COLLEGE GRADING PRACTICES: AN OVERVIEW1

Abstract

While grades and grading procedures have become issues of widespread interest and controversy in recent years, the interest has been directed primarily toward questions of external form and the prediction of later grades from earlier grades. More important questions concerning the purposes and effectiveness of grades have continued to be neglected. Nontraditional forms of grading currently being tried are usually Pass/Fail systems, but Pass/No Record and descriptive grading are also used.The most commonly stated purposes of grades are for selection to more advanced educational programs and employment, for motivating students, and for providing students with information about their performance. Consideration of purposes, however, seldom enters decisions about form. Grades are charged with distorting both learning and teaching and undesirably affecting students' attitudes and emotional states, yet evidence either for or against these charges is sparse. Education is commonly viewed as a vehicle for social and economic mobility, but a contrary view of the educational system as a device for the restraint of mobility and the maintenance of the existing social class structure has also been presented. Neither view can point to convincing evidence in its support, but grades have a major role in both.Although grades are often charged with being unreliable, those charges usually refer to grades assigned to individual pieces of student work, such as test papers or themes. Course grades and grade‐point averages have shown high internal consistency and good temporal stability up to about a year. Treating academic performance as a single dimension represented by grades is therefore justifiable. Nevertheless, situations probably exist in which the widely presumed but infrequently demonstrated multidimensional nature of academic performance should be acknowledged and put to use.