You, overly ambitious, prospective history major—you will work hard. You will always have something incisive to say in discussion sections. You will spend hours in Butler, defacing your expensive books with those neon tabs. You will actually do research for five-to-seven-page papers. At home, you will log on to SSOL, check, and rest assured knowing that you got the A you deserved.
And you, disturbingly focused, prospective chemistry major—you too will work hard. You will slog through all those daylong labs. You will write detailed outlines of your even more expensive books. You will learn all the answers to those crazy tests. Come December, you will be satisfied: You will have an A+.
Huh? A+? If you thought that A+ was an imaginary grade reserved for Jesus and kids in cliché TV shows—welcome to Columbia! Here, 4.33-weighted A+s exist, and some of you are going to get them, especially if you are good at numbers. The A+ is a known for those in the sciences, but for those in the humanities, it's a known unknown; some people are getting them, but why and when is less than transparent. This raises a cluster of related questions: why are A+s so central to grading in the sciences? Who gets A+s in the humanities? Is the widely felt disparity putting the best humanities students at a disadvantage when it comes time to award academic honors?
While grade inflation is a hot topic on campuses, there are few available statistics—the Office of Academic Affairs will not make grade distribution statistics public. According to minutes from an Executive Committee on the Arts and Sciences meeting, A-range grades (A+, A, A-) have increased 22.2% over the last 12 years, but no one knows how many of those are A+s. Thus, The Blue and White decided to go for the next best thing: opinions. Here, in an unscientific sampling, is what we found.
Talking to science professors bolstered the perception that students in the sciences are getting more A+s, because, well, the scientists liked A+s. One professor who works in the sciences and wished to remain anonymous pointed to the most basic difference in grading between the sciences and the humanities. "In the sciences, it is generally possible to discern perfect mastery of concepts tested," he said. This perfect mastery was, for chemistry professor Scott Snyder, reason to keep the A+ grade. "I gave only 3 people A+ grades this year," he said. "That's out of 400 people, and it was for people who were perfect. I reserve it for a performance that is truly extraordinary." As to the bloated 4.33 the grade carries? "Just as A- counts as 3.67, why should A+ count as 4.0?" he asked.
Among the humanities faculty, however, there was little consensus. Many professors wade around somewhere in the middle of the A+ pool, uncomfortable with grade inflation but wanting to reward truly outstanding work. Many are not opposed to A+s on principle, but have rarely—if ever—given them. For others, it is a pedagogical issue to which they've given little thought.
Then there are those for whom the grade means a lot. In the anti-A+ corner looms Herbert Sloan, a professor of history at Barnard. When I first emailed Sloan, he wrote back quickly: "No one has ever gotten an A+ from me... The notion is an abomination and the sooner it disappears from Morningside Heights, the better." Sloan later clarified that he opposes awarding even outstanding work a symbolic 4.0 A+. "It's an unnecessary grade," he explained. "An A pure and simple should be enough for anyone, and if you accumulate enough of them, you'll graduate summa, so the distinction for the happy few is there." Michael Rosenthal, a professor of English, concurred. "I think it's a sort of silly grade," he smiled. "It implies a sort of immortal perfection."
Sloan also thinks that its disappearance is a real possibility. "As I understand it," he said, "the subject is under consideration by the relevant faculty and administrative bodies... I wouldn't be surprised if the A+ disappears in 2008-2009." (He later said he learned from a conversation with someone knowledgeable that he was probably being too optimistic).
There are certainly those in the humanities who disagree with Sloan. General Studies Dean Peter Awn, also a professor in the Religion Department, was one of the few I spoke to who had taken part in any interdisciplinary discussions about the A+, and he appreciated the scientists' claim that the grade was necessary. But Awn finds the grade useful in the humanities as well. "Look," he said, "when someone is writing papers of such an analytic quality that they literally look like they were written by an advanced graduate student—and does that for all four of the eight-page papers in my lecture course—I think that the student deserves the mark of A+."
For Awn, the scale-busting A+ is something of a red herring—perhaps a symptom of, but ultimately a distraction from, the real problems plaguing grading in the humanities. It is not the occasional 4.33 that is running the system into the ground, but that fact that few are willing to drop below 3.33. "I wouldn't be surprised if you tracked the frequency of F grades over time and saw that it had declined into oblivion," Awn said. "I fail people every semester! It's crazy that someone could not hand in half the papers and think that he or she could still pass a course." Michael Rosenthal agreed that professors have stopped grading seriously. "After the 60s," he said, "the faculty lost its corporate nerve. To me, B+ is a solid grade, but people come to me in tears over a B+. If a class has 50% As, how do you distinguish? This really hurts the best students." But, while Sloan and Rosenthal worry that the prevalence of A+s in the hard sciences may hurt the best students in the humanities when it comes to academic awards, Awn stresses that different disciplines grade differently and need to be evaluated as such. (Phi Beta Kappa and Latin Honors selection processes include subjective elements like professor recommendations, for example, and thus are not chosen on GPA alone.)
While not disputing the consensus history of grade inflation, some who've spent decades in Morningside Heights were quick to note that lax grading is not the sole reason for steadily increasing GPAs. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Karl Kroeber, who got his Ph.D. at Columbia in the 50s and returned to teach in the 70s, has been around long enough to remember the university's ebb and flow. "This is Columbia University in the City of New York," he said. "If New York is up, Columbia is up." Kroeber remembered giving an A+ in the 50s as a grad instructor, and gives them now to recognize outstanding work, but gave few, if any, during his time here in the 70s.
Other factors complicate a straightforward assessment of grade inflation. The Executive Committee on the Arts and Sciences held a forum to discuss grading policy this past March, and the minutes offer multiple explanations for rising GPAs. One commenter pointed out that many C and D students drop classes once they realize their destinies. Differences in grading between the humanistic disciplines were a springboard for speculation that students may self-select into higher-grading majors. Someone noted that students can pick majors in accord with their skill sets, but must suffer their ways through the core.
But the biggest take-away message of the minutes was the lack of consensus. There is little discussion between humanities faculty on grading rationale, no training of new faculty members on how to grade, and few departments with concrete grading guidelines. But, if professors are stuck in their own grade-distribution monads, students are in the position to understand the hills and valleys of grading idiosyncrasies best. So, we sought the advice of some Phi Beta Kappa students.
Like their professors, most students agreed that science and math majors would rack up more A+s than their counterparts in the humanities. And, like their professors, they disagreed deeply on whether the grade should be used in the humanities. For some like Andrew Gershon, an English major, the idea is crazy. "Humanities grading is completely subjective," he said. "It's easy to tell what is an A paper and a B+ paper, but honestly I think an A+ is absurd in the humanities. Even for journal articles—you could find ways to make them better."
Because of the fundamental difference between the disciplines—there are perfect chemistry test scores but are there perfect interpretations of Little Dorrit?—humanities A+s have come to stand for profound originality in question asking and answering. "I wrote about something that hadn't been studied much and took a very unorthodox approach to it," said Michael Alijewicz, an English major who got one of his A+s for a seminar paper that he then turned into a senior thesis. "If you can go against the grain while still being convincing, I think that's a good criterion for an A+."
But since breathtaking originality in the humanities seems to be less common than technical mastery of the sciences, students say the A+ has come to stand for two radically different things. While an A in many science classes indicates that the student is probably not the best in the class, in the humanities an A is still the standard upper limit and A+ seems like a bonus. "They are more like pardons or get-out-of-jail-free cards to help smooth over the sometimes rocky results of unstandardized, value-based grading," said Chris Westcott, who studied English, philosophy and creative writing. "The latter being such, I'd say a lot of professors in the humanities don't even bother with A+s."
The fact that many professors don't give A+, combined with the idiosyncratic standards of the ones who do, gives the feeling that getting an A+ in the humanities is pretty random. "Getting an A+ in a humanities course was really a total surprise," said Kieron Cendric, an art history major. "I feel like it was really luck of the draw. There were other times in humanities courses when I was working equally as hard and not getting A+s, because some professors just don't give them."
Nevertheless, there were dissenters. A quantitative student who chose to be anonymous offered an appropriately quantitative analysis of the A+ approach by science and humanities faculty. While the student received more A+ grades in sciences courses, s/he also took more science courses. "I think the proportion relative to the courses in the field was about the same." The student also wondered whether science and math students appeared to be getting more A+s because their classes are typically larger than those in humanities. "In a huge lecture course, one professor may be giving five or six A+s," the student said, while no A+s may be awarded in a seminar of only 10 or 12 humanities students.
Jon Siegel, an economics-mathematics major and former chair of the Student Governing Board, refused to accept the line that humanities grading is more subjective than grading in quantitative fields. "I think the reason that it's harder to get an A+ in a humanities course largely stems from the policies of the teachers," he said. "Any good course could make itself quantifiable. There is much more grade inflation as a whole in the humanities, so teachers don't want to give A+s, but there should be standard curves across all the disciplines."
When it comes down to the effect skyrocketing science GPAs might have on things like getting inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the A+ drama gets a bit fiercer. "I wish I could say it never crossed my mind," said Gaby Rothberger, a double concentrator in philosophy and psychology. "I guess even when I did think about the fact that people in the hard sciences might get more A+s, I acknowledged the fact that it would be very hard [and] in the classes I was taking it would be harder to do worse." Jeff Shrader, an economics-mathematics major, offered a more controversial hypothesis. "I'm not saying it's the truth," he said, "but it could simply be that you have the best students self-selecting into quantitative majors. That may ruffle a lot of people's feathers."
Despite these disagreements, many granted that something ought to be done to achieve clearer standards. Shrader had a story. "I went on a job interview once," he told me, "and I had my 4.0 GPA printed on my resume, and the interviewer said, 'Well, Columbia grades out of 4.33. Why do you have a 4.0?' That confused me, and I thought, 'Why do I have a 4.0? Maybe I should have a 4.33.' I think Columbia ought to go one of two ways—either keep it at 4.0 or give out a more standard number of A+s." While some doubt that departments could ever be brought to cooperate on grading standards, Shrader, who TA'd Macroeconomics, offered the Economics Department as a stellar example of a department that suggested standard grading curves. "It was like the U.N.," he said. "They said 'It would be nice if you gave these grades. The whole university could do that."
This very point was made by someone at the Executive Committee forum in March. Furthermore, Professor Awn noted that the Task Force on Undergraduate Education is talking to students and seriously investigating issues surrounding grading. Hopefully a more open discussion will help clear up the ambiguities of grading.
What this portends for the future of A+s is anyone's guess. "Should it be given away like a blue ribbon at the State Fair or like a 1-up in Super Mario?" Chris Westcott wondered. "I don't know." He has lots of company.
—additional reporting contributed by Anna Phillips
