In recent years, colleges and universities across the nation have been fighting an ongoing battle with grade inflation -- a battle which the majority of schools, Penn included, seem to be losing.
Grade inflation "is a matter that all universities struggle with, particularly elite universities," College of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell said. "One account for this is that bright, motivated students tend to get A's. On the other hand ... they also expect to get A's."
Kent Peterman, director of academic affairs in the College, has been tracking trends in grades throughout the College for many years.
Peterman explained that the mean grade in the College "does seem to be creeping up very, very slightly every year." The mean for the 2001-2002 academic year was a 3.3, according to Peterman -- a 0.1 increase from 1992.
"There's no year in which that number went down, but there are some years when it didn't change," Peterman said, adding that at one point, the average grade was a C, not a B-plus as it is now.
Grade compression, a second phenomenon that goes hand in hand with grade inflation, has also swept Penn in recent decades, according to Peterman.
"The range of grades that are assigned to people gets smaller and smaller," he said. "If you don't use the F, and you don't use the D, either, and as is happening in some classes and some departments, you don't really use the C anymore, either ... that's not much of a range."
This small range of grades results in a very small difference in grade distributions and can have dire consequences, according to Peterman.
"What it might mean is that instructors are not making discrimination and giving feedback to students about the quality of their work," Peterman said. "Everyone's above average."
"It seems that educationally, that's the real problem," he said. "If students are not getting honest and accurate feedback about the quality of their academic work, that's a disservice to them educationally."
But such administrative woes are far from limited to the University.
"It's not just a Penn phenomenon," Peterman said. "We've had a number of discussions over the past decade or so with the Ivy group of universities about grade inflation. The patterns we see at Penn are virtually identical to the patterns that you see at our peer institutions."
One difference between Penn and some of its peers, though, is that two other Ivy League schools have chosen to tackle the issue of grade inflation directly.
Ten years ago, Columbia University implemented a new policy. At that time, the registrar began printing the number of A's and A-minuses given in the class as a whole alongside the students' individual grades on every transcript.
In a similar effort, Dartmouth College began including median course grades on students' transcripts in 1994.
"There have been several proposals over the years for us to do that here," Peterman said, adding that "there was a time when I thought we should actually go in that direction."
Now, however, Peterman said that such a new policy may not work well if implemented at Penn.
"Students already are highly focused on grades ... to the extent that it can often stand in the way of learning," he said. "As much as I can sometimes get concerned about inflation and grade compression ... the Dartmouth/Columbia solution does have the effect of calling even more attention to grades, which would make it an even more competitive environment than we have right now."
But while Penn has no intentions of instituting such stringent policies, administrators do closely monitor grade distributions throughout the College in an attempt to curb grade inflation.
"Being very conservative about it ... if the mean grade [for a class] is a 3.6 or higher and it's a large class, it just sends up a red flag," Peterman said. "That doesn't mean that it can't be explained -- maybe it's quite appropriate in that class -- but it's an indicator that maybe we should look at that."
In these cases, according to Bushnell, such anomalies in grading are brought to the attention of the undergraduate department chair, who then may speak to the professor if he or she feels it is necessary.
