View the printed version of this Page 3 Feature.
A wide-eyed freshman arrives at Penn with dreams of stethoscopes and scrubs dancing in his head.
He enrolls in the typical pre-med introductory science classes and it is in the vast lecture halls of the Chemistry Building that he realizes his true destiny might not include medical school.
He aced his science classes in high school, but now he is getting Ds in biology and chemistry. He has never before teetered on the edge of failure.
Maybe he'll be an English major.
Within the College of Arts and Sciences, the numbers show that average grades given in undergraduate natural science classes are much lower than average grades in the humanities -- perhaps leading a freshman would-be doctor to rethink his intended academic pursuits.
Though College officials declined to provide data on all academic departments, College Dean Richard Beeman and members of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education said the grades ranged from about 2.9 in biology to 3.7 in Spanish as of last school year.
By discipline, during the 2000-2001 academic year, the average overall class grade was 3.48 in the humanities, 3.3 in the social sciences and 3.05 in the natural sciences.
According to Beeman, these differences may rest in part on how grades are determined across disciplines.
"I think it is true that the sciences tend to examine students quantitatively and it is sometimes possible to make a clearer grading distinction when you are dealing with quantitative data," Beeman said. "I think that's one possibility, [but] that's an insufficient explanation."
Beeman said some of the differences may be attributable to the "academic cultures" of particular disciplines, as grades in the disciplines are remarkably similar at Penn and its peer institutions.
Penn and the other Ivy League schools have compared grades across departments and have found a great deal of consistency from institution to institution, so trends in grading seem to operate across the board.
Psychology Professor and Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairman David Williams maintains that the humanities value different student attributes than the sciences.
"The sciences are cumulative and build on an agreed-upon factual base," Williams said. "The humanities look for soul and the human spirit, while the sciences look for intellectual excellence. [The] humanities [are] oriented more toward a sense of community and the sciences work toward a sense of individual achievement."
These cultural differences can cause corresponding differences in how -- and why -- students are graded.
English Department Associate Chairman James English said he feels grades in introductory science classes "serve a somewhat different function" than grades in departments like his, effectively acting as "filtering classes to shake out the students who aren't going to end up pursuing careers in medicine or other science-intensive fields."
Beeman added that introductory science classes do cause some students to give up on majoring in biology or chemistry but denied that there is any conscious effort to use these classes to separate the future doctors from those who just won't cut it.
"I categorically reject the notion that our intro science courses are designed to 'weed out' weaker students but I do think those courses have the effect of causing some students to reevaluate their intentions to major in science," Beeman said.
Administrators emphasized that differences in grading shrink when class size is factored into the equation because grades in large classes are consistently lower than grades in small classes.
For instance, looking only at classes with 75 or more students, the mean grade is 3.33 in the humanities, 3.23 in the social sciences and 2.98 in the natural sciences. Considering just classes with fewer than 25 students, the mean is 3.57 for the humanities, 3.52 in the social sciences and 3.46 in the hard sciences.
Peterman said this difference is natural because small classes tend to attract experienced students.
"A seminar... is a small group of students, normally prepared through taking introductory courses and intermediate level courses... you can imagine they're [working] at a very high level and all deserving to get high grades," he said.
And Political Science Chairman Jack Nagel said it is natural that students in small classes get higher grades because they tend to have a real interest in the subject.
"By the time they're seniors and juniors, students have started to sort themselves out into the areas they like and are best at," Nagel said.
Though grades are affected by class size, the differences are too large to be explained away entirely by how many students are enrolled in a given course.
When Psychology Professor Robert Rescorla was dean of the College in the mid-90s, he also conducted a study of mean grades in classes and he found that the numbers for the natural sciences were almost a half point lower than those for humanities -- after he factored out class size.
Harvard Professor Henry Rosovsky, who co-authored a report on grade inflation for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, said the relatively low grades handed out by science departments serve to stem what he considers rampant inflation.
"A lot of [science] exams are much more objective, are problems, and once you grade problems [it] gives you a much less ambiguous result and unless they really dumb down the material that's going to be a natural way of holding the line," Rosovsky said.
But some academics, including Chemistry Department Chairman Hai-Lung Dai, worry that grade differentials are driving too many students away from the sciences.
"There is a problem of the discrepancy between the grade distributions of science classes and non-science classes, because if non-science classes are giving higher grades and science classes are giving lower grades, then we are essentially telling students that you are better at doing these non-science subjects," Dai said.
"We are discouraging students from pursuing science and tech-related careers."
But Dai does not feel the problem lies with his department and he defended the grading practices of Penn's science departments, stressing that all grades are relative.
"My question is, what is a higher GPA, what is a lower GPA?" Dai asked. "Are we saying that a student with a 3.0 is not a good student? We recognize that all the students coming to Penn are... all good students. So why would a 3.0 be viewed as bad?"
However, Dai added that, if everyone in a class does extremely well, it becomes impossible to make meaningful distinctions between students.
"If the entire class all gets As, do we still have a significance about the grades?" Dai asked. "The Penn transcript becomes useless."
Though grades given out in natural science classes are relatively low, the GPAs of students in those majors at graduation are far from it. Last school year, the average GPA of biology majors was 3.40, slightly above the College mean of 3.38. The average GPA was even higher for chemistry majors -- 3.43.
Beeman said he believes this may indicate that science departments give out their lower grades in introductory classes, an idea that fits with the figures on grading in classes of different sizes.
SCUE Treasurer Katherine Sledge said she thinks students in majors which give out relatively low grades might also tend to consciously compensate for their ailing GPAs by taking easy classes outside their home departments.
"Obviously if you're taking [biology classes where the average GPA is 2.9] you're going to try to raise it somewhere else," Sledge said. "You don't take all of your classes in your major."
Perhaps this fact may account for some of the other surprising averages, like a 3.24 mean GPA for last year's graduating political science majors and a 3.25 for sociology majors.
Nagel said political science majors have lower GPAs because political science is one of Penn's most popular majors, attracting a wide variety of students.
"If you have more students in a major, you're going to get less of the self-selected, really enthusiastic [students who are] really good in that particular small field but more of a cross-section, so that may be part of it," Nagel said.
SCUE Chairman Jacob Cytryn said he sees the lack of significant or predictable variation in average GPAs as an achievement on Penn's part.
"The average students across all majors are really getting roughly the same grades -- something the University should be commended on because no one is running away with a GPA, and that's a good thing," Cytryn said.
Grade inflation: an Ivy league solution or a disservice?
A phenomenal rise in grade-point averages at elite institutions has intrigued professors and pundits alike in recent years, spawning headlines like "When is an A Not an A?" and "To B or Not to B?"
Many maintain that the trend is due to grade inflation, which a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences defines as "an upward shift in the grade point average of students without a corresponding increase in student achievement."
Though some academics see no problems with grades that keep rising and rising, others feel grade inflation does a disservice to students and makes it difficult for graduate school admissions committees and employers to get an accurate read.
"The problem is that, first of all, it denies information to students which they are entitled to and should have and need," said Harvard Professor Henry Rosovsky, who co-authored the AAAS report.
But English Department Associate Chairman James English said grades still act to differentiate students, no matter how inflated or compressed the actual numbers are.
You "don't need Ds and Fs, you don't need a 2.5 GPA to tell you that you're looking at a poor student," English said. "A student who has a B-minus is a poor student today."
And Rutgers Political Science Professor Ross Baker, a Penn alumnus, said he does not feel grade inflation is a problem since it tends to take place at very selective schools where much of the student body is intelligent and hardworking.
"Once a student gets in, there's a strong presumption that the person belongs there," Baker said. "It would bother me more if schools that were less selective had grade inflation. Then it would raise the question of whether people are being trained at all."
Experts and Penn administrators have offered a variety of explanations for grade inflation.
In his report, Rosovsky reviewed -- and discounted -- several of these explanations.
The theories included professorial compassion for men on student deferment during the Vietnam War who needed certain grades to keep from being conscripted, watered down course content and the hypothesis that professors give higher grades to poorly prepared students admitted under affirmative action policies in order to keep them in school.
Rosovsky stressed that solutions to the problem of grade inflation must come from within individual universities.
"There is no national solution, there is no Ivy League solution. There has to be a solution institution by institution," he said.
A grade inflation solution at Penn may be a long time coming, though, because although administrators are worried about the trend, no concrete action has been taken to counteract the upward shift in grades.
According to College of Arts and Sciences Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman, the undergraduate department chairs have discussed grade inflation but have not come up with an official stance.
"The faculty in general were unwilling to take any corporate stand on grade inflation that would place Penn students at a competitive disadvantage with students from peer institutions," Peterman said.
And College Dean Richard Beeman said grade inflation, while a concern of his, is "not the most serious educational challenge that we face at Penn today. [It is] not one of my highest priorities."
Deputy Provost Peter Conn said he believes that the grade shift cannot be attributed entirely to inflation and that some is actually a result of better college students these days.
"I think they are brighter and more motivated," Conn said. "The level of competition and of preparation that many of our students go through before they get here is significantly improved."
The Daily Pennsylvanian is an independent, student-run newspaper. Please consider making a donation to support the coverage that shapes the University. Your generosity ensures a future of strong journalism at Penn.
DonatePlease note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.
