Just over half of Brown undergraduates described their courses as very difficult or somewhat difficult, The Herald’s fall 2024 poll found. But 63% of grades were an A in the last academic year.
The share of A grades has decreased from the record high in 2020-21, when over two-thirds of awarded grades were As, The Herald previously reported.
In interviews with The Herald, professors from four departments said they are not currently concerned about grade inflation at Brown.
Economics faculty “have been doing a pretty good job at (minimizing grade inflation) for the last decade or so,” said Kareen Rozen, who chairs the department. “It’s not been a major concern.”
The Computer Science department has “no department-wide policy” about grading practices, wrote Roberto Tamassia, CS department chair, in an email to The Herald. Last spring, CS faculty had a “preliminary discussion about the distribution of grades in CS courses,” but there is no official departmental position about grade inflation, he added.
Brown’s Courses Factbook data reaches back to the 2007-08 academic year, when 51% of grades were an A and 22% were a B.
Last academic year, only 10% of grades distributed were Bs.
The factbook combines “S with distinction” grades — a grade designation equivalent to an A for classes that were taken with the Satisfactory/No Credit grading system — and S grades. Together, these S with distinction and S grades comprised nearly a quarter of total grades given in the 2023-24 academic year.
Conversations about the rising level of A grades have been happening for more than a decade, Herald coverage shows.
In 2013, Brown’s economics department developed a set of grade distribution guidelines meant to control grade inflation, The Herald previously reported. In ECON 0110: “Principles of Economics,” it was recommended that 30% of students receive an A, 40% receive a B and another 30% receive a C.
If every student received an A, it “would make the value of an A grade meaningless,” Rozen told The Herald last month. “It would just be a purely noisy signal.”
But grading policies are ultimately up to individual professors, Rozen said. The guidelines are non-binding recommendations.
Roberto Serrano, an economics professor who wrote an op-ed to The Herald in 2022 on the topic of Brown’s grading system, chaired the department when these guidelines were introduced. He said they were created because some instructors “reacted very strongly” when informed that 95% or more of students in certain advanced courses within the department were awarded As.
In 2022, when the level of A grades reached an all-time high, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 wrote in an email to The Herald that “the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic played a role.”
At the time, Dean of the College Rashid Zia told The Herald that he believed grade distributions would continue to “return toward pre-pandemic levels.”
In the 2022-23 academic year, only 62% percent of grades distributed were As — a drop from the previous year. But the percentage of As has remained higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Peer institutions such as Harvard and Yale have released minimal data about their students’ grade distributions in the past four years, but the most recent data indicates that nearly 79% of undergraduates’ grades were within the A range at both universities. At Princeton, where a decade-long grade deflation policy was repealed in 2014, the average GPA was 3.562 in the 2022-23 academic year.
In an email to The Herald, Zia noted that final grades are “one way of evaluating and supporting student learning.”
When determining his students’ final grades, Serrano ensures that there is a statistically significant difference between an A grade and a B grade — meaning that receiving an A grade doesn’t always mean a student earned above a 90% in the class.
“It doesn’t make sense to insist on some objective numbers” for grade cutoffs, he said, adding that doing so “would be making foolish assumptions” about the varying quality of each class of students.
Richard Stratt, professor of physics and chemistry, currently teaches CHEM 0330: “Equilibrium, Rate, and Structure.” He said that for this course — which has been taught by six different people in the past two years — instructors consult with each other to maintain consistency in how course material is presented, although there is variance in how instructors weight assignments for students’ final grades.
But grades “sort of distract from what we’re trying to do,” he added, because “people spend a lot of their time worrying about the grades and less of their time worrying about the material, or even what they want to do with their life related to this material.”
Matthew Harrison, an associate professor who is director of undergraduate studies for applied mathematics, wrote in an email to The Herald that the department is “definitely concerned” about grade inflation.
Harrison explained that higher enrollment and larger courses in the department have caused the courses to contain less material, which “can lead to a phenomenon akin to grade inflation.”
The department is “actively working on solutions,” he added, including expanding their faculty to offer additional courses “more tailored to students’ needs and backgrounds.”
In the history department, professor Harold Cook said that his grading policies are meant to discriminate between students’ performances rather than focus on the actual letter grades awarded.
When grading his students’ papers and weekly discussion posts, Cook evaluates whether they connect course topics “in ways that allow those issues to speak to one another,” he said.
Grade inflation “rarely comes up as a source of conversation among faculty, as far as I know,” Cook added. “But I think we’re all aware of it.”
Kate Rowberry is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
