This article was published in The ‘Burnian on Dec. 1977 as part of the “From the…Owl’s Nest” column by Dan Woods, the managing editor.
Well fans it’s that time of the year again when we struggle against time and rack our brains, attempting to keep a grasp on sanity. What do we do it for? It’s called a grade, a little letter that sums up three hours a week in class, (give or take an hour or two) x hours of reading, and only you know how many hours spent on papers(s), and other projects, during a period of fourteen weeks.
It had always been my belief that school was a place for learning and that grades were to show the degree of what a student has learned. Rather than showing this however, many times grades tend to show how well a student can, or cannot take an exam, or how much a student is able to recall in a two hour exam period, or [their] mental and/or physical condition during or prior to an exam. Grades may also show how well relations are between a student and professor. Yes, and in a few cases, even how well a student can cheat on a test or paper, but rarely does a grade reflect how much a student actually has learned.
I know, from personal experience, that many times more is learned and understood after a test or paper is handed back and gone over, although the grade doesn’t change from this added learning.
Many teachers use a curve to justify low grades on an exam. How can a teacher justly say that a student scoring 50 percent on an exam deserves a “C” because that was the average grade in the class? If the average student is only learning 50 percent of the material, I think that the teacher has a definite problem that should be solved rather than just curving the grades and moving on to new material.
It’s bad enough that a single letter be left to sum up a whole semester’s work in a class, but worse than that a whole semester’s work, and eventually all four years of a college education are summed up into one little number that is to tell the whole story. This number is well known as the G.P.A. or Grade Point Average.
Seriously, how can you take 122 semester hours of credit and average the grades for these all together when these hours consist of around forty different classes on different subjects; especially when these are taught by different grading systems and grading methods.
A “B” in one class may be a 75 percent, according to a curve, and better than average performance as compared to the rest of the class, while a student in another class may need 85 percent to receive a “B” on a straight scale.
For some of you, G.P.A. may not matter much, unless of course you are thinking of Graduate School. G.P.A. is a main admissions factor for many Law or Med. Schools and it hurts if insignificant (esp. required) classes pull down your G.P.A.
What does a “C+” mean? A high “C” or maybe missing a “B” by a few points? If plusses are added to grades, why aren’t they figured into G.P.A. Last year I worked my tail feathers off to try and make the Dean’s List (3.5 G.P.A.), two of my grades that semester were “C”, and “B+” (having learned more in the “C+” class than in one which I received an “A”): I ended up with a G.P.A. of 3.475. Since then I’ve tried to put less emphasis on my grades and more on my learning since the two aren’t related as they should be.
Emphasis should be taken off of grades and leave some room for learning. Grading, I believe should consist of either Passing or Failing a course accompanied by a short explanation of the student’s achievement by the professor.
Here at B.U., we seem to be emphasizing grades more. We used to have some courses pass-fail, but someone decided that “D” was not a passing grade, however it’s not failing either. Now we have a number of courses which can be taken Pass, Very Poor, and Fail. What’s the use?
Changes as I’d like to see them are unforeseeable in the near future so I’d just like to wish all of you good luck in your grade-war. Study hard, and hopefully you’ll have time to learn something too.