While the College of Arts and Sciences is keeping an anxious eye on the number of A's its professors hand out each semester, the University's other undergraduate schools are unconcerned.
Officials at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Nursing and the Wharton School say they see little evidence of an unwarranted rise in the grades awarded to their students, and the numbers they provide seem to verify this assessment.
Barbara Kahn, the vice dean and director of Wharton's undergraduate school, said that a task force found that A's, A-minuses and A-pluses consistently make up about 25 to 30 percent of all grades received by students in Wharton classes.
This is a significantly lower percentage than in the College, where grades A-minus and up accounted for 54 percent of total grades during the 2004-2005 academic year.
Similarly, a mere quarter of Engineering undergraduates have a GPA higher than 3.4.
The Nursing School does not keep statistics on the grades or averages of its students, but Dean Afaf Meleis said that in her 40 years of teaching, grade inflation "just has not been an issue in a field such as nursing."
Norm Badler, the associate dean of Engineering, cited the quantitative nature of many of the classes at the Engineering School, where grading has little room for interpretation, as a potential reason for the paucity of evidence of grade inflation in that school.
Engineering "permits more formal methods of evaluation [such as] homework, problem sets, quizzes, exams and projects," Badler said. "This tends to differentiate student performance in class and hence spread out grades."
Meleis said that classes in the Nursing School, too, have few ways in which grades can be artificially inflated because, in order to receive licenses, Nursing students must pass tests graded by independent evaluators.
"Nursing is a profession, which means there are certain competencies that [students] must achieve before they sit for the exam," Meleis said. "My conviction is that students, when they graduate, are able to function in life-and-death situations, and grade inflation is just not congruous with this."
Kahn said that while she could not point to a specific reason for Wharton's lack of inflation, grade distributions have changed little over the last 10 years or so.
"Periodically, we run some analyses across our sections," Kahn said. Grade inflation "is not an issue that's particularly hit our radar at this point."
Wharton students, however, do have ideas as to why their classmates tend to receive fewer A's than College students.
Chan Ahn, a junior in Wharton and the College, believes that the curves that many Wharton professors enforce in their classes make it harder to gets A's.
"Generally speaking, every Wharton class does curve," Ahn said. "Some classes have easier curves than others. It depends on the professor."
Wharton sophomore Kyle Goldman said that while he does not necessarily find Wharton classes to be more challenging than their College counterparts, he finds Wharton professors to be stingier with their grades.
In Wharton classes, "they cut the number of people who get A's," Goldman said.
