Curbing grade inflation isn’t as simple as slapping class rank on student transcripts, University of Colorado regents and chancellors said Wednesday.
Instead, CU should look more broadly at policies to ensure that professors are packing enough rigor into courses, they said.
University leaders were weighing in on a proposal from president Hank Brown to add class rank, grade-point-average percentile or the average course grade to transcripts, a change Brown said would give employers and graduate schools a better “understanding of what the grades mean.”
At the least, CU should allow students to find out their class rank, Brown said.
Regent Tom Lucero said he did not want the university to “miss a real opportunity to talk about a much-deeper” issue.” He said he is “intrigued” by a grade-quota system at Princeton University, where faculty can give no more than 35 percent of students A’s.
Whether grade inflation is a problem is a national debate. A U.S. Department of Education study found that the average college grade-point average climbed from 2.66 to 2.74 during a 10-year period.
At CU-Boulder, the average grade-point average crept from 2.87 in 1993 to 2.99 in 2004. At the Colorado Springs campus, it increased from 2.93 to 3.0, and in Denver, from 2.97 to 2.98.
Regents said they want faculty and student opinions before they vote on any policy changes.
Administrators also must consider that the mission of universities has evolved, Boulder chancellor Bud Peterson said.
“Thirty years ago, institutions used to measure their quality by the number of students they flunked out,” he said. “We don’t do that anymore.”
Boulder provost Phil DiStefano favors putting the average course grade on transcripts, saying that kind of transparency would cause faculty to correct grade inflation on their own.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
