What the Ivies can learn from Wellesley

By C.W. | LONDON

PROFESSORS at Harvard University used to be vicious examiners. In 1950, according to one source, its average grade was a C-plus. Today things are different. The median* grade is A-minus: the most commonly awarded grade is an A. Yale's may be little better: from 1963 to 2008 the average grade increased by 37%. (We can't verify any of these stats, and comparing over time is fraught with difficulty; but you get the idea).

Grade inflation gets some cogent defences. It may reflect harder-working students. But it irritates many—particularly those who don't benefit from it. There is even a website that allows Princetonians, who are marked notoriously harshly, to compare themselves to cosseted Crimsons. The nerdiest Harvard students have their own complaints: when lots of students are squashed together at the top, they say, separating out the top scholars is trickier.

Some colleges have pursued anti-inflation policies of which Paul Volcker would be proud. In 2004 administrators at Wellesley College, a prestigious, women’s-only university, mandated that in introductory and intermediate courses (with at least ten students) the average grade could not exceed a B-plus, equal to a grade-point average of 3.33. Three economists look at the impact.

Only courses in high-grading departments in the humanities and social sciences needed to change grading practices: science subjects were unaffected by the policy. That gave the economists a good “control", allowing for a meaningful analysis of the policy.

What happened? Previously generous departments became more tightfisted. Students were 14% points less likely to get an A in the treated departments (though they were no more likely to get a C-minus or below). Lots more Bs were given.

The graph below gives a flavour of the results (the green lines show when the policy was introduced then implemented; the dashed red line shows the 3.33 target).

More interestingly, the cap changed students’ course choices. For courses in the treated departments, enrolment fell by about 19%. Students were 30% less likely to major in one of these courses.

These results are positive and other universities can learn from them. Before the policy the difference between the profligate and the parsimonious departments could exceed 0.6 grade points. The hope of higher grades could have encouraged some students, who would really have preferred to study sciences, to move to humanities. But by grading more uniformly, Wellesley removed this perverse incentive. Universities should take note and encourage their students to study what they find intrinsically rewarding; not what will give them bloated grades.

* The latest year for which I could find an estimate of mean grade was 2005, where it was 3.45 (a B-plus).