THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY
Faculty Senate/CFA Ad Hoc Committee on Grading in Tenure and Promotion
Recommendations on Grade Distributions and Best Practices in Grading
Committee Members: Lynn Bradley (Chemistry), Lisa Grega (Engineering), Rick
Kamber (Philosophy and Religion), Bozena Leven (Business), Elizabeth Mackie (Art),
Jacqueline Norris (Secondary Education), Felicia Jean Steele (English), Deborah
Thompson (Elementary Education)
Presented to Faculty Senate 12/1/2007
Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Grading and Grading Practices
Presented to Faculty Senate December 2007
Executive Summary
1. Our Charge was to investigate best practices in a) grading and b) interpreting grading
and to address the following concerns:
a. Grading: How can grading contribute to teaching effectiveness? What are the
connections between grades and student learning? How can The College help
individual instructors, departments, and schools to consider philosophy and
methods of effective grading? What are appropriate differences in grading among
different disciplines?
b. Interpreting grading: If grade distributions are to be a part of the reappointment,
tenure, and promotion processes, what policies and procedures will help those
involved in these processes to interpret candidates’ philosophy and methods of
grading, as well as the distribution of grades in courses? How will grade
distributions be used in evaluating candidates for tenure and promotion?
2. Our committee reviewed literature on grading, grade distribution, and best practices in
grading, and reviewed peer institutions’ personnel policies for discussions of grade data.
3. Our review of the literature led us to an understanding that “grades, particularly final
course grades as isolated artifacts, are not particularly useful …[i]f the criteria, standards,
and contexts for a grade are not known to external audiences” (Walvoord and Anderson
4).
4. Moreover, despite efforts at some institutions to mandate grade distributions,
particularly by high-profile neighbors in New Jersey, the committee believes that an
attempt to mandate specific grade distributions in schools and departments at The College
would abridge academic freedom.
5. The committee benefited immeasurably from disciplinary diversity and recognizes that
different methods of assessment (for example, quantitative and qualitative, or objective
and performative) may produce different grade correlates and result in different grade
distributions. Most importantly, the committee agrees that our community must address
our assumptions about the comparative validity of various assessment measures across
The College.
Revised draft as September 10, 2008
Page 2 of 8
6. The committee recommends the following:
 Grade distributions (and other potentially relevant grading data) may be included
in tenure and promotions dossiers by candidates, but only once departments and
programs have reflected upon their own grading practices and grade distributions.
 Departments and programs should provide materials equivalent to the disciplinary
Standards for Scholarship,” so that grades are not treated as “isolated artifacts.’
 If disciplinary standards for grading and grade distributions exist, grade data may
be considered alongside the candidates’ dossiers, but they may not be added at a
level beyond the candidate’s department. Thus, departmental personnel
committees may review grade data not provided by the candidate, although they
must notify the candidate and allow the candidate to interpret grade distributions
within disciplinary standards created.
 The committee agrees that grade distributions, if included in tenure and
promotions considerations, must be part of the dossier that is forwarded from
departments. Promotions committees should not access materials beyond those
provided by candidates and supporting departments.
Committee Strategy and Framework
Members of the Ad Hoc Committee on Grading represent number of different
disciplines, including those that use strictly quantitative grading procedures, such as
Science, Engineering, and Business, and those that use strictly performance-based
measures, such as Education and Art. Faculty from the Humanities, Philosophy and
English, use a combination of measures, both quantitative and qualitative. After we
surveyed peer institutions’ publicly available personnel policies, we determined that few
institutions like The College of New Jersey explicitly link grade distributions to
personnel decisions. If they are included within those documents at institutions such as
Brandeis, Lafayette, William and Mary, or Villanova, the committee found no evidence
from publicly accessible policies.
This absence of data provided the committee with an opportunity to begin a
discussion that members believe should be afforded to disciplinary units, departments,
schools, and The College as a whole: a discussion of the significance of grades, the
purpose of grades, and our collective assumptions about the grading practices of our
colleagues in other disciplines. Furthermore, the committee wrestled with the overall
implications of grade distributions and their relevance for tenure and promotions cases. In
effect, we struggled to identify the reasons why faculty would wish to include grade
distributions in their dossiers at all.
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 3 of 8
The bulk of the literature about the significance of grading in an institutional
context concerns grade inflation and the relationship between grading and student
evaluations. Much of the literature argues that students reward faculty for lenient grading
and that higher student evaluations, important for tenure and promotion, incentivize grade
inflation. Differences in employment status, for example, adjunct, tenure-track, or
tenured, may affect the patterns of grading and student evaluation (Centra 2003; Sonner
2000; Wright and Palmer 2006). Some skeptics in the grade inflation debate suggest that
“any increases in average grades can likely be accounted for by the demographic and
institutional changes in higher education over the past two decades” (Freese, Artis, and
Powell 186). The committee suggested that The College’s own demographic changes
over the last fifteen years may have altered grading practices and distributions locally as
well.
Nonetheless, some scholarship suggests that faculty attitudes concerning grade
inflation are more important than the objective evidence for grade inflation over time
(Academic Leader 2004). Faculty perceptions of one another across disciplines appear to
be a major issue in the admission of grade distributions to tenure and promotions cases.
Valen Johnson concludes that “grading practices differ systematically between
disciplines…and that [h]umanities faculty tend to grade most leniently; social sciences
faculty, with the exception of economists, are approximately grade neutral; and
economics, mathematics, and natural sciences faculty tend to grade most stringently”
(Johnson 237).
When the committee first convened, we addressed a number of stereotypes held
across departments and disciplines. We discussed campus perceptions that elementary
education courses, for example, lacked rigorous grading schema and inflated students’
overall grade point averages, while philosophy courses, as another example, challenged
students with the sophistication of their material and the rigor of their grading.
Nonetheless, materials drawn from Institutional research demonstrated that, in the Spring
2007 semester, 41.66 % of students in 100-level elementary education courses received
an A or A-, while 45.88% of students in 100-level philosophy courses received the same
grade. The grade distribution for B level students differed by 0.11%, with philosophy
handing out the marginally higher numbers of B grades. The committee does not intend
to single out these two departments for scrutiny, but to demonstrate that perceptions of
grade inflation are not always supported by evidence from data. The committee agreed
that grade distribution data failed to capture the range of variables that might account for
the grade distribution: class standing, gender, previous course work, completion of
writing courses, or access to tutoring.
Faculty on the Ad Hoc committee share a consensus that discussions of grade
distributions need to be embedded in a dialogue about the functions of grading and
alternative methods of assessment available to faculty within programs with grade
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 4 of 8
distributions that may deviate from the overall institutional pattern. For example, the Art
department requires students to submit their portfolios of work to the faculty for jurying
comparable to that artists experience in their professional careers. Such summative,
qualitative, assessment is not reflected on their transcripts but is necessary for their
retention in the program. The committee agreed that such professional evaluations,
equivalent to the procedures that faculty members face in tenure and promotions
decisions, would certainly be rigorous and reliable, although not correlated to a
traditional letter-grade scale.
The committee also lacked direct evidence that grade distributions measure
learning in meaningful ways. For example, Virginia Anderson and Barbara Walvoord
suggest that overreliance on grade distributions may “introduce dynamics that may be
harmful for learning” (100). They suggest that faculty, departments, and schools should
remain vigilant that the following assumptions be addressed when considering rigid grade
distribution frameworks, such as those that have been introduced at Princeton University
and those used in many law schools in the United States, and suggest that such grade
distribution schema might reinforce such notions:
1. The notion that grades, and the learning they supposedly represent, are a
limited commodity dispensed by the teacher according to a statistical formula
2. Competition among students for a limited number of high grades—competition
that encourages students to keep the other person from learning, lest that other
person take one of the precious and limited high grades
3. The notion that learning is a demographic characteristic that will show a
statistical distribution in a sample population
4. The notion that each class is a sample population
5. The teacher’s role that focuses on awarding a limited number of grades by a
formula, rather than a role that includes rewarding all learning with the grade it
deserves
6. The possibility that standards for a grade will be lowered to enable a certain
percentage of students to receive that grade. (100-101)
Thus, the Ad Hoc committee recommends that departments, schools, and the institution
as a whole engage in vigorous debate concerning the significance of grades, grading
distributions, and possible alternative means of assessment (such as pass/fail) appropriate
to areas best evaluated by holistic, performance-based assessment.
Recommended Process for Developing Disciplinary Standards for Grading, Grading
Methods, and Interpreting the Significance of Grading
Throughout the process of transformation, faculty engaged in thoughtful
discussion of assessment methods appropriate to their courses and programs. Every
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 5 of 8
course proposal included a discussion of assessment artifacts, assessment philosophies,
and assessment measures. Further discussion of grading, grading philosophies, and grade
distributions will complement efforts begun during transformation. Grading standards for
disciplines may be extracted from disciplinary syllabi, summarized, and provided to
personnel and promotions committees, along with longitudinal grade distributions for
departments, aggregated or delineated by course level. Institutional Research maintains
such documents, and faculty may access their own grade distribution reports through
SOCS.
Finally, the committee endorses efforts across The College to discover authentic
and reliable assessment measures of student learning that encourage faculty to refine their
teaching methods over time and to respond to potential changes in student preparedness
over time. Anderson and Walvoord caution faculty against using idealized grading
measures, suggesting “that the meaning of a grade is socially determined. You have to
teach and grade within the grading system as it is currently interpreted in the society that
you and your students currently inhabit, and …have to teach and grade the students you
have now, not the ones you wish you had, or the ones you had in 1975, or the ones you
had when you were a TA at Berkeley” (102). Grading distributions, grading practices,
and grading methods should be relevant to our current pedagogy and our current students
and must be examined critically and recursively.
Nevertheless, committee members recognize the relevance of grades beyond the
institutional level. The committee had a rich discussion of institutional assumptions
concerning external constituencies, for example, school boards, future employers, and
graduate schools. We encourage The College community to acquire data that will affirm
or deny our assumptions about these external constituencies and foresee a number of rich
opportunities for faculty research within the new Center for Institutional Effectiveness.
Conclusions
The ad hoc committee on grading affirms that “When we talk about grading, we
have student learning most in mind” (Anderson and Walvoord 1). Nevertheless, grade
distributions do not reflect the process of grading, the communication between faculty
member and student, but the final evidence of student participation in any given course
recorded on a student transcript. Grade distributions may provide one piece of evidence
for faculty success in communication of institutional and disciplinary goals, but we
question how effectively they represent true teaching effectiveness or student learning.
Grades are most meaningful when they may be correlated with other assessment
measures of student learning and student success. Serious discussions of the correlates to
grades has led the committee to believe that discussions of the function of grading may
be less effective if framed by the grade inflation debate. We encourage faculty to reflect
critically on their own teaching effectiveness and develop more sophisticated measures of
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 6 of 8
student learning than final course grades and the resulting grade interpretation. We
anticipate, nonetheless, that our discussions will offer the first step toward a fruitful and
open discussion of our community’s assumptions about the significance of grades as
evidence of both our effectiveness in the classroom and our student learning. The tenure
and promotions processes, like grading, provide the most direct channel of
communication between the institution and the individual faculty member. Despite our
skepticism concerning the ultimate significance of grade distributions, we recognize that
meaningful discussions of grading practices and grading distributions is most likely to
happen at TCNJ if associated with tenure and promotion.
Bibliography
"Academic Freedom and Tenure: Benedict College (South Carolina)." Academe 91.1 (Jan. 2005):
51-54.
"Correlates of College Grades." ASHE Higher Education Report 30.6 (2005): 9-14
"Faculty Perceptions, Reality of Grade Inflation Tell Two Different Stories." Academic Leader
20.11 (Nov. 2004): 3-3.
"Instructors Challenge 'A for Effort' Policy." National On-Campus Report 33.1 (01 Jan. 2005): 66.
"Study Reveals Faculty Attitudes About Grade Inflation." Teaching Professor 18.9 (Nov. 2004):
5-6.
Centra, John A. "Will Teachers Receive Higher Student Evaluations by Giving Higher Grades
and Less Course Work?." Research in Higher Education 44.5 (Oct. 2003): 495.
Churchill, Louise. "Professor Goodgrade." Chronicle of Higher Education 52.25 (24 Feb. 2006):
C1-C4.
DeBoer, Betty V., Donna M. Anderson, and Abdulaziz M. Elfessi. "Grading Styles and Instructor
Attitudes." College Teaching 55.2 (Spring 2007): 57-64.
Holmes, Linda E., and Lois J. Smith. "Student Evaluations of Faculty Grading Methods." Journal
of Education for Business 78.6 (July 2003): 318-323.
Hoover, Eric. "Princeton Proposes Limit on the Number of A's." Chronicle of Higher Education
50.33 (23 Apr. 2004): A40-A40.
James, Mark C. "The effect of grading incentive on student discourse in Peer Instruction."
American Journal of Physics 74.8 (Aug. 2006): 689-691.
Johnson, Valen E. Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education. New York:Springer, 2003.
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 7 of 8
Kamber, Richard and Mary Biggs. “Grade Inflation: Metaphor and Reality.” Journal of Education
84 (2003), 31-37.
Kreiter, Clarence D., et al. "Recommendations for Assigning Weights to Component Tests to
Derive an Overall Course Grade." Teaching & Learning in Medicine 16.2 (Spring 2004):
133-138.
Lammers, H. Bruce, et al. "How Hard Do I Have to Work? Student and Faculty Expectations
Regarding University Work." Journal of Education for Business 80.4 (Mar. 2005): 210213.
McArthur, Ronald C. "A comparison of grading patterns between full-and part-time humanities
faculty: A preliminary study." Community College Review 27.3 (Winter 1999): 65.
Moore, Melanie, and Richard Trahan. "Tenure Status and Grading Practices." Sociological
Perspectives 41.4 (1998): 775-781. .
Nasser, Fadia, and Knut A. Hagtvet. "Multilevel Analysis of the Effects of Student and
Instructor/Course Characteristics on Student Ratings." Research in Higher Education 47.5
(Aug. 2006): 559-590. .
Pasnak, Robert. "Research Fundamentals and the Interrelation of Emotions, Grades, and
Evaluations." Teaching of Psychology 13.1 (Feb. 1986): 30.
Phipps, Stephen D., Robert S. Kidd, and David A. Latif. "Relationships among student
evaluations, instructor effectiveness, and academic performance." Pharmacy Education
6.4 (Dec. 2006): 237-243.
Smallwood, Scott. "Faculty Group Censures Benedict College Again Over 'A for Effort' Policy."
Chronicle of Higher Education 51.20 (21 Jan. 2005): A11-A11.
Sonner, Brenda S. "A Is for 'Adjunct': Examining Grade Inflation in Higher Education." Journal
of Education for Business 76.1 (Sep. 2000): 5.
Walvoord, Barbara E. and Virginia Johnson Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning
and Assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.
Wright, Robert E., and John C. Palmer. "A Comparative Analysis of Different Models Explaining
the Relationship Between Instructor Ratings and Expected Student Grades." Educational
Research Quarterly 30.2 (Dec. 2006): 3-18.
Young, Jeffrey R. "Web Site Fights to Get Professors' Grades." Chronicle of Higher Education
53.7 (06 Oct. 2006): 26-26.
Revision as of September 10, 2008
Page 8 of 8