Two years after ridiculous numbers of Harvard University students graduated from the university with honors, sparking heated discussions about grade inflation, Boston University’s graduating seniors will be the first to feel BU’s effort to combat the issue smartly. The Latin honors system, which used to be based solely on grade point averages, will now be based on each student’s rank within his or her school’s graduating class, yielding a constant percentage of recognized students every year while increasing the honor’s significance.
This new approach is a huge step forward in the effort to combat grade inflation and the differing standards of BU’s 11 undergraduate schools. Students often complain about BU colleges’ efforts to deflate what university officials have called inflated grades, and the new system will take that problem into account. Instead of relying on the validity of letter grades in wildly different subjects, the new system will provide awards by ranking students against other students who take classes of fairly similar difficulty during their four years of college. The administration should be commended for addressing grade problems and attempting to solve them fairly.
Other efforts to combat grade inflation and make honors meaningful are flawed because of the nature of grading and different subjects. The flexible nature of grading itself makes it impossible to make an A in one class the same as an A in another.
Students enrolled in the different colleges at BU are often graded on different things and in different ways. The College of Engineering doesn’t rely on essay exams to evaluate students – nor should it. And because students are graded in different ways, their final GPAs often reflect the differences – it is well known that students in ENG, Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and the School of Management work harder and are graded more strictly than those in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Communication because of the nature of the subjects.
By adjusting the system so that each student is compared to students in his or her college, the awards will be given out on a more fair and consistent basis. Now when a student graduates from BU, the specific college he or she attended will not determine whether or not he or she received the Latin honors they deserve. Latin honors can be extremely important and play a deciding role in a students future. Graduate schools and employers often make significant decisions based on such aspects of a student’s rsum.
The point of a grading system is to judge one student’s work against another’s. The new system will allow that intent to flourish on a more consistent basis and students will be rewarded as a result. Administrators made the right decision in changing the Latin honors policy and students will benefit as a result.