New Grading Scale Proposal

What are two seeming constants in the debates about education? Assessment and grade/gpa inflation. As a student I find the whole debate very deeply interesting for personal reasons. Intersting enough to put together the following rough sketch of what I would impliment if I got to pick how grades where assigned.

As a student, I want my grades to measure how capable I am with the material. Sadly, that's pretty hard to condense into one of five letters.

Thinking like an admissions officer, I would want grades to transparently reflect performance and provide a common measure across applicants from different backgrounds.

So what's wrong with the tried and true A-B-C-D-F system? For one, it condenses everything about performance into a single value thus hiding HUGE amounts of potentially useful information like class size, class difficulty, etc. Secondly, it's easy to inflate even in the face of all but the most draconian standards.

It is my belief we can alleviate the second by addressing the first.

Rather than a simple letter grade (or any other single number) the final report for a class should look like this:

• Raw Percentage
• Five number summary (min, Q4, Median, Q2, max) for the class
  
• Five number summary across all classes
• Class Size
• Some form of objective letter grade
• Subjective letter grade/Overall letter grade
• Prof's comments (?)
  

In short, include a basic set of summary statistics with the overall letter grade. The first four items allow anyone looking at the transcript to gage things like how well the student did relative to their peers in the class and against everyone who took the class (which should average out differences across sections). Not perfect, but being trapped in a harder than normal section will show up (as will easier than normal sections and grade inflation). The objective letter grade might be as simple as which quintile the student's raw score falls into, and the overall letter grade and perhaps some simple comment codes would help take into account things like effort, etc.