Grades might be “artificially scarce” to the extent that we adopt something I’d call “grade platonism.” Grade platonism is the tendency to think of the letter grades as having a kind of external meaning and value, separate from its indication that the student was at a certain percentile in the class on a given exam. To some extent, I think we do internalize (and we worry that employers, etc., internalize) the idea that an "A" signifies great work, that a "B+" signifies good work, that a "B" signifies OK work, and so on, regardless of what percentage of a class fits within each grade bracket, and regardless of whether the underlying test actually measures anything useful.

This is why people get their feathers ruffled about grade-inflation or grade-deflation. No one would care at all about grade inflation if: (1) grades were immediately mappable into percentiles; and (2) we believed that everyone who looked at a grade transcript actually did map the grades into percentiles, when thinking about whether our grades are “good” or “bad,” or when comparing them against transcripts from other schools. We wouldn’t really care whether the median grade is an B+ or a C+, as long as the grade distribution is printed on the back of our transcripts. Our objections would be to the fact that we are being measured against each other, the meaninglessness of those measurements, and the sort of learning we do when the method of evaluation is a single anonymous final exam.

While I do think that grade deflation can cause real stress and anxiety, I think after first semester, we do tend to reset our expectations for what a "good" transcript would look like, and I suspect potential employers largely do too.

The important thing is to separate out our objections to the grading curve (viewed as a quota system for each letter grade), from our concerns about the meaninglessness of whatever it is that anonymous final exams end up measuring, and the sort of learning that students do in classes where evaluations are based on a single anonymous final exam. This is I think partly what I was trying to get at in the discussion over at Lauren Rosenberg's Paper. The grading curve and the letter-grade system are both up for grabs, it seems, but the model of evaluating students on the basis of one anonymous exam (to the extent we're evaluated at all under alternative systems) doesn't seem to be up for grabs. Nor does the companion practice of having nearly 100 person Socratic classes for 1Ls.

-- DanielMargolskee - 31 Mar 2009