The first phase of a plan to provide contextualized grading information for undergraduate classes at UNC was implemented this week — with the release of the first Instructor Grading Patterns reports.
Faculty members will now receive the reports each term in order to compare their grade distributions to the distributions of other faculty members within their department or across the schools.
Results of the reports are visible only to faculty members.
Andrew Perrin, a sociology professor and former chairman of the educational policy committee, which developed the plan, said the reports are the result of concerns over grade inflation and inequality.
“There was a really strong sense that both of those issues — grade inflation and grade inequality — were important and were threatening the validity of grading at UNC,” he said.
“We decided that the best way to approach that is through the process of transparency — what grades mean in their particular context and how different faculty instructors are grading.”
Chris Derickson in the registrar’s office said the ultimate stage of the plan is the implementation of contextualized transcripts, though he said there is no timeline for when that will begin.
Perrin said the contextualized transcripts and the grading patterns reports are both important in understanding UNC’s grading.
“I think that combination is kind of the one-two punch that should really provide some real transparency on the grading here,” he said.
