The issue of grade inflation is not new. It arose as far back as the late 1960s, at the height of student unrest. Many colleges, eager to calm the masses, eased their grading systems.
Some banished D's and F's; some went to pass/fail; some replaced letter grades with excellent, good and pass. Students were allowed to drop courses as late as the last week in the semester, giving them the opportunity to avoid a bad grade. Short of being caught with final-exam answers taped to your forearm, it became almost impossible to do poorly.
Recently, though, there has been heightened awareness of the issue, highlighted by events at some of the nation's most prestigious schools:
* Stanford University decided in the spring to bring back the F, which disappeared in 1970. The new move was prompted by a university study showing that 90 percent of all grades at the school were A's and B's.
* Last year, Harvard Magazine published statistics showing that 43 percent of all Harvard grades were A's - twice as many as in the mid-1960s.
* This month, students at Dartmouth College will find that their transcripts carry more than just grades. For the first time, the median grade and number of students in each class will be included.
The intent is to better assess a student's performance and to put the grade in some sort of context, said Dartmouth professor Gary Johnson, chairman of the school's Committee on Instruction. Schools want to stop giving students a false sense of how good they are.
At Bryn Mawr, where the median grade-point average has risen steadily over the last decade, the designation of summa cum laude will be limited to the top 10 students - out of graduating classes that number about 300 - regardless of what the grade-point averages say. Last year, there were 28.
