Standard grading system would put students with higher-level classes at disadvantage
I write in regards to the Student Government grading scale initiative and the accompanying editorial in the Friday Nov. 2 edition of The Gamecock.
Consider two students taking different sections of the same course. One section awards credit for attendance/participation, leaves out a hard exam question, is more lenient on partial credit, allows extra credit, grades homework only for the attempt and not correctness and allows replacing the lowest exam with the grade on the final if it is better. The other section doesn’t. To make the 90, 80, 70 or 60 mean the same thing, wouldn’t one need to force the entire faculty to use the same classroom policies and jointly make and grade all exams and homework?
Also consider two students taking different courses in the same department. One student is taking MATH 111 and the other is taking MATH 554. How does making a 90 on a MATH 554 exam mean the same as a 90 on a MATH 111 exam? Especially considering MATH 554 students must have already earned decent grades in multiple prerequisites.
Expanding this, consider two students who earned a 4.0 in their first semester. One took BIOL 101, CHEM 101, ENGL 101 and MATH 111. The other took BIOL 250, CHEM 333, ENGL 462, and MATH 241. If “[a] 4.0 GPA should mean the same thing for everyone,” should both of these students expect to be treated the same for university academic awards and be found equally desirable for internships?
The only way going to a mandatory scale reflects student achievement even slightly more fairly is if every professor is forced to change their classroom policies substantially and cede individual control over classroom evaluation.
Even then, it is only an illusion unless all students are forced to take course loads of similar difficulty -— however that is measured. But at least students would save a bit of the time by not having to read the grading sections of their courses’ syllabuses.