ disposal, such as written comments on students’ work, discussions during office hours, letters of recommendation, informal discussions with members of hiring and admissions committees, and so on. There are two aspects of grades, however, that mark out their distinctive communicative function. First, grades necessarily represent a professor’s assessment of the overall merit of a student’s performance. This distinguishes them from written comments or verbal feedback on a student’s work. Second, grades are formalized – the grade symbols represent a professor’s assessment of a student’s achievement in a way that allows them to be compared and averaged across assignments and classes. This distinguishes them from letters of recommendation and most ‘narrative’ systems of evaluation. Reflection on the specific communicative function of grades again reveals that inconsistency in grading policies across courses is objectionable. The problems here stem from two main sources. First, when the same grade is used to communicate different things, it is difficult for audiences to interpret

different rules apply to different contestants, there is no single skill or set of skills the rules are testing for.

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what these symbols mean. The less overlap there is in what the symbol ‘A’ is used to express, the more difficult it is for anyone but the instructor to know what information to glean from a particular student’s being given an ‘A’ for a particular assignment or course. This difficulty is only exacerbated by the fact that individual instructors rarely give detailed explanations of what their grades represent to their students, let alone to the institution that employs them, or to the public at large.10 Second, the current absence of consistent institutional grading policies facilitates a gradual reduction in grading standards, and this in turn limits how much grades can express. To take the second step first, it is clear that when professors use laxer standards, they effectively truncate the grading scale. The lower grades in the scale are rarely, if ever, given, and the upper end of the scale remains fixed – we do not compensate for the effective elimination of ‘D’ ‘D+’ and ‘C-’ by adding an ‘A++’ ‘A+++’ and ‘A++++’. When there are, in effect, fewer different grades to assign, there are fewer distinctions in the quality of academic performances those grades can be used to convey. Consequently, the grades can communicate less information than they might have had higher standards been used.11 What explains why standards are loosening? The apparent incentives for instructors to lower their standards are well worn: higher grades make students happier, thereby reducing complaints, challenges and negative evaluations; assigning and justifying higher grades takes less time and intellectual energy; high grades give programs or universities a competitive advantage in recruiting students.12 What is worth emphasizing, though, is that the absence of any consistent institutional grading policy allows these perceived incentives to go unchecked. At most institutions, there is no explicit or implicit institutional standard that professors can be held accountable to, and thus little reason for them not to succumb to the incentives to give students higher grades. And even if this fact does not help explain why grades have risen over the last thirty years, it will certainly hinder any attempts on the part of individual faculty members to reverse the trend by raising their standards unilaterally. For the incentives in favor of lowering one’s standards

10 J. O. Urmson would have found the ambiguity that results from the diversity of our grading practices sufficient reason to reform them. In his essay “On Grading,” he claims: “… grading words can only be used successfully for communication where criteria are accepted. Where they are not there can only be confusion and cross purposes until it is seen that the only discussion possible between such people is what grading criteria to adopt – grading words must then be discussed, not used.” Mind 59 (1950): 167.

11 Harvey Mansfield makes this point in his “Grade Inflation: It's Time to Face the Facts,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 47(30), Apr 6, 2001: B24.

12 A thorough and sophisticated treatment of this topic can be found in Henry Rosovsky and Matthew Hartley’s Evaluation and the Academy: Are We Doing the Right Thing? (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2002).

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are also incentives against raising them. Our current failure to institute a consistent grading policy across courses thus means that there is little hope that grades will recover the ability to convey the distinctions in academic performance that they have lost. Our inconsistent grading policies, therefore, produce grades whose meanings are both ambiguous and imprecise, and thus strip them of communicative power that they might otherwise have had. This raises two sorts of moral problems. The first are broadly utilitarian – ambiguous and imprecise grades produce unnecessary harm. These harms will be suffered by anyone whose interests are advanced by having access to professors’ formalized assessment of the overall merit of students’ academic performance – either on a particular assignment, in a particular course, within a major, over a given number of terms, or over the entirety of their academic careers. With respect to assignment and course grades, the students themselves are likely to be those most harmed. When we fail to give students an accurate and precise formalized assessment of their overall performance on an assignment or in a course, we make it harder for them to assess their strengths and weaknesses. We make it harder for them to know where the gaps in their skills or understanding are, so that they may address them. A student who receives ‘B’s on his papers for his first humanities courses, for instance, might reasonably, but mistakenly, conclude that he is a proficient writer. And we make it harder for students to know where their talents lie, so that they may decide what major or career to pursue with a better understanding of their potential to excel in it. A student who receives ‘A’s in her first English classes and ‘B’s in her first Economics classes might reasonably, but mistakenly, conclude that she is better suited to analyzing literature than markets. Such inevitable confusions show that the ambiguous and coarse feedback grades currently provide makes our students worse off – academically, professionally and, ultimately, personally. With respect to the course grades a student accumulates over time, the interested audience, and hence the range of those who are harmed by ambiguous and coarse grades, is significantly larger. Potential employers and admissions committees need both a reliable and a precise accounting of a students’ academic performance so as to make informed predictions about who will contribute most to the employer’s or program’s mission. Awards committees who must make selections on the basis of academic achievement need reliable and precise information regarding what students have accomplished. And the university or college itself has pedagogical interests in having a reliable and precise picture of how well its students are performing, for it must make decisions about who should be encouraged to apply for scholarships and graduate study, about who needs remedial help, about who needs the extra monitoring that academic probation achieves, and about who simply does not belong in its classrooms. All these audiences need professors’ evaluations to be communicated in a format that allows for comparability

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across a large number of courses. The formalization of grades promises to provide just that, and so it is no surprise that these audiences pay close attention to students’ GPAs.13 But when students’ GPAs are compiled on the basis of ambiguous and coarse grades, they provide far less accurate and precise information than they might.14 In addition to causing these personal and social harms, ambiguous and coarse grades frustrate the just distribution of important merit-based goods. We believe, for instance, that goods such as desirable jobs and admission to competitive graduate and professional schools should be given to the most qualified candidates. And we believe this not only because doing so promotes social utility, but also because we think that the most qualified candidates merit these positions.15 Were a less qualified candidate to get a position that a more qualified candidate would have accepted, we would typically think that this is not only inefficient, but unjust. And in many cases, part of what makes candidates merit these positions is their past academic performance, since candidates merit these positions on the basis of their potential to excel in them, and we take past academic performance to be an indicator of that potential. The more ambiguous and coarse grades are, the more likely it will be that these positions will not be distributed correctly. When different professors use grades to communicate different information about a student, it is inevitable that some candidates who achieved more will have a lower

13 There are those who believe these audiences pay far less attention to GPAs than they might. For instance, some students complain that many law schools pay at least as much attention to how a student performs on a single test taken on a single afternoon as they do to the grades a student earns in dozens of courses over a period of several years. Their frustration is understandable, but so are the practices of the law school admissions committees. One recent study showed that despite the LSAT’s obvious limitations, LSAT scores are at least as good predictors of law school success as GPAs. The author of the study suggests that GPAs’ lackluster predictive value is due to “the vast variety of standards for grading throughout U.S. higher education, a variety that exists both within and among educational institutions.” David A. Thomas, “Predicting Law School Academic Performance from LSAT Scores and Undergraduate Grade Point Averages: A Comprehensive Study” Arizona State Law Journal, 35 (Fall, 2003): 1020.

14 There are additional social harms of our current approach to grading that are not straightforwardly attributable to the ambiguity and coarseness it produces. In particular, there are the harms that arise from it being predictably harder to get good grades in math and natural science courses than in many other disciplines. This creates a significant disincentive for students contemplating a math or science major. In a society that has interest in encouraging more of its young people to pursue higher education in math and the sciences, such disincentives can be costly. Thanks to John Arthur for this point.

15 An insightful discussion of the justification for thinking that the most qualified candidates for a position deserve it can be found in George Sher’s Desert (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1987): 119-128.

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GPA than candidates who achieved less, simply because their professors applied different grading standards or criteria. And when grades are coarse, they cannot indicate certain real differences in achievement between students. It will too often be that a student who achieves more than a classmate will nonetheless receive the same grade, and, consequently, that this higher achievement will not be communicated to those who distribute merit-based goods. It is worth noticing that the case against our current practices does not yet include the charge that probably fuels much of the current furor over the rise in GPAs during the last thirty years – namely, that many of the high grades students now receive are lies.16 Since it is unlikely that the majority of the students in any class do exceptional work, these critics say, we have good reason to believe that those not-uncommon professors who give the majority of their class grades in the ‘A’ range are not assigning those grades truthfully. There is some truth in this charge, and if it could be sustained, it would add to the case against our laissez-faire approach to grading policies insofar as that approach both fostered and perpetuates lower standards. On reflection, though, we are likely to find this charge is an anachronism, albeit an understandable one. It is premised on grades’ possessing a univocal meaning, and therefore on the existence of common standards concerning how much quality a student’s work must possess to be worthy of a particular grade.17 Currently, there is so much diversity in the assignment of grades that, for the most part, ‘A’ means whatever an individual professor uses it to mean. And when the meaning of a symbol is so closely tied to one’s own usage, it is exceedingly difficult to ascribe it falsely. Moreover, in order for many of the high grades that are currently assigned to be untruthful, not only must grades possess univocal meanings, those meanings must be such that an ‘A’ represents outstanding work. This is unlikely. If indeed there is a robust conventional meaning for the symbol ‘A’, at many institutions it is more likely to signify that a student has done acceptable rather than exceptional work.18 The strongest case against our current grading policies, then, rests on the fact that inconsistent grading policies render the competitions for academic awards unfair, deprive people of positions they merit, and leave people, institutions, and societies less well off than they would otherwise be.

16 Richard Kamber and Mary Biggs make this charge in their “Grade Conflation: a Question of Credibility,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 48(31); Apr 12, 2002: B14.

17 Sher makes the case for the necessity of such conventions in Desert, p. 115. 18 Similar considerations undermine the concern that inflated grades are

awards bestowed on those who do not deserve them: whether a particular award is deserved depends on the rules governing the competition in which it is awarded, and currently, it is left to individual instructors to decide what rules govern the assignment of grades in their courses.

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All this is so whether the inconsistency occurs within courses or across courses. Indeed, the scope of the unfairness, injustice, and harm caused by institutional inconsistency far exceeds that which any single professor could cause by applying different grading policies to different students within the same class. If we would not accept such inconsistency on the part of a single instructor, we should even more strongly reject the inconsistency across professors that now flourishes on our campuses. 3. THE ‘RELATIVE PERFORMANCE’ SYSTEM

If we are to reject our current approach to grading, we will need a replacement.19 The replacement should be an institutional grading system that will produce more consistency across courses and professors and that will allow grades and GPAs to communicate an accurate and detailed picture of a student’s academic achievement. Institutions could accomplish this by insisting that the grading practices of all instructors converge on a particular point in each of the three dimensions of grading variability discussed earlier – what grades measure, the degree to which grades assess intrinsic and relative merit, and the strictness or laxity of standards. What practices should institutions require? To begin, grades should measure the quality of the work a student submits, and nothing else. That grades reflect the quality of submitted work is a cornerstone of our grading practices, and for good reason: as was noted earlier, there are many who have a legitimate interest in having a formalized professional assessment of the overall quality of the academic work students do. But grades should not measure such additional factors as effort, achievement relative to educational background, or attitude. The primary reason for this is that all instructors have access to the information relevant to assessing the quality of all their students’ submitted work, while, practically speaking, a significant number lack access to the information needed to assess all of their students’ effort, academic backgrounds or attitude. Some professors in some small classes will have both the opportunity and inclination to get to know their students well enough to make such assessments reliably for every student in a class. But if what we are after is institution-wide convergence on what grades represent, then they

19 Not everyone would agree. One writer who would not is Alfie Kohn, who

claims, “… the real threat to excellence isn't grade inflation at all; it's grades.” (“The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation” Chronicle of Higher Education 49(11), November 8, 2002: B7.) Several institutions seem to share his view, and thus have abolished grades altogether. This is an important position deserving of a reasoned response, but engaging it is beyond the scope of the present paper. However, the present discussion should shed some light on the debate about the value of grading insofar as it clarifies what a defensible grading system would look like, and thus precisely what the opponents of grading need to give compelling arguments against.

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should be used to represent only those things that everyone who assigns them is capable of representing accurately. With respect to the question of merit, institutions should require that grades reflect only how a student’s performance compares to the performance of the other students in that class.20 There are two related reasons for abandoning the use of grades to signal the intrinsic merit of students’ work altogether. First, to retain the practice of using grades as assessments of intrinsic merit would be, in effect, to retain much of the unfairness and inefficiency of our current system. For it is hard to imagine – even in theory – how the faculty at an institution could articulate and then adopt a conception of what constitutes an intrinsically excellent performance, a less-than-excellent-but-better-than-good performance, a good performance, and so on, that was both substantive enough to ensure that it could be applied uniformly and general enough that it could be used to measure the quality of assignments submitted in every discipline. Or, if discipline-specific standards were to be adopted, it is hard to imagine how the faculty would calibrate them so that the standards in different disciplines were equally stringent. For while it is an overstatement to say that the value of the work submitted in different disciplines is incommensurable (some student work in mathematics is clearly better than some student work in sociology, and vice versa), such values cannot be compared with the precision necessary to underwrite a consistent grading system. (Imagine trying to determine whether the intrinsic value of a given engineering homework was equal to that of a ‘B’ as opposed to a ‘B+’ or ‘B-’ creative writing assignment).21 Thus, we cannot hope to have univocal grading standards when grades are assigned either partly or wholly on the basis of intrinsic merit. Secondly, even if it were possible to articulate and adopt a set of substantive standards, there would be no practicable way to hold professors accountable for applying them. The determination of how a particular submission compared to those “intrinsic” standards would have to be left a matter of individual judgment. Consequently, if a given professor awarded a large number of high grades, it would be very difficult to tell whether those grades were wholly a reflection of the intrinsic merit of the students’ work or whether they were partly motivated by the significant incentives to give students high grades. And if that determination cannot, in practice, be made,

20 This proposal is neither new nor unfeasible. It was advocated in 1908 by

Max Meyer in his “The Grading of Students”. Its feasibility is evident from the fact that many law schools have adopted it.

21 The commensurability and comparability of different kinds of value has recently received a good deal of philosophical attention. See, for instance, the essays in Ruth Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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then it will be very hard for the institution to counteract the forces that encourage professors to inflate students’ grades. Finally, with respect to the question of standards, institutions should set a course grade distribution that contains as many distinctions in relative quality as the faculty collectively judges that it can reliably make – subject, of course, to practical limitations on the amount of time and energy professors can be expected to devote to grading. Admittedly, this will not be an easy determination. There is certainly divergence across disciplines in how many distinctions in quality professors are comfortable making, not least because of variation in the instruments typically used to assess student achievement. It is, for instance, far easier to reliably make fine differentiations in the quality of students’ performance in a chemistry class in which students are given 50-question multiple choice exams than in an English class in which they are given only creative writing assignments. And it will be necessary, for consistency’s sake, for the institutional distribution to be determined by the discipline in which the least fine distinctions in quality can be reliably and feasibly made. (The distribution need not – and probably should not – reflect the status quo in these disciplines. Many professors are capable of making finer distinctions in quality than they currently do. Doing so will involve some change, of course. Some professors may have to approach their grading more rigorously and/or devise additional instruments that lend themselves to finer evaluations.) Adopting such a course grade distribution at the institutional level will allow grades to provide fine-grained information about students’ academic performances. Moreover, this precision can withstand the inflationary pressures that threaten it. Such a system would make it easy to hold professors accountable for their grading standards. It is a simple task to determine whether a professor’s course grade distributions conform to the institutional policy, and provided that grades measure only relative quality, there are very few valid excuses for deviating from that policy. So although many of the incentives for lowering standards would remain, the ability to hold professors accountable would allow institutions to counteract them. To sum up, institutions should remedy the problems that bedevil our current approach to grading by stipulating that grades be used to communicate only the relative quality of the work students submit in their courses, and that there be an institution-wide course grade distribution that allows as much of this information to be conveyed as possible, subject to considerations of practical feasibility. Let us call this the ‘relative performance’ grading system. Some may worry that this remedy is too drastic. After all, the cause of consistency can be promoted by such measures as encouraging departments to discuss their grading practices in an attempt to reach some measure of consensus, publicizing professors’ and departments’ grade distributions, and conducting formal reviews of the grading practices of professors whose grade distributions are far outside the norm. And, of course, these measures would

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be far less revisionary than the relative performance system. Whereas adopting the relative performance system would be to change the very meaning of the grades we assign, these more moderate measures would allow us to retain the basic structure of our current practice and, at the same time, reduce the injustice and harm that these practices produce.22 These more moderate steps would be welcome improvements over the status quo. It is clear, however, that they will not achieve nearly the degree of consistency that the relative performance system would. Departmental conversations, peer pressure, and discipline at the margins can facilitate some local and isolated gains in consistency, but they cannot hope to result in an institution-wide convergence on grading criteria and standards. And until such a convergence is achieved, our grading policies will cause some academic competitions to be unfair, some positions to be awarded to those who do not most deserve them, and some interests to be set back for lack of a precise, unambiguous assessment of the quality of students’ performance. The issue, then, is whether there is sufficient reason to settle for less consistency than we could achieve under the present proposal. In other words, are there costs to the relative performance system that are grave enough to offset the gains in consistency and precision – and hence in fairness, desert and utility – that it promises? As will be argued in the next section, the answer is no; all the most significant potential costs are illusory. 4. OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES A. The Objection from Fairness

The most controversial feature of the relative performance system is how it circumscribes what grades represent. To some it may seem that this restriction would eliminate the unfairness that plagues our current system only by creating new forms of unfairness. Since grades would measure only relative merit, a majority of a class may do truly outstanding work, but only a small minority receives the highest grades. It may seem unfair for some students to receive a middling grade if the work they submit is truly praiseworthy. In addition, if a professor offered the same course at different times, a student who did outstanding work in one section might receive the same grade as a student in a less competitive section who does only mediocre work. When different levels of accomplishment are awarded the same grade, it may seem that the students are not being treated equitably. Similarly, we can imagine a freshman taking her first philosophy class who struggles through many drafts of a term paper and eventually produces a paper of the same quality that a senior philosophy major in the same class writes over lunch. There is a clear

22 An anonymous referee for this journal deserves credit for calling attention

to this worry.

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sense in which these two papers represent very different levels of accomplishment, yet on the relative performance system, they would receive the same grade. This too can seem unfair.23 The objection rests on a conception of grades in which they reflect academic attributes such as intrinsic worthiness and effort. It is presumably because we are thinking of grades as representations of such qualities that it seems a professor who assigns a middling grade to outstanding work, or the same grade to work that represents different levels of achievement, fails to treat students as they deserve. But in an institution that implemented the relative performance system, grades would no longer reflect such attributes: a middling grade would no longer mean that a student has done mediocre work; the fact that a professor assigns two students the same grade would no longer mean that her overall assessment of their accomplishment is the same. Once an institution stipulates that its grades have the meaning the relative performance system assigns to them, complaining that these scenarios constitute unfair treatment is on a par with a student complaining that he has been treated unfairly because his grade does not reflect how handsome and charming he is. Perhaps, however, what motivates the objection is a conviction that grades should reflect intrinsic merit, effort, attitude and/or educational background. Surely these attributes are important facts about students that professors are often in a good position to evaluate. And there is much to be gained by communicating such evaluations to a variety of people and institutions. The putative problem with the relative performance system, then, is that in the pursuit of consistency, grades would be prevented from playing their proper communicative role. But it is a mistake to think that by sacrificing consistency we can salvage grades’ ability to convey information about intrinsic merit, effort, attitude, or educational background. For, as was argued above, allowing grades to represent these things is to allow grades to mean different things: not every professor is in a position to make the additional assessments, and when they do, they will inevitably use standards of varying strictness. And if different professors use grades to communicate different kinds and levels of assessment, no one but the professor will be able to tell simply by looking at the grades what aspects of a students’ work are reflected in the course grades, and how they are reflected. So were we to allow that some course grades reflect these additional factors, the fact that they do so would simply not be conveyed to the intended audience. Moreover, the relative performance system does not prevent professors from communicating these additional assessments tout court. There are modes of communication at our disposal other than grades, and

23 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that this concern deserves

a detailed response.

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these are far better suited to conveying that information. Professors who have made assessments of intrinsic merit, effort, attitude or performance relative to educational background will have ample opportunities to give this information to the students directly, whether in conversation or in written comments on the students’ submitted work. It will also be possible to convey such assessments to interested parties using letters of recommendation. Indeed, in institutions where different professors’ grades reflect different kinds of assessments, a professor who wants to use a particular student’s course grade to communicate information about, say, her effort, could only do so successfully if he or she explicitly explains this to the intended audience. But once the professor has made this explicit using some other communicative device – such as a conversation or a letter of recommendation – there is no longer any need to use the grade to communicate that information. Thus, in the event that grades do succeed in conveying something beyond the relative quality of a student’s submitted work, their doing so is unnecessary. B. The Objection from Inconsistency across Institutions The current proposal is aimed at individual colleges and universities, and there is little hope that all institutions will decide to implement it simultaneously. It may seem, then, that any institution that adopts the relative performance system will disadvantage its students in external competitions for awards and positions. It seems the relative performance system would bring down median class grades, and hence median grade point averages. But since not all institutions will follow suit, this will mean that a student from a university that adopts this system may have a lower GPA than competitors from another institution, despite having achieved more. Consequently, some awards may be given unfairly and some positions will go to those who do not merit them, and the victims will be from the university that improved their grading policies. This is an important consideration, which gives us reason to supplement the current proposal. In particular, it points to the need for an institution that adopts the relative performance system to educate the relevant decision-makers regarding the meaning of the grades it awards. There are many ways this might be accomplished. The institution could explain its grading policies on student transcripts. It could attach letters of explanation to the dossiers its career services center sends out for students. It could encourage professors to explain the significance of students’ grades in their letters of recommendation, and encourage students to explain what their grades mean during interviews. Finally, the institution could use a novel notational system. For instance, if the faculty determined that it could reliably make ten distinctions in the relative quality of its students’ performance in a class, the institution could use a ten-point scale, with a ‘10’ representing that a student’s performance was among the top 10% of performances in that class,

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and so on down to ‘1’. Using such a system, most GPAs would be above a 4.0, and hence there would be little room for external evaluators to mistakenly interpret a student’s GPA as if it had been determined using the more traditional system. It is also likely that an institution that adopts the relative performance system will give its best students a competitive advantage in external competitions. It will be easy for evaluators to recognize that their high GPA represents a significant achievement, while those evaluators will have much less reason to come to the same conclusion about the high GPA of a student from an institution with lower grading standards.24 C. The Objection from the Value of Cooperation

Another objection concerns the fact that the relative performance system makes the grade a student receives depend in part on the quality of other students’ performances. Some sceptics will think that this would discourage students from helping or cooperating with other students in the class. But, the sceptics will continue, we should not inculcate this kind of competitive ethos in our classrooms or in our institutions. We should aim to foster cooperation among our students, not stifle it with a system that rewards selfish individualism. The basis of the objection should not be that some of us find competitive environments unpleasant, but that students learn less in them. This, however, is far from obvious. Some non-competitive environments can foster certain kinds of academic achievement that some competitive environments frustrate. But this does not mean that students learn less in more competitive environments, all things considered. For there are also kinds of academic achievement that competition nurtures best. Those who would reject the relative performance system on these grounds would thus carry a double argumentative burden. First, they would need to show us that, on the whole, the educational costs of the particular kind of competition this system can be expected to generate would outweigh its educational benefits; and second, they would need to show that the putative net educational benefit of a less consistent grading system is worth the unfairness, injustice and harms it produces. Not even the first of these burdens can be met, let alone the second. Consider what kind of cooperative efforts grading on the basis of relative merit would discourage. Since a particular student’s grade would be a matter of how many students submit work that is less good than her own, she will be

24 This suggestion is confirmed by comments by employers and admissions

officers that are included in a Princeton University memo on a proposal to raise its grading standards. See http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/04.html.

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discouraged from cooperating with another student only when she has good reason to believe that: (1) if she does not cooperate, the other student’s work will be worse than her own, and (2) if she does cooperate, the other student’s work will be better than her own, and (3) cooperating will not make her work better than that of any other student in the class. There are cooperative activities that clearly meet these three criteria, but they are the kind of cooperative activities that hinder rather than foster academic achievement. An example is when one student in a class gives her notes to another student who would rather not attend lectures or do the readings. If the lazy student is academically gifted, then the conscientious student may have reason to believe that the three criteria are met, and that cooperating in this way will hurt her grade. But this cooperation hinders the lazy student’s achievement rather than promoting it, for it removes an incentive to come to the lectures and do the reading whereby, presumably, she would learn more than she can by reading the notes. Another, even clearer, example is when a student is aware of cheating but “cooperates” by neither confronting nor reporting the cheaters. Here, all three criteria are fulfilled, and such “cooperation” is discouraged. But again, this is as it should be. An important strength of the relative performance system is that it gives students clear incentives to maintain a culture of academic honesty.25 When we consider the kind of cooperation we want to support, it is hard to see that grading on the basis of relative merit would discourage it. Worthy cooperative activities typically fall into one of two categories. Some of these activities involve students who have a very strong grasp of the content of the class tutoring students who lack this understanding. Here the stronger student has little reason to believe that the cooperative activity will catapult the weaker student’s performance above her own, and may well have reason to believe that teaching the material would improve her own performance relative to some other strong students. The other cooperative activities we want to encourage are those that mutually benefit students of roughly equal ability. In some cases, such cooperation may catapult one student’s performance above the other’s. But typically neither student will have reason to believe that it will be her partner rather than she who receives this benefit. Furthermore, both may have reason to believe that, whatever effects of cooperation will have on the quality of their work relative to their partner’s, cooperating will leave them better off than they would have otherwise been relative to other students in the class, and this itself will be sufficient reason to cooperate.

25 For empirical data that cheating is a growing problem, and hence that

these considerations count as important arguments in favor of the relative performance system, see Donald McCabe, et al. “Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research,” Ethics and Behavior. 2001; 11(3): 219-232

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D. The Objection from Academic Freedom

The last objection to be considered does not dispute any of the arguments against our current grading practices, nor does it dispute any of the arguments in favor of the relative performance system. Instead, the putative problem is that implementing this system would involve violating academic freedom. Professors, it might be claimed, should be free to decide how to conduct their classes, and this freedom is part of their implicit (and sometimes explicit) contract with the university or college that employs them. The nature and limits of academic freedom are another area of professorial ethics that deserves more philosophical attention than they have received. It should be clear at the outset, however, that academic freedom is not a license to do whatever one pleases as a teacher. Instead, it is a right to be free from certain limitations concerning the content of one’s speech in one’s capacity as a professor.26 But the relative performance system need not stifle the expression of any ideas. In an institution that adopts the system, professors should be not only free, but encouraged, to express their assessments of effort, attitude, intrinsic worthiness, and so on. The only requirement would be that they not use the institutional mechanism of course grades to do it. No one thinks that it is a violation of academic freedom to be prohibited from using an ‘A’ to represent how much money a student has given in return for it. Similarly, if an institution insists that its grades measure relative merit and nothing else, only confusion could lead professors to see this as a violation of their academic freedom.27 5. CONCLUSION

Throughout this discussion, grading has been approached as a matter of institutional policy and moral principle. Inconsistent grading at the

26 For an insightful account of academic freedom, see Alan Gewirth,

“Human Rights and Academic Freedom” in S. Cahn (ed.), Morality, Responsibility, and the University.

27 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit would agree. When the engineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign required instructors to grade on a prescribed curve, Professor Louis Wozniak filed suit, claiming that the policy violated his right to free speech. The Court dismissed this claim, writing: “No person has a fundamental right to teach … classes without following the university's grading rules. Quite the contrary, both a university and its students have powerful interests in the comparability of grades across sections, for grades are a university's stock in trade and class rank may be vital to a student's future. By insisting on a right to grade as he pleases, Wozniak devalues his students' right to grades that accurately reflect their achievements.” Wozniak v. Conry, 236 F.3d 888 (2001)

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institutional level runs afoul of our commitments to fairness, justice, and the avoidance of unnecessary harm; the relative performance system would allow us to live up to them. Ultimately, however, we should replace our current practices with the relative performance system not for the sake of abstract principles, but for the sake of individuals. Some of these individuals have been explicitly discussed here: those students who, because of our current practices, lose competitions they deserve to win, make ill-informed decisions, or do not receive positions they merit. But as is often the case with misguided policies, the personal costs extend well beyond these direct victims. As things now stand, professors are apt to fret about which grades to assign, being unsure of whether and how they ought to take effort, attitude, and the like into account; or whether they are expecting too much or too little of their students. Students understand that their grades express serious judgments about them, and are apt to be troubled about how deeply into their capacities or character these evaluations go, and about how, exactly, they measure up. The unease on both sides cannot be healthy for professor-student relations. When one issues important judgments about which one is unsure, it is natural to feel defensive in the presence of those that one judges. And when one is the subject of consequential but esoteric judgments, it is easy to resent both the judgment and the judge. By adopting the relative performance system, an institution would make grading far more straightforward for professors; it would make the limits and meaning of the evaluations grades expressed far more transparent to students; and it would thereby make this aspect of academic life far less fraught than it currently is. With respect to grading, then, many of us stand to gain if our colleges and universities do what morality requires.28

28 Thanks to Steve Scalet for comments on an earlier draft, and to John

Arthur for his suggestions and criticism throughout.

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