Passed: December 15, 2023
Vote results and comments
Posted: September 27, 2023
Sponsors: Listed below
Resolution:
Whereas between 1997 and 2011, there were multiple Faculty Senate resolutions about whether and where to publicize median grades – whether to include them on student transcripts, as is the current practice, and/or to publish them on the Office of the University Registrar (OUR) website, which was once the practice, but was discontinued[1];
Whereas the Faculty Senate originally expected that the transcript and OUR postings would encourage students to take courses with low median grades, which the Faculty Senate thought students might not otherwise do;
Whereas in 2011, the Faculty Senate learned, based upon a published research study[2] of the OUR posting practice, that students used the OUR postings to shun instead of select courses with low median grades, the exact opposite of what was intended; according to the study, the availability of this “grade information online induced students to select leniently graded courses – or in other words, to opt out of courses they would have selected absent considerations of grades” (Bar, T., Vrinda K., & Asaf Z. 2009, p. 107);
Whereas the published research study also indicated, and the Faculty Senate believed, that the OUR website postings contributed to grade inflation;
Whereas largely based upon the published research study, and aimed at discouraging strategic course selection and combatting grade inflation, in 2011, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution to end the practice of posting median grades on the OUR website;
Whereas the resolution did not address the practice of including median grades on transcripts, and that process was kept intact;
Whereas after the OUR median grade postings stopped, as a direct response to that action, and continuing to the present day, students have resorted to self-help to replicate those postings by crowdsourcing their own course median-grade spreadsheets on Reddit (and, likely, elsewhere);
Whereas students report that these spreadsheets are well known and produce similar results to the OUR website postings by helping students avoid courses with low medians; indeed, that is the raison d’être of the spreadsheets;
Whereas through a Student Assembly resolution and columns in the Cornell Daily Sun, students have repeatedly voiced their upset with the policy of posting median grades on transcripts, and in these media and in discussions, students noted that the postings are unfair unless median grades are made available to students before course selection;
Whereas according to students, in addition to promoting strategic course selection, Cornell’s practice of including median grades on transcripts disadvantages Cornell students in job and academic applications, demoralizes students, devalues academic accomplishments in the classroom, detracts from learning, reinforces student competition, and discourages academic risk taking;
Whereas students also note that the practice results in inequities in courses with multiple sections where section instructors have different medians, but the different medians are aggregated to produce one standardized median grade for all sections; in such instances, students from the sections with lower medians feel disadvantaged;
Whereas another inequity is that commercial websites may use the Reddit postings to make Cornell course median grade information available for a fee, thereby advantaging those students able to pay these fees;
Whereas it is expected that if median grades are no longer included on transcripts, students will stop creating such spreadsheets as the data with which to do so would be limited, if not eliminated, and, hopefully, students’ motivation to create public listings of median grades would be diminished as they would not have to worry about having their performance relative to other students recorded on transcripts;
Whereas there is no reason why letter grades, which reflect mastery of materials, cannot speak for themselves;
Whereas Cornell is anomalous in its practice of recording median grades on transcripts; of the 71 member institutions of the Association of American Universities, Cornell is one of only four institutions that record median grades on transcripts;
Be it therefore resolved that for the reasons stated above, the university should discontinue posting median grades on transcripts.
[1] The posting of median grades on the OUR website commenced in 1998 based upon a 1997 Faculty Senate resolution calling for the posting of median grades on both the OUR website and student transcripts. Due to technological obstacles, median grades did not appear on transcripts until 2008. The OUR website postings ceased in 2011 based upon a Faculty Senate resolution.
[2] Bar, T., Vrinda K., & Asaf Z. (2009). Grade information and grade inflation: The Cornell experiment. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23 (3): 93-108. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.23.3.93. The study was conducted before median grades were included on transcripts.
University Faculty Sponsors
Geoffrey Abers
Diane Bailey
Brad Bell
Kendra Bischoff
Lawrence Blume
Laura Brown
Austin Bunn
David Delchamps
Elizabeth Fisher
Chris Fromme
Cole Gilbert
Lee Humphreys
Karim-Aly Kassam
Harry Katz
JR Keller
Lori Leonard
Caroline Levine
Corinna Loeckenhoff
Drew Margolin
Lisa Nishii
Thomas Overton
Marvin Pritts
Masha Raskolnikov
Chris Schaffer
Margaret Smith
Jed Sparks
Tudorita Tumbar
I support the first resolution but am strongly, strongly, strongly… opposed to the second.
The current situation will be improved not by eliminating posting of median grades on transcripts, but by posting them to the OUR website for all – students, our faculty colleagues in and outside our departments and colleges, and consumers of transcripts – to see. All of the other issues raised in the resolution can best be addressed by other means.
For most of the time that grades were previously posted to the OUR website, they were not posted on transcripts. So of course students flocked to courses with high median grades, because consumers of their grades were unlikely to look up each course’s median. Sheer momentum after a decade of this situation may have contributed to its continuing for the two or three years when median grades were also posted to transcripts.
Students may continue to prefer courses with high median grades if we post to OUR and to transcripts. But at least then the outlier courses will be visible to everyone, and faculty and chairs may choose to exert pressure on their peers.
Letter grades absolutely do not speak to command of course material in many, many courses and many disciplines. Median grades in far too many courses are A, as noted in a recent NYT article. Large variations in median grades and grade distributions between Colleges and programs (and previous large variations in rates of Deans list and latin honors recognition) further devalue grades and other academic recognition as metrics of student performance. In many disciplines, a Cornell student with a 3.9 GPA is likely less capable than a student at a good state school with the same GPA and less capable than students from near-peer Canadian or European universities with the same GPA, places where grade inflation is less rampant and where there is more emphasis on grading transparency.
Grade inflation – and also the problem of courses with unfairly low grades – can best be addressed by shedding more light, not less, on grading practices. We can start by providing detailed guidance to faculty across the university on median grades and grade distributions. But in the absence of strong peer pressure based on reliable information, too many faculty will not follow that guidance.
I have been proud that Cornell has been one of the few elite institutions that has some measure of transparency in its transcripts, allowing employers and graduate/professional schools to properly assess each applicant, and properly indicating to each student how their performance stacks up relative to their peers.
Eliminating all posting of median grades will make grades far less useful to everyone, diminish meritocracy, and elevate the role of connections and good old boy/girl networks in determining post-graduation student trajectories.
Given Cornell’s reputation as an elite institution, that may in fact help our students to out-compete more capable students from non-elite institutions. As a first generation graduate from a non-elite university, I find this possibility appalling. And so should the rest of America.