n I hope that the Student Union’s initiative on “grade deflation” will include not only student perceptions about grading trends but also actual statistics and school policies. Grade distributions for the College of Arts and Sciences in fact show mild grade inflation over the past 30 years, with the percentage of A’s rising from 28.3 percent in 1972-73 to 29.4 percent in 2003-04 and of B’s from 46.4 percent to 49.3 percent, while the percentage of C’s fell from 20.8 to 18 percent, of D’s from 3.1 percent to 2 percent and of F’s from 1.4 to 1.2 percent. The CAS guidelines on grading contain no official or unofficial policy on deflation. We encourage our faculty to use all five available grades as appropriate to each course and its students. When most or all students in a course receive A’s and B’s, we work with the instructor to see whether the course is insufficiently challenging or the grading insufficiently rigorous.
We also regularly provide faculty with the overall GPA of the students in their courses, so that they can see how their own grades for these students measure up. The CAS goal is to keep our curriculum challenging for students of ever-increasing academic ability, and to reserve A’s and B’s for truly excellent performance.
Jeffrey Henderson Dean College of Arts and Sciences
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