Faculty still debating grades

Professor Robert Porter understands grading.

“I know how to grade,” Porter, a professor in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, told the Faculty Council on Friday. “And I think all of you know how to grade too.”

But how Porter grades might be different from how a chemistry professor grades. It might even be different from how members of his own department grade.

And that disconnect frustrated the council as it tried to reach a consensus about what to do about address grade inflation at UNC, even after about an hour of deliberation.

“People come in bringing in the perspective of where they’re from,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “The natural sciences don’t want grades to be inflated. The humanities don’t want to be told how to grade.”

In fact, despite a comprehensive report that illustrated dramatic grading trends at UNC — including the fact that 82 percent of all grades given out at UNC are A’s or B’s — many members of the council weren’t even sure that anything should be done.

Faculty members at UNC have been having these talks for years with little agreement. Committees have been discussing the trend since at least 1976.

Friday’s discussion and the lack of a clear policy direction illustrated a problem that has been apparent from the start — the lack of consensus about what grades should represent.

Even within different departments, faculty members said there wasn’t a consistent standard for what to do.

“There was never any department chair who took me in and said, ‘This is how we grade,’” said Laurie Maffly-Kipp, a religious studies professor. “When I asked, I couldn’t get a straight answer from anybody.

“When new faculty get here, they get a tour of campus and learn about all these things. It seems to me obvious that we would do the same thing when it came to grading.”

Throughout the talk, professors’ focus remained on students culpability in receiving grades, not professors’ responsibility in assigning them, which frustrated student leaders.

Professors also brought up the idea that the quality of students attending UNC has increased over time, and that could correspond to the increase in grade.

Members of the council also brought in numerous other factors that could affect grading. They discussed graduate student grading, an erosion of standards at UNC and the decision to push back the date to drop classes.

At the end of the meeting, the council approved a resolution to have the educational policy commission bring a specific policy proposal back before the council in April.

But they passed the resolution without a consensus for which direction to send the committee in, something the committee will have to determine on its own.

A few things became clear during Friday’s discussion. Faculty members don’t want to go the way of Princeton University and implement a quota on how many of each letter grade can be given out.

They also said they don’t want to follow the law school’s method and rank students.

What they want, many stressed, is more talking. They want a broader understanding of what grades mean and how each department distributes grades. Faculty members also want to begin having a broader talk with other universities so UNC’s actions don’t work against its students.

And that, the meeting showed, could be difficult.

Grades are used as an assessment of student understanding, a measure of comparison between students and a method of feedback for how students can improve. And faculty members said it is difficult — maybe impossible — for all three of these goals to be represented by the same mark.

“How can we be having this conversation without understanding the step before that,” said Steve Reznick, a psychology professor. “What do grades represent at UNC?”

After the meeting, Thorp said talks are going to continue for a while and will remain a faculty issue for now.

“I’m not any time soon about to mandate a method of grading,” he said. “We’ll watch and see what happens at Princeton.”



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.