Fabio Rojas over at orgtheory.net has a post about grade inflation in which he lists five possible options to curb grade inflation:
- A curve. The top 10% get As, the next 20% get Bs, etc.
- A fixed bar. There is a pre-determined level of skill that get’s you the high grade.
- Pass/no pass. We abolish the idea of grades and just work with a “you get it or you don’t” system.
- Contingent. The instructor decides the grades based on the merits and skills of each batch of students.
- A budget. Instructors don’t have to give A’s, but all A’s are capped at 10% of the course.
At the Sanford School, we have adopted a mixture of several of the options above: each course category — determined by the course number and by whether a course is a core course — has a target mean grade.
For example, both my 200-level seminars have a target mean grade of 3.4, i.e., slightly above a B+, but my core 100-level course has a target of 3.2. How to arrive at these mean course grades is entirely up to the instructor’s discretion.
How is this enforceable? Each year we receive a memo from the Director of Undergraduate Studies informing us of these targets. The memo also reminds us that whether we stick to these targets will be taken into account by tenure and promotion committees for tenure-track faculty and at contract renewal time for non-tenure-track faculty.
The system seems to work well. In my syllabi, I inform my students of the target mean and explain that there has to be a distribution, if only to set up incentives for them to learn the material.
As someone who has done a good amount of work, both theoretical and empirical, on contracts, I am always impressed by the effectiveness of the rank-order tournaments we run in our classes.