The Testament of the Grades

In Olin Café last week, a freshman girl pondered aloud her academic future: should she pursue her studies in Spanish or switch to international relations? “Double major,” her friend suggested, “you can work for the Spanish government.” Having overheard the conversation, a senior cautioned the wide-eyed newcomers against overextending themselves, as in his words, “The most important thing you can graduate with is a high GPA.” (My response was a girlfriend.)

Evidently, it’s not just civic knowledge that depreciates during our four years in Ithaca, but also youthful idealism.

In my last two columns, I’ve looked at root causes of collegiate disengagement — the fall of the core curriculum and the rise of technology. Day Hall’s announcement last week that median grades will soon be published on transcripts provided the impetus for this third installment in the trilogy of scholastic decline.

Whether it’s median, mean, mode or mediocre, the letter grade is an apple of discord for higher education; it’s hard to incentivize students to learn for the sake of learning when they’re graded on a curve. Thus, some schools have adopted pass/fail options, while others have done away with grading completely.

Not so at Cornell, where a decade-long fetish for the letter grade is now approaching its zenith. Handed down from Ezra Cornell on his deathbed to A.D. White, the canticle went something like this:

For in the beginning, there were letter grades. Now the University was formless and empty, and the Spirit of Competition was hovering over Cayuga’s waters.

Cornell saw all that it had made, and it was very good. And there was bad weather, and a snowstorm — the sixth (and every) day in Ithaca.

And so we have the Testament of the Grades, an infatuation at Cornell with the ABCs of education that publishes, republishes, contextualizes and advertises the sinuous curves of Cornell’s student body.

Until recently, the dark underbelly of the Testament was not apparent. However, thanks to a study published in the Social Science Research Network last month by three Cornell professors, “Quest for Knowledge and Pursuit of Grades: Information, Course Selection and Grade Inflation,” we now have a comprehensive report available on the fallout from median grade reports.

Not surprisingly, median grade reports induce all kinds of anti-intellectual and downright backward practices. According to the study, since 1996, students have used the reports to sign up for more leniently graded courses, driving up grade inflation and discouraging students from selecting classes based on interest. The ironic twist is that by publishing median grades, the Administration has devalued the letter grade itself, having fallen on its own sword of grade inflation.

As the study concludes unambiguously, the “pursuit of grades compromises the quest for knowledge.”

So Cornell’s big, fantastic solution to this problem? Publish the median grades more widely, for all to behold! Proponents of the new proposal see it as an antidotal bookend to the 1996 initiative, holding that students will now enroll in tougher classes; for isn’t a B+ in a C+ median class kind of like an A?

Well, no. This “solution” misses the point on many counts. As the aforementioned senior suggested, “It’s about the GPA, stupid.” To assume that students will now enroll in Math 191: Calculus for Engineers, with a C+ median grade, or Animal Science 341: Biology of Lactation, with a B– median, instead of the A– average Physics of the Heavens and Earth is naïve; any way you cut it, a low grade brings down the all-important aggregate GPA.

Another problem remains unaddressed in the new system in that students will still pick majors based on grading reputation, and not prestige or interest. For instance, many students seem to prefer an A in an applied economics and management class to a B in an economics course, even if the latter is more intellectually-driven and reputably more difficult. As the Cornell study worries, “Departments vary in their grading practices, which may result in skewed enrollment into the leniently graded ones.”

As a letter in yesterday’s Sun explains, fairly difficult engineering classes might have median grades in the B-range, while advanced classes — with more advanced students — will often have an A-range median grade; with published median grades, the implication is that the harder course was “easier,” when it’s just the opposite.

An analysis in the Journal of Economic Perspectives explained that uneven grading in introductory courses across disciplines also determines choice of major for freshmen: “If the math department [at Williams College] adopted in its introductory course the English 101 grading distribution, our simulation indicated an 80.2 percent increase in the number of students taking at least one additional math course!”

For all of these reasons, and probably many more, public access to median grades runs counter to an engaged and intellectual student body; rather than marrying ourselves further to the system, we should file immediately for divorce (as our 10-year commitment seems to preclude an annulment). Students will come out of this social experiment with an even more calculating and defeatist approach to learning than they had before. Success is no longer defined by an A or a B, but by a skewed system that considers an employer’s inaccurate perception of everyone else’s As and Bs.

In that vein, I spoke to my freshman friend the other day. Having scored below the average on her first International Relations prelim, she’s reconsidering that government major.

Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbfishman@cornellsun.com [1]. Agree to Disagree appears Tuesdays.