At the university senate meeting Monday night, members considered a maximum department grade point average (GPA) in order to standardize grading practices atMiami University.
The maximum GPA, which was part of a set of recommendations to decrease grade inflation presented by the grading practices committee, would set the highest GPA a student could earn in a class - and this maximum would vary across departments.
The grading practices committee, appointed by Provost Jeffrey Herbst to examine issues of undergraduate grade inflation, presented their final recommendations to university senate Monday after finding large variation in the average GPAs earned by students in different divisions at Miami and from different levels of faculty.
Across departments, the committee found that the variation in GPAs earned by students ranged from 2.56 in the department of economics to 3.74 in educational leadership.
The report highlights this discrepancy as a problem, and notes that grades lose their meaning if they are not consistent across departments and faculty members.
The report questioned what grades mean are if a large percentage of students in one department's courses routinely get A's, and students in another department receive lower grades.
The maximum department GPA recommendation was created in an attempt to combat this problem.
Both the committee and Herbst said this maximum would only be created after university-wide discussion, and Herbst said he wants to look into whether or not such discussion will result in a useful outcome before devoting a large amount of time to the effort.
The committee, which initially presented these recommendations to Herbst in June 2006, fielded comments and questions from the senate to increase university-wide input on the issue.
The cross-divisional committee came up with a total of four main recommendations, including that the average GPA for course sections should be reported along with a student's actual grade on degree audit reporting system (DARS) Web and transcripts.
"We want people to see a grade in context," said committee member Jim Kiper, professor and associate dean in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
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Committee chair Michael Pechan said this would allow potential employees or graduate schools to have such context. Saying, for example, that a student with a 3.0 in a class where the average is a 2.5 is a more attractive candidate than a student who got a 3.0 in a class where the average was a 3.9.
Herbst said the addition of this information to DARS would be more for the benefit of students to better understand grade distributions and would probably be put into effect quickly. In contrast, Herbst said the decision to include the averages on transcripts would be made aftermore discussion.
"We'll obviously engage in discussion with students before making that decision," Herbst said.
When looking at the variation in grading between different types of faculty, the committee found that full-time faculty are generally consistent in their grading, but graduate students who are responsible for grading and part-time instructors often give out better grades than full-time faculty in their department.
"We did not find a large difference across (tenure versus non-tenure) categories," Pechan said.
According to data provided in the report, graduate students gave out grades deemed "considerably higher" than other instructor types. (See graph)
The committee's recommended action to combat this problem is for departments to make visiting faculty and graduate students aware of the expected grading practices and hold them responsible for following the department's standards.
"We've pretty much put that (responsibility) at the department level," Pechan said.
Other recommendations included the consideration of average GPAs in annual department and program reviews, but not to require the reporting of these averages by faculty for consideration in promotion and tenure decisions.
Herbst also expressed his agreement with a recommendation to base university honors, such as cum laude status, on a normalizing formula rather than a set GPA. In other words, instead of needing to meet a certain minimum GPA to receive those honors, a student would need to be within a certain percentage at the top of the class regardless of their GPA.
The committee recommended in the report that these steps be implemented in fall of 2007, but Herbst expressed that he will seek more university input before moving forward with many of the recommendations.
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