Alessandro van den Brink | Beating the curve

Small Talk | What Penn can do to decrease the role of grades in scheduling

By Alessandro van den Brink 12/07/15 1:21am

In about a month or so, we Penn students will most likely have forgotten all the material we crammed for finals and instead be entirely focused on one thing: GPA.

It’s easy to say that GPA shouldn’t define who we are as individuals and doesn’t have the greatest effect on our future, but to a certain degree, the grades on our transcripts matter, whether we like it or not. In order to enter a specific course, internally transfer or receive acceptance to a highly selective study abroad program, GPA can be a deciding factor. In many cases, we might even alter our Penn experience in response to that reality.

At the beginning of this semester, The Daily Pennsylvanian published an article about the most popular classes at Penn, with “Victimology” being a selection, partially due to the requirement it fulfills and its reputation for being an easy class. One of my teaching assistants was a bit shocked to hear during a recitation that Penn students rely heavily on Penn Course Review to assess the difficulty of courses, but the administration must realize that certain classes have notorious reputations as “GPA boosters.”

This is not inherently a problem, since professors of classes that are known for being requirement-fillers understand that students taking the courses may not be incredibly passionate and thus may decide to reduce the difficulty level of the course. But a problem arises when professors implement grading systems that are inconsistent with other professors.

For example, there are certain classes where the median grade is thought to be a B or B-plus, with a bell-curve model deciding the A-range grades and the Cs and Ds. Yet there are also classes in which only a few select students receive A grades while the majority of the class will receive B- or C-level grades.

Neither of these models is necessarily better, especially because it is dependent on the subject, but professors and graders must understand the effect that a grading system has on students taking the class and even on students who may be interested in the class. A student might be interested in a particular course, only to decline to take it simply because it might negatively affect his or her GPA.

With the ease of information about courses thanks to Penn Course Review and word of mouth, it becomes very easy to figure out whether a course is “worth it” based on a calculation of interest and potential grade. There are certainly many students who are willing to lower their GPA slightly in order to take what they want, and for certain fields, GPA simply tends to be lower or higher.

The average GPA, according to data from 13 years ago, for a humanities student is 3.50 while the average GPA for a natural sciences student is 3.07. Granted, the information is a bit dated, but most students at Penn would probably say that it is still relevant.

This doesn’t change the fact, though, that there shouldn’t be so much variability simply based on what will give students a higher GPA, which many students believe will lead to a better future and a more promising job. In an ideal college system, a student would feel that whatever course he or she decides to enroll in would give him or her an equal chance at getting a (comparatively) good or bad grade. Factors such as teacher philosophies toward grading should not make a difference both in the selection of courses that students want to take and in generally skewing GPAs in a certain direction.

What Penn needs to do is decide on a uniform grading system and stick to it. It doesn’t matter if that rubric establishes a median grade of a B or an A-minus. Creating this precedent can allow students to pursue subjects outside of their comfort zone without compromising their GPA or having to use pass/fail methods to do so. It doesn’t matter how the regulation operates, as long as it’s consistent enough to free students from the constraints of scheduling based on grades.

ALESSANDRO VAN DEN BRINK is a College sophomore from New York, studying economics. His email address is alevan@sas.upenn.edu. "Small Talk" appears every other Saturday.

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