It’s finals week, and I’ve got half a dozen stacks of blue books spread about my office. If every one of my students takes a final, I will have 339 exams to read through by next Tuesday. I will have 339 final grades to assign.
At PCC, as at most California community colleges, we aren’t permitted to use “+” and “-” modifiers on final grades. Leaving aside the tiny percentage of incompletes, and the equally tiny number of students who take a course “Credit/No-Credit”, all of my students will receive an A,B,C, D, or F. That leaves me only three real passing grades (D is technically passing, but I give few Ds) from which to choose.
What’s maddening is, of course, that students don’t fall neatly into three discrete categories. This is especially true, I note, of the B students. (I give slightly more Cs than Bs, and far fewer As.) The student who just barely missed an A gets the identical grade as a student who just barely avoided a C. Because I can’t give a “B+” and a “B-”, two students who did very different work each end up receiving the exact same mark; each receives a 3.0 on the standard American 4.0 grade scale. And the problem is true with other grades as well; the student who just barely gets an A receives the same 4.0 as the rare gem of a student who did flawless work of the “A+” variety.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the state began to permit the community colleges to assign “+” and “-” grades. The college had to decide as a whole to offer the option to all of its instructors. The University of California system has offered the modifiers for decades, and I was thrilled when we heard we would have a shot at the option. To my amazement, my colleagues in the Academic Senate here at Pasadena City College voted overwhelmingly to reject the plus/minus option. They complained — as Jessica Valenti would say, “I shit you not” –that taking on the plus/minus option would increase faculty work-loads!
The Senate was also lobbied by our student government, who worried that the modifiers would be more likely to reduce student GPAs than to raise them. Our student body president at the time said, with extraordinary chutzpah, “A lot of my As were barely As. If I had A- grades instead of straight A grades, I’d have a lower GPA.” (On the 4.0 system, an A- would be a 3.7, a B+ a 3.3, a B a 3.0, a B- a 2.7, a C+ a 2.3, etcetera.) I protested that I might consider giving an A- to a student to whom I would otherwise give a B, largely because I didn’t think they’d done A level work, but might be deserving of a modified A. And the number of B+ grades given would also help balance out student GPAs. In practice, student GPAs wouldn’t change at all — they would simply be more reliable indicators of achievement, as faculty would have greater precision.
Alas, faculty laziness and resistance to change — combined with intense lobbying from a small group of students worried about the spectre of the A-minus grade — served to block the implementation of the modifier option at PCC. It’s made my job much harder, and my final grades much less fair. Because I have so few final grade options, and because my students turn in such a wide range of work, A “B” from me, frankly, means a wide range of things and describes a range of abilities. And that’s not right.
At my school (a large four-year college), we don’t have plusses or minuses either. Our dean (or some other honcho) reportedly told the faculty that he won’t accept any grading system that includes a C-. I take it the issue is that most courses require a C to count for your degree, and a C- throws a wrench into that? (It seems weird to me. I think of a C- as a variety of C.)
As a student, I have mixed feelings. I would work harder if there were plusses to be had. But I don’t mind not working harder, exactly.
Hello Hugo,
My university recently implemented this system, however with one (in my opinion) fault. Receiving an A+ still grants the same 4.0 points as an A. From my perspective, this means that I will now have to work harder to maintain my 4.0 GPA. For receiving 1 A, 1 A-, and 3 A+ grades, I will have less than a 4.0 GPA, despite the fact that I produced exceptional work in the majority of my classes in a particular semester. Naturally I can see this would have disadvantages: a student could take a very easy class in order to get an A+ to counteract an A- (or lower, naturally) in a harder class.
The solution I would propose (I like to call it the System of Unattainable Perfection, because to achieve all A+ grades would be nearly impossible) is that an A+ would be 4.0, an A 3.75, A- 3.5, B+ 3.25, B 3.0, B- 2.75, and so on. This stratifies the group of students at the highest end; in the current system, all students who achieve a 4.0, while they have the same score, may have different levels of actual ability and achievement. Of course this system wouldn’t exactly be compatible with a “standard” 4.0 scale, as the same achievement level would have a lower score, and at first glance look worse.
So, my question for you: could you please share your thoughts on this situation?
Just a note: I realize that the majority of people are not faced with this situation and that my asking reveals the privilege I have, in that I am actually taking the time to ask about the (poor, struggling) top few percent of students. If I truly had to struggle to get B’s or A’s, I imagine this would not be nearly as important to me.
At Berkeley, the A+ grade could appear on your transcript, but without anything beyond the 4.0 offered for the straight A. THe idea was that it was a “feather in the cap”, and a rare one, but with only intangible benefit.
As for the C-, it would be easy to bar its use and still have the other modifiers in place. It’s just absurd to have only three degrees of passing work, when it would be infinitely more accurate and fair to have, say, ten or more.
It’s not like it’s physics or something important, Hugo. You’re running an off-Broadway version of the Oprah show, so I think 4 or 5 grades are enough for a random selection.
At Madison we had AB and BC as the in between option. The AB being a 3.5 and the BC being a 2.5. Is was nice in that you did have something in the middle, but there was no distinction between the A- and the B+ (which I suppose would make grading less of a hassle). It does help to have a cushion so borderline doesn’t drop you all the way to a 3.0. No one ever got an A+ though. I thought in college such a thing didn’t exist.
Oh, I like the AB/BC option to allow for further precision. The A+ was both rare and controversial at Cal (and I never got one, but knew people who did).
At my original alma mater, an A+ was worth 4.33 points, an A- worth 3.67, and so on. I thought it was a good system.
For all its flaws, the US system in all its guises is surely to be preferred to the incomprehensible British marking system. But it’s certainly true that the B is the most ambiguous of grades.
Good luck with the marking in any case.
On a teaching discussion list I used to subscribe to, there was an argument about this question. Most of the people on the list (who tended toward the radical/lefty even for college professors) were against using +/- grades. (Well, most of them wanted to abolish grading altogether, but absent that option they’d take unadorned letter grades.) The argument they made — which never made much sense to me — was that because grading is so subjective, having more categories implied a false level of precision. I think the fuzziness of grading makes it *more* important to have more categories — the difference between an A and a B is too momentus a decision to make if you’re uncertain about a borderline case, but the difference between an A- and a B+ is less so.
I do think forcing me to use letters only would result in an increase in my students’ GPAs, because I would tend to err on the side of giving too high a grade when someone was hard to decide on. I’m just a softy like that.
… and just as I hit “post,” I realized that the lack of +/- options could also result in unjust sorts of bias in addition to mere inaccuracy. While I may be a softy in general, I can’t count out the possibility that my instinct would push me toward mercy more when I like a certain student for whatever reason (such as they come from a similar class/race/cultural/ideological background to mine).
Indeed, Stentor. One of the things I notice is that I tend to be very zealous about guarding the “sanctity of the A”. There’s no higher grade that can be given, so to bestow it on anyone who isn’t genuinely deserving spoils the work of those who really did earn it. On the other hand, I’m a much easier B and C. If I could give B+s and A-s I would, and students who otherwise get straight Bs would have a significant GPA boost.
At that granular a level, probably not. But since no one really cares about individual grades so much as the GPA, who cares? A student who consistently does A+ work will get his 4.0 average, while the student who just barely ekes out an A in your class is bound to just barely miss it in another.
At my original alma mater, an A+ was worth 4.33 points, an A- worth 3.67, and so on. I thought it was a good system.
It’s a good system for the hypercompetitive to distinguish themselves and fight over. Instead of a mere A, there’s the coveted A+. Hell, why not add A++?
I’m not really getting why an A is different than a B in terms of width. Isn’t a C average, B above average and A excellent?
Where I went to school…only a handful of people graduate with 4.0’s (2 for one year, for example, with 3000ish in the college). If you compare my GPA against someone who went to a school with grade inflation, it doesn’t look so good. But I’m proud of it, because you had to fight for good grades. We did have -’s and +’s though.
Mythago, it’s funny how the B ends up being the widest category. I have a stronger sense of what a C is and what an A is, whereas the B compartment just seems so much more flexible.
I think psychologically, there’s a sense that a “C” is in some sense a “disappointing grade” and an “A” rewards genuine excellence. It’s a sign of grade inflation that B has become so broad a category, no doubt.
My college has recently adopted the full +/- system. Before, there had been minus grades, no pluses, and an A was simply an A. It was rather confusing. The faculty and administration were pretty unanimous about this decision, but the student government fought tooth and nail about it. They used the same “it will make our grades lower” argument and invoked the GPA requirement for the state scholarship that a large number of the students were there on. I was reading all this and was a little embarrassed for two reasons.
First, as with the student you mentioned, it really means that students perceive this change as having to work harder to receive the grades they’re already getting. It’s the desire to get more while doing less, at any cost, that bothers me.
Second, all the arguments I read in the paper did not worry about the A being divided between A- and A. It was about the B- becoming a C+. Sigh.
It’s funny because the day they announced in the paper that the system had been passed was the day before Thanksgiving break, while half the school had already left. Sneaky.
Maybe now that the “A” is going to be more sacred, it will be that much more rewarding when I get one :-)
UW has the opposite problem. Every GPA tenth from .7 (D-) to 4.0 is a possible grade.
So while you’ve been lamenting the lack of precision, I’ve been staring at papers thinking “I’m pretty sure this deserves a B+ but is it a 3.2, 3.3 or 3.4?”
I now teach at a school with plusses and minuses and I think that’s the right amount of precision.
And Tam, what a bizarre objection your Dean had. It’s easy, just say C is lowest grade to count toward credit in majors and for requirements. Plenty of schools have that rule (UW set the cut-off at 2.0, so technically a 1.9, while a C, couldn’t count toward major credit).
Two grades I never gave on that system were 1.9 and 3.9. The former I considered a C, so I just called it a 2.0. The latter I figured at every other school, this student gets a 4.0, and “an A is an A” of something like that.
I think psychologically, there’s a sense that a “C” is in some sense a “disappointing grade” and an “A” rewards genuine excellence.
Which is the real problem, not the lack of pluses or minuses; with that mentality the B is still a very wide category, since a C+ is just “disappointing but you made the exta effort”.
The plus/minus system as implemented at many universities needs to be modified. I feel that A+s should be rewarded more than an A if A-s are penalized. Also I think it would be best for the majority of colleges and universities to pick the same grading system, whether it be traditional or plus/minus, so that no unintended advantages/disadvantages exist when employers or graduate schools examine student GPAs from several institutions.