Because Brown has no school-wide grading criteria, faculty and administrators are continually looking for ways to increase awareness of the process of assigning grades, a process that many students find to be ambiguous and inconsistent.
Serika Gooden '05, a modern culture and media and American civilization concentrator, said she often goes into a course not knowing how her grades will be calculated and leaves at the end of the semester with a similar lack of understanding as to how she received a particular grade.
To combat this sentiment, the College Curriculum Council has recommended that Course Performance Reports be available to students in any course with the faculty member's consent, said Jonathan Waage, who is executive associate dean of the College, a member of the CCC and a professor of biology. Under current provisions, CPRs are available to students taking an S/NC course - with the agreement of the professor - but are not offered in courses being taken for a grade.
The CPR provides space for both the student and instructor to comment on the student's performance in a course. "The Course Performance Report is the most valuable and underutilized means of assessment of this University," Waage said.
The CCC, which decided in Spring 2003 to once again reject the use of pluses and minuses in grading, has recently recommended that a Web-based set of resources on grading be available for faculty members to help increase discussion on the topic of grading.
The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning is also working toward increasing communication on the issue of grading. Nearly 70 graduate students and professors from across the curriculum gathered to learn more about grading and assessment at a Monday evening workshop sponsored by the Sheridan Center.
The workshop, run by Lawrence Wakeford, senior lecturer and clinical professor of biology and science education, and Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education, provided instructors with various methods of assessment that could be used when grading students.
"The deepest flaw is the attempt to try and put into a single letter or a single number what somebody has learned," Wakeford said.
It is not only the ambiguity of what a particular grade means that troubles faculty and students, but also the large variance between how students are graded, both across the curriculum and even within departments themselves.
"It varies way too much, I think," Gooden said.
"I find that in English courses or in modern culture and media courses, it's a point system that will somehow translate into a grade which you won't even know until you get your transcript," she said.
But deans and professors agree that a school-wide grading standard is not the solution to avoiding discrepancies between the grades students expect and those instructors dole out.
"We want to make sure faculty have a lot of autonomy. They have to be as invested in the course as the students are," said David Targan, associate dean of the college and dean for science programs. A school-wide grading policy outlining what an A, a B or a C grade means would be antithetical to Brown's New Curriculum, he said.
On the other hand, Wakeford said such rubrics can be very useful when created individually by instructors for their courses. Identifying the criteria that makes up an A, B or C assignment, paper or exam within a particular course provides students with a better understanding of what is expected of them, he said.
Gooden, now in her last semester at Brown, said she has never received such a rubric in any of her classes.
"It's more than just simply saying the midterm is worth 20 percent ... it's what will be an A on a project and what will be a B," Wakeford said.
Often the issue in math and science courses is not only inconsistency in grading, but also the lack of individual assessment.
"Unfortunately, if a math problem is simply graded by a number at the bottom, that is almost useless feedback to a student," Wakeford said.
Instead, Wakeford suggests instructors provide more detailed feedback on work so students are motivated to obtain not simply the right answer, but a deeper understanding of the material. He suggests this can be achieved across the curriculum by reserving grades for larger projects, papers and final exams and providing students with more comments on their smaller assignments.
"Good assessment is the same when it is done well in all fields," Wakeford said.
Wakeford also suggests instructors provide students with opportunities for self-assessment, a way to integrate the aspect of assessment into larger courses where it is more difficult to devote personal attention to each student.
"This is a complicated issue," Wakeford said. "There aren't easy answers, but we need to talk more about it so that we can change the way we do assessment, so that we can make it more valuable for teachers and students."
