<p>The Brown Daily Herald has noticed some interesting data about grades at Brown University. Last year, for the first time, a majority of all grades given to undergraduates were As. In 2007-8, 50.6 percent of grades were As. A decade earlier, the percentage was 42.5 percent.
<a href=“http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Institutional_Research/documents/TABLE21.pdf[/url]”>http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Institutional_Research/documents/TABLE21.pdf</a></p>
<p>Incoming people making poor assumptions based on that data...</p>
<p>FWIW, I think the more interesting piece of information is how few students fail courses and how many students are taking advantage of pass/fail.</p>
<p>However, that's not spicy enough for most people.</p>
<p>I'm curious. How many students fail courses and how many students are taking advantage of pass/fail?</p>
<p>I was at this open house at Brown a while ago, and a student said that a minority of classes are taken S/NC and that usually that's because those classes are the ones you're taking for fun/because you just want to learn about the subject, even though you might not have any previous knowledge of that subject whatsoever. Most students still opt for the standard grading system (A, B, C, etc.)</p>
<p>Given that it's Brown, I'd say very few students fail courses. But then again, I actually have very little authority in my answers.. modestmelody could probably do a better job.</p>
<p>Very few students fail courses. I think the number was around 5% or even less, but it's in the BDH article. The number, 19.9% grades were Ss is probably pretty accurate-- slightly more than 1/5 classes are taken S/NC.</p>
<p>Most people I know take about 1 class a semester S/NC. I doubt anyone goes through Brown taking no S/NC courses. The purpose of S/NC is to make exploration outside of your comfort zone far more appealing. How can Brown give students the responsibility to create a liberal arts education if we don't also create a system which encourages exploration as opposed to potentially punish a student who bites off more than they can chew?</p>
<p>Of course, my discussions with professors about this issue has largely surrounded around this statement in the article by an outsider, a so-called expert on grade inflation: "Grades are a comparative measure of student performance among students at the same university," he wrote. "If a college admits particularly talented students, then a C must be defined relative to that university's student pool."</p>
<p>The faculty member's I've talked to about this quote dismiss this concept of grades whole-heartedly. A-level achievement in their course does not change because the students are smarter. An A doesn't mean that you've beaten your other classmates, and A means you've completely the course with an excellent level of knowledge as defined by the professor's expectations. If students one year do remarkably well and do better on more complex material than the class before them it does not mean that the grades need to be adjusted, it means more students are doing fantastic work.</p>
<p>That being said, I'd be very interested in a by department breakdown. Not to be whiny or make myself sound exceptional, but in chemistry we're far from the ridiculous percentage cited by the Herald for physical sciences in general. The only class I've taken where anywhere near half the students got As was a graduate course with 2 undergrads and 2 grad students where I'm pretty sure we all got As.</p>
<p>The professor had taught the class before and had never gotten through that much material and was very happy with how much the students learned so we all got As. I don't know why we should have had only one A and two Bs and one C especially because the differentiation in learning between the A and C student would not have made that much sense.</p>
<p>In fact, recognizing the differentiation between +/- type grades is small enough so as to not be all that meaningful, we eliminated the practice.</p>
<p>So basically, are there some departments and some classes that give a tremendous number of As at Brown? Absolutely. Are there some paths you can take that achieving an A for today's student is less challenging than yesterday's student? Probably. Are there some paths you can take where earning an A is almost unthinkably hard for the average student? Absolutely. Do these wholesale general numbers really act as interesting diagnostic information? No, you can pretty much read whatever bias you want into such a general statistic.</p>
<p>To be honest, I've seen many of my friends dropping courses towards the end of the semester, particularly the ones that they were not performing too well in. In other words, you might see an inherent skew in the data because the lower grades were weeded out by the students themselves. This is somewhat both the beauty and poison for Brown's transcript policy, in my opinion.</p>
<p>I don't know many people who drop courses more than halfway into the semester. Occasionally someone who's taking five courses will drop class five a little later than that, but I don't know anyone who drops classes the last few weeks because they don't want a lower grade.</p>
<p>I know of one person who dropped a course pretty late but I think it may have been a 5th.</p>
<p>well, i suppose we don't know the official number of people doing that, so none of us is an authority to speak regarding the motives of dropping the course.</p>
<p>but my point is this: there is an incentive to do so, as brown does not record grade drops in the official transcript. of course, this policy started to encourage people to explore challenging courses, but it does not prevent people from using it in a manner i described above.</p>
<p>Well, not entirely true. I had some private data on this a while ago from the 300 or so respondents to a Task Force poll taken by students and from the 3 focus groups we ran. Grading came up and we addressed/talked about some of these issues.</p>
<p>The practice of dropping a class you're going to earn a C in is not particularly widespread, not to the point where it would significantly effect grade distribution (well except NC... people certainly drop classes they would fail around that halfway mark when it begins to become inevitable, but a drop and an NC are recorded nearly identically).</p>
<p>Maybe 2-3% skew.</p>
<p>Remember, NCs are not on the official transcript either.</p>