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I recently taught an undergraduate seminar course, in which each student has to read a research paper, summarize it and present it to the class. In the first lesson I explained to the students the components of the grade: attendance, summary writing, and presentation quality.

Most of the students did great jobs: attendance was near full, summaries were good, and presentations were great. Many of them did more than I expected - they contacted the paper's authors to get more information, presented movies and demos, engaged the class in discussions, etc. So, when I wrote the grades to myself, most of them were between 90 and 100.

But then, when I told this to the department vice-chair, he told me "what have you done? You will cause a grade-inflation! The department policy is that the average grade on seminar courses should be at most 85!" I totally understand this policy - grades that are too high might show that the course was too easy, and they do not sufficiently distinguish between good and better students. Also, they might be unfair to students who took the course in previous years.

However, I am not sure what I should do now. I haven't published the grades to the students yet. Should I just re-scale the grades so that 90 becomes 70? I feel this is somewhat unfair to the students who worked hard for their presentations. Are there better options?

Erel Segal-Halevi
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One really wants to say that the vice-chair is an idiot, but I will refrain. The policy is idiotic in any case. I've taught at places in which nearly every student excels on every measure I could devise. Why would I want to pit one student against another for the purpose of an artificial "average"? They weren't average.

If you have the twenty best people (students or employees for example) in the world and you measure them in any single way, then half of them will be below average. Just how fine can you make the graduations so that someone can be "called" worse than someone else.

On the other hand, if the average, as measured over several runnings of the class, is around 85 and if there are clear differences in behavior and outcome, then "rewarding" everyone equally is also idiotic.

You set a standard. People met it. The standard was not that you must do "better" than someone else. If you change it now you have an ethical failing.

I hope you have enough standing in the university and in the profession that you can stand up to such unfair and unethical suggestions. If your group of students was exceptional there is no reason not to mark them as exceptional.

If you want to lower the average in future, with a different group of students, make the course more demanding.

But if you change the grading structure after they have finished their work then you are doing evil, not teaching.

Buffy
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    OP should ask whether the students were good compared to, say, OP's own expectation of themselves when they were a student? If so, they can try this argument to stand their ground. Or else, they need a mandate from the chief of vice to commit the sin of "p-" - cough, cough - "mark hacking". As a young lecturer I once refused to lower marks "because I would not punish students for working motivatedly and hard and thusly doing well"; I was told off for "being unfair to the fellow lecturers" (yes, indeed), but my marks stood. I do not recommend to do so without a good gauge of OP's standing. – Captain Emacs Sep 05 '18 at 20:29
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    +1 to the answer above. The academics in question should look into why corporations are abandoning (well....good corporations) this same process under a different name: stack ranking – NKCampbell Sep 05 '18 at 23:33
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    @NKCampbell, yes, different context, of course, but it only makes sense to fire someone if you can replace them with someone better. But on any single (or aggregate) scale, someone is always "worst". So, you can get worse on average with stack ranking over time if the new hire isn't better than the old employee. – Buffy Sep 05 '18 at 23:36
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    @Buffy It's actually much, MUCH worse than that. Stack ranking means the best way to keep your job is to sabotage someone else's work. You just changed everyone from working towards a measurable goal (which already has weaknesses, like gaming the metric), to everyone trying to work against each other (which is outright toxic). – Nelson Sep 06 '18 at 00:23
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    +1 for"But if you change the grading structure after they have finished their work then you are doing evil, not teaching." At my institution this is grounds for a student grade grievance for arbitrary and capricious grading, and can be considered academic misconduct. Assign grades the way you told the students you were going to. – Ben Norris Sep 06 '18 at 01:33
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    @BenNorris you, and I think also Buffy, are talking about something that sounds quite different from what OP is asking about. There is no indication in the question that OP is considering doing anything like “assigning grades in a different way than what he told the students he was going to”. He is considering recalibrating the grades, i.e., changing the function mapping quality of presentation/writing/etc to a numerical score. If that function was not explicitly told to the students, he has every right to change it up to the very last minute. In fact, such last minute decisions ... – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 02:27
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    ... are extremely common, and I have never seen anyone argue that they are unethical, inappropriate, evil, or that a grade grievance based on such a decision has any chance whatsoever to succeed. What matters from the point of view of ethics is that: 1. the instructor follows to the letter their own grading policy that they explicitly communicated to the students, and 2. the instructor’s decisions are made in good faith and out of a sincere desire to have the grades most fairly and accurately represent their evaluation of the students’ abilities. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 02:30
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    @DanRomik You call it recalibrating, but this certainly seems like grading on a curve: Because everyone did well, we're recalibrating the average to fit what we think it should be. "Many of them did more than I expected - they contacted the paper's authors to get more information, presented movies and demos, engaged the class in discussions, etc." Your grade: C, Although you did exceptional work and exceeded expectations, others did more/better than you did at exceeding expectations. Tough luck. Talk about moving the goalposts. – TemporalWolf Sep 06 '18 at 20:27
  • @TemporalWolf call it what you like. I have expressed my position to the best of my ability within the limited space of this discussion, and don’t have anything to add. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 21:43
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    @DanRomik: I will argue that (while extremely common), the practice you describe is indeed unethical, inappropriate, and evil. E.g., my letter to the editor of Thought & Action in 2006. Most best-practices I've seen recommend documenting the number-to-letter formula up front on the syllabus (e.g., Yale). The "recalibrating" argument is simply word-play. The standards for a particular letter grade should be, and in many cases are, made known beforehand. – Daniel R. Collins Sep 07 '18 at 03:52
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    @DanielR.Collins that’s very interesting, and there’s a lot I can agree with in your critique of grading on a curve. However, I believe this thread is not an appropriate venue to discuss the topic. For one thing, everyone seems to have their own idea of what “the practice I describe” even refers to, which in many cases is quite different from what I actually meant, and I don’t have the space to describe things in sufficient detail so that we can all be sure we are talking about the same thing. Anyway, maybe some day we can debate it in some other thread. Thanks for your comment. – Dan Romik Sep 07 '18 at 04:34
  • @DanielR.Collins PS your letter to the editor link was broken, here is a corrected one. – Dan Romik Sep 07 '18 at 04:36
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    Excellent answer. "half of them will be below average" is wrong, though. – Eric Duminil Sep 07 '18 at 06:14
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    @Dan Romik I'm not sure I follow. I thought a grading policy is a calibration, but for you these seem to be different things. Is that what you mean? And how so? – henning Sep 07 '18 at 06:21
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    @DanRomik I think we agree more than disagree, in that the instructor is ultimately responsible for deciding the scale against which everyone is evaluated, and that scale is usually not (completely) set in stone. I just object to factoring in a department "expected average" or class average into that function... that seems to me to violate "2. the instructor’s decisions are made in good faith and out of a sincere desire to have the grades most fairly and accurately represent their evaluation of the students’ abilities." I wanted to clarify I object to only that very narrow piece. – TemporalWolf Sep 07 '18 at 22:55
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    Practically speaking, your first sentence does not refrain. – jpmc26 Sep 07 '18 at 22:57
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    @EricDuminil the median and the mean are each averages. Half will be below the median. ( Those that live by pedantry, fall by pedantry :) – fectin Sep 08 '18 at 16:53
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    @fectin 20 excellent students. 19 students get 100 points, 1 student gets 99. Only 1 student is below average. Either with median or mean. – Eric Duminil Sep 08 '18 at 17:10
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    From this non-academic's point of view, grading on curve seems antithethical to anything grades are supposed to serve. Given that a course doesn't always normally distribute across skill levels, you could have one course in one year where every student is really execellent and another where most students are poor. Now with grading on curve you have excellent students getting worse grades then their poorly performing peers? Madness. – Magisch Sep 10 '18 at 08:41
  • @EricDuminil: Now you're cherry-picking examples! While much fewer than half of the students are below the median, none of them are above the median either. It’s just a terrible example to illustrate the issue for a practical grading scenario. – David Foerster Sep 10 '18 at 10:15
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    @DavidFoerster: That's the thing with mathematics. One counter-example is enough to disprove a proposition. My example wasn't even so far fetched. If you take the twenty best people in the world, it's probable that many will get the same note : the highest one. – Eric Duminil Sep 10 '18 at 10:34
  • @EricDuminil There is some noise in the grading process so by this token some of the best get some variation and thus get lumped in with failures. So grading can never guarantee the situation above. – joojaa Sep 10 '18 at 17:25
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    @joojaa: Don't shoot the messenger ;) "half of them will be below average" is wrong, that's it. – Eric Duminil Sep 10 '18 at 17:57
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    I second: vice chair is an idiot. – NotStanding with GoGotaHome Nov 05 '21 at 05:30
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From a mathematical point of view, the problem that they are trying to solve with a policy that attempts to enforce a maximum/minimum average class value is the wrong problem. Statistically, you will have plenty of variation from class to class as to good classes and bad classes. If the general guideline is that you want an "average" student to receive an 85, that is fine, but you will get classes where your students excel abnormally, and you will get classes that are a bit behind the grade, and fluctuate the other way. This is even more common, in fact, because when an entire class is doing badly, they have more trouble getting help from their peers, whereas when a class is excelling as a whole, friendly tutors are easy to come by and the performance of the under-performing students rises.

Forcing any individual class to conform to an exact standard like that flies in the face of statistics. I would take my department head and go talk to the head of the statistics department, and rework the policy so that it takes into account things like standard deviation within a class, the tendency toward positive or negative feedback cycles, and outliers.

This is an academic setting. It can be easily recognized that the existing policy does not meet scientific rigor, and there are experts a few rooms or halls away who can help.

kashim
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    That’s a very nice way of framing the issue. Indeed a blind insistence on a fixed average grade that ignores statistical variations in performance levels between different groups of students would be deeply misguided. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 15:55
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    @DanRomik Remind me to invite you to visit some UK universities if you have sabbatical leave coming up... ;-) – Yemon Choi Sep 06 '18 at 22:47
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    Good points here, I will add (as one who was assigned the lower performing classes & students) that classes below the average also end up covering less material or having to pick or choose which material to cover in depth (because you need to scaffold learning to cover gaps in their understanding). While, those performing above the average allow you to cover more in depth as there is both less scaffolding (less gaps) but you can go more in depth with the fewer students who need that. @DanRomik I have definitely seen this in US universities. – LinkBerest Sep 07 '18 at 11:14
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    Downvoted because what you are saying flies in the face of statistics. The bigger the 2 groups are more likely it is that they will have the same average on same problems. Not to mention that even if differences exist they are not of the magnitude that OP describes. – NoSenseEtAl Sep 13 '18 at 11:22
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    @NoSenseEtAl "The bigger the 2 groups are the more likely it is that they will have the same average" Yes, exactly. The original poster did not post their class size, but many graduate seminars have limits of 15 or less students. That is no where near a high enough sample size to expect any kind of real conformity. In a class that small, each student accounts for 7% of the class average, meaning that just 1 or 2 extraordinary students can completely throw the average. If this were a class of 300, then large numbers apply, but in a small class, there is just too much deviation. – kashim Sep 13 '18 at 22:53
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Based on your description of what took place, it sounds like the reason most of the students will get a grade between 90 and 100 is because according to your best judgment they genuinely deserve it. If that is indeed your belief, you don’t need to do anything other than to publish the grades as they are. After all, the department charged you with teaching a class and grading it in the most fair and accurate way and to the best of your abilities, and that is what you have done. I would simply recommend, before publishing the grades, to make sure that you are not violating any formal policies the department may have that mandate a certain distribution of grades or range of average grades; and, since you are going against the vice chair’s opinion, it may also be advisable to either discuss the matter some more with the vice chair and try to reach a consensus as to the desired course of action, or to make sure you are comfortable with going against the suggestion of your senior and that you will not suffer any adverse career consequences as a result, before proceeding.

If on the other hand the premise that the students in fact deserved the good grades you were going to give them is not something that you strongly believe in or are sure you can defend if challenged, then I think it’s reasonable to follow the vice chair’s suggestion and curve down the students’ grades to reach an average grade that is in keeping with historical norms in the department. After all, if this year’s students are no more talented than, and worked no harder than, last year’s students, then having the average grade remain the same across successive years does sound like the most fair grading methodology.

To summarize, it all depends on your personal convictions regarding what the students deserve. Try to do what you thinks is the most fair for the students, while being attentive to the broader concerns of others in your department.

Dan Romik
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    I think changing the grading structure after the course ends, to make it less generous, is completely inappropriate and can't be defended. It is breach of contract, in my view. The fact that the students don't yet know their grades is immaterial. If I work hard and believe I've done all that was required for a grade and you tell me, no, you get a lower grade, I don't think you can defend the decision. – Buffy Sep 05 '18 at 22:46
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    @Buffy grades haven’t been published yet, so all that’s happening is that OP is making an internal decision between himself as to the calibration of the grades. Instructors do that all the time and it’s neither inappropriate nor requires defending, so I don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s not “no, you get a lower grade”, it’s “here is the numerical score that I’ve decided, after considering all relevant factors, most faithfully represents my evaluation of your work”. – Dan Romik Sep 05 '18 at 23:54
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    From the student's standpoint that sounds like a game with secret rules in which their work and effort is only one component of grading. The other being some hidden and mysterious process. I don't grade like that. My students knew exactly where they were at all times and had an opportunity to improve their grade if they didn't like what they saw. (Retired now, so past tense). I can play evaluation games at a lower level of granularity (this paper is worth 80...) but when the course ends, they get what they earned. No question. – Buffy Sep 06 '18 at 00:00
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    @Buffy by the way, plenty of students “work hard and believe [they]’be done all that was required for a grade” but still don’t deserve that grade. What matters is not what the student believes, but what grade their instructor decides they deserve (assuming the decision is made in good faith), and whether the instructor misrepresented the way his/her grading decisions would be made. Even if OP revises the grades prior to posting them (again, assuming he is making good faith decisions to calibrate grades in pursuit of maximal fairness), there is no evidence to suggest students were misled. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 00:00
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    Still (strongly) disagree. See the note about granularity above. You are dangerously close to making grading purely subjective. You earn what I say you earn. It is a bad practice. There should be no confusion in the student's mind about their standing and progress. – Buffy Sep 06 '18 at 00:04
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    @Buffy thanks for your opinion. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 00:06
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    @Buffy I like and have upvoted both this answer and yours. I take issue with your comment here that Romik is "dangerously close to making grading purely subjective". In the course of my 60 years of teaching I came to believe that grading really is mostly subjective. I know mine was, after staring at spreadsheets with spuriously precise numbers. – Ethan Bolker Sep 06 '18 at 01:23
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    @DanRomik, it seems you're essentially saying, 'do what you've done unless you think you should do something different.' I must be missing your point because that doesn't seem helpful. Maybe I just can't think straight tonight. – CramerTV Sep 06 '18 at 02:00
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    @CramerTV I’m saying “do what you believe is right”, but I can’t recommend a specific course of action since OP did not exactly specify how strongly he believes the students deserve the precise grade he was going to assign them. I suspect he may not even have thought about this question while writing the question. So what my answer tries to do is to clarify what are the parameters on which the correct action to take depends, and asks the OP to figure out those parameters for himself (only he can do that part unfortunately). – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 02:16
  • @DanRomik, fair enough. – CramerTV Sep 06 '18 at 02:24
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    Academia is more the perspective of teachers and then it's easy to say this - but not if you see it from the other perspective. I know if I would go back to being a student, I would 100% prefer @Buffy's approach. I'm sure you also had some students tell you they like your lectures, but that's certainly not because of this practice here. I assume you stand by your methods enough to put it in your course description - your students should know they can solidify their grade by sabotaging other students! – R. Schmitz Sep 06 '18 at 13:47
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    @R.Schmitz you are reading things in my answer that aren’t there. Sabotaging other students? What nonsense. And what do you mean by “your methods”? You know nothing about what “my methods” are. I simply gave some suggestions to a fellow teacher about possible ways to deal with a tricky situation. Many people here also seem to have a profound misunderstanding about what OP is asking about (see my comment below Buffy’s answer), perhaps due to a lack of clarity in the question. By the way, since you accuse me of lacking the perspective of a student, I’d respond by pointing out that students ... – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 15:38
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    ... lack the perspective of a teacher, and in particular one common misconception students have is to think that grades are some scientific, objectively-determined quantity, so that if at one point I contemplated giving someone a 90 for a presentation and then before publishing the grade privately changed my mind and decided an 85 was a more accurate numerical representation of the quality of their performance, then I am committing some evil, mortal sin. Not so. – Dan Romik Sep 06 '18 at 15:45
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    @DanRomik It's very simple: In the given situation, if OP would go with lowering the grades, a student could have prevented getting a lower grade by sabotaging their peers to the point that the average was already 85. What I mean by "your methods" is what you're admitting to do here, but if you lied, I indeed know nothing about them. Concerning "profound misunderstanding about what OP is asking", that might be an explanation: The question is about a teacher who already decided on certain grades for some exceptionally good students. Now the department vice-chair advised them... – R. Schmitz Sep 06 '18 at 17:42
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    ...to get the average closer to or below 85. Take note: 85 is not the historical statistic for this course, it's an arbitrary number for all seminars. The OP is unsure whether to disregard their professional evaluation in favor of achieving that average - but you seem to assume that OP is asking themselves if they graded too highly. On a sidenote, that your grading is not relying on solid criteria which knowledge a student has to display and is more an educated guess, which you won't be able to protect from your biases (gender, race, "teacher's pets" etc) just makes me sad. – R. Schmitz Sep 06 '18 at 17:44
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    @R.Schmitz Your final comment suggests that you have in fact never had to grade any significant amount of work, seeing as you are under the impressions that what you describe is in any way feasible. – Tobias Kildetoft Sep 06 '18 at 19:57
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    @TobiasKildetoft That really sounds like somebody who has given up, but the upvotes seem to agree with you. I'm tired of fighting this pessimistic view, so I'll just accept that I severely overestimated the connection between academic achievements and skill. My partner currently has to work with a Phd from the USA and she's dumb as bread - they lost one of six data points because she didn't read the instructions and was somehow unaware that fresh, undried plant samples in a plastic bag will get moldy if they're not preserved. But somehow, I still believe... – R. Schmitz Sep 07 '18 at 10:49
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    "In the first lesson I explained to the students the components of the grade: attendance, summary writing, and presentation quality." If I were a student that had criteria detailed by my professor for what constituted a high grade, met those criteria, then received a lower grade, I would feel seriously betrayed by the institution and my professor. It's honestly baffling to me that people can suggest lowering grades based on "historical norms" – C Henry Sep 07 '18 at 20:50
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    @DanRomik: given OP’s description of the situation, the statement you suggested in the second comment would be a lie. The truth would be, “This is the grade my boss said you should have instead of my evaluation of your work.” – WGroleau Sep 09 '18 at 01:16
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    Dan, I think@ Buffy's complaint (or, at least, mine) is that by grading this way, you stop taking objective measurements of the quality of a student's work. If I score a 95 on an assignment, that should be the grade I get. But by adjusting the grading scale (with or without me knowing), then if another student also scores a 95, you'd have to go back and change our grades to ~90s to fix the curve. It's no longer an objective measurement of my understanding or ability to perform the work on the syllabus; it's a subjective measurement of my understanding compared to my peers, which isn't the deal – Lord Farquaad Sep 11 '18 at 18:11
  • This is the answer. Setting any number as a target is bonkers. There should be no standard on how difficult the class should be. You have a subject to teach. If you have taught it effectively then your students should be able to reflect that through adequate testing. If adequate testing demonstrates your students as a whole did a great job learning the material then you are a great teacher and should be proud of yourself. – David Baucum Sep 11 '18 at 19:31
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You are in a less than ideal situation.

This happened to one of my undergraduate professors, who I had for a year long course (actually, two back-to-back semester long courses). The department told him his average grade for the course was too high after the first semester. The professor told the department he would change his grading in future years, but would keep the same grading for the second semester course because we were the same group of students. This was my professor's first year teaching at my university. I respect him and still keep in touch with him to this day.

If you are unwilling or unable to stand up to your department, I would turn the question on your department and ask them how to handle the situation and make them own the decision if they want you to lower grades. Also, hopefully you have a mentor at your university who can help you with local politics. I would add the warning you might accidentally burn bridges in your department if you do not handle this well. 

Pikamander2
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Richard Erickson
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Grades are too high for the department - what should I do?

Make the class harder next time you teach it.
Set the bar higher in terms of learning objectives and challenge your students to meet that higher bar. Continue whatever teaching strategies you were using to promote that engagement, learning, and quality work among your students.

If there is a formal policy requiring a certain distribution of grades, obtain that policy and share it with the students. Share with the students what their grades would be without that policy and what they are with it applied. Tell them where the policy comes from (i.e. which authority/group within the university) and, to the extent you understand it (maybe ask the vice chair for some help here) the reasoning behind it. Then the students can organize to lobby for a change in the policy if they want (as other comments/answers have highlighted, there are good reasons to do so).

If there is not a formal policy requiring a lower distribution, issue the grades as they stand and just use this comment from the vice chair as a feedback point for you to raise the bar for the next class.

If you think the bar is already quite high, and students are meeting it with exceptional work, share some of that exceptional work with the vice chair and offer to ask students' permission to highlight their work in appropriate public promotions of the department's educational programs as examples of what students from your department are successfully able to do.

The most important outcome is students gaining knowledge and abilities they didn't have before. If you can show impressive success at that, and the department can show this to the dean, provost, prospective students, current students' potential employers, etc., the educational mission is a demonstrable success.

Regardless of the grading policy, be sure to give the students the positive feedback you feel they deserve. They worked hard and exceeded the standards you set and deserve praise for that.

WBT
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    +1 for "Share the exceptional work", Sometimes an inspiring instructor meets a hard-working, creative class, and a high number of A's is the result. – J.R. Sep 10 '18 at 15:07
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    Back when I was in the military, I was in a Data Processing A school and has the (mis)fortune to be in a class full of people who knew what we were doing. Yes, we totally blew away the lifetime average of the school, and until the program was revamped due to rate changes, we were mentioned to having had set the highest they've seen, and dared other classes to do better.

    Don't change it to a curve. There is nothing in the curriculum or subject matter that has them competing with each other, so that should not be part of the grading.

     – whiskeyfur Sep 10 '18 at 19:22
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Giving high grades doesn't cause grade inflation. Grade inflation is where you give higher grades for the same quality of work than the year before. I assume he does understand that but what he wants is to avoid having to explain in the future why grades went down one year.

I think a good way for your department to handle this would be to have a number of other members grade a random sample of your class and move the average accordingly. Better still would be them at the same time grade some previous years samples so the grades are 'calibrated' based on the previous grades.

henning
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PStag
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If there is more than one class, with more than one teacher/lecturer/tutor marking, then you can cross-mark a sample of each group to establish a baseline. This is known as moderation.

You could do a similar exercise if, in previous years and under the same syllabus/criteria, there is student work available as a comparison.

There is a school of thought that says you should never give 100% for a submission because there is always something that could be improved. I disagree with this because if the student addresses all the criteria and meets or even exceeds the standard set then they deserve the credit.

It's like going to work, doing your job to the best of your ability, delivering what was asked (or more) and your employer saying that you're only going to be paid 90% of your salary because there is always something that you could have done better. Nobody would stand for that.

It's the same flawed argument that if you grade a large enough sample of students on a normal distribution then half of them are below average. You don't fail half of the students on this basis because there are modifiers to the sample - not everyone has to take the class, the group of students in the class have progressed to a certain level and those who could not meet the standard are no longer in the group, etc. The students in the class are already at the upper end of the distribution.

The students should not be penalised for delivering what was asked. I would discuss how to address it in the future but submit these grades as they are.

Mick
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Let's set aside your vice chair's use of the term "grade inflation". No, that term means something else, as PStag has already pointed out. The important thing to know that he's telling you your grade distribution is off from department norms. He's saying he thinks you're an "easy A".

It's up to you to decide what to do with that information. He may or may not be right and you may or not care, especially depending on whether it's a grade on an assignment where everyone gets an A (so what) versus a final grade in a course.

You're the instructor, you decide your students' grades. This is solely your responsibility and your call, nobody else's. If you're satisfied your grading is fair and correct, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. You have to call 'em as you see 'em.

But most instructors do like to keep their grading in line with their colleagues'. Most of us would like to avoid students thinking there's a grade advantage to one instructor over another. Also, there are a lot more students than instructors and we expect that with a class-sized sample, we can be more confident of what the distribution of A's and B's should be than of whether an assignment or exam we just wrote will turn out to be harder or easier than we expected.

So you might reach out to your colleagues or bring up the question at your next department meeting, asking others in the department how they set their curves. It might be helpful to know more about how your colleagues decide grades.

But let me get to the real bottom line: If everyone gets an A, it is likely, as WBT argues, that the material was too easy. It is your job to match the material to your students so as to be able to make that distinction. When I read your description of the assignment, it sounded easy to me and I wasn't surprised by what happened.

If it were me, I'd make the project more difficult somehow, add more structure, more hoops for the students to jump through, a more fine-grained rubric with pickier grading, whatever it takes to push the students enough that you can differentiate their performances.

henning
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Nicole Hamilton
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  • +1 on all counts. I'll note that being "demanding" and being "generous" aren't inconsistent. But it usually takes a smidgen of "inspiring". – Buffy Sep 07 '18 at 12:17
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    "we expect that with a class-sized sample, we can be more confident of what the distribution of A's and B's should be"... I was disabused of this notion a few years ago. I had two sections of the same course, meeting on the same days, receiving identical lectures and exams, etc. On the (uniform department) final exam, 23% passed in one section and 60% in the other. (This being consistent with other assignments/exams; N = 25 in each section.) I'm pretty sure that student performance is often dependent on the section they enter. – Daniel R. Collins Sep 10 '18 at 05:37
  • @DanielR.Collins Twenty-five is a very small class. – Nicole Hamilton Sep 10 '18 at 10:41
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If the grades are deserved as you state, and within the marking framework for the course, then hold the line and keep the grades as they are. It is not the fault of the students that they all achieved well within the framework that was set before the semester started, therefore, they should not be 'retrospectively punished' in their grades for doing what they were asked to do, and ultimately doing it well.

This situation does pose a series of opportunities:

  1. Restructuring the coursework/assignments
  2. Reframing acheivement levels in the marking criteria
  3. Department wide review to ensure parity across the student assignments for different courses

In all my lecturing roles, these periodic reviews were undertaken on a fairly regular basis e.g. every year for small adjustments, every 5 years for a full course overhaul.

In your case, as I said, you must maintain the grades as they were deserved in this instance, but for next years cycle of teaching, make sure you have set clear expectations in what is needed to be done to acheive each grading level through a marking criteria matrix (and make sure the students can access this), and structure the coursework, so that additional work can earn extra credit. Students at different levels of abilities will then work at their appropriate level and that will be reflected in a broader distribution of grades.

If however, they all complete the work within the framework you set, complete the extra credit work, and all at a high standard - then they deserve the high grades.

10B
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The sentiment of the vice-chair is really quite alarming and very sad: He should have said "What have you done? The engagement with your course is fantastic! I think it would be really valuable if we could have a discussion about your overall approach, and your methods of teaching and assessment and see if we can implement some permanent changes for the seminar in future years, and perhaps on a wider scale in the department."

Of course that's in a perfect world where everyone has plenty of time for workshopping and professional development, and the vice-chair isn't stressed out and run off their feet and isn't able to see past the next fire they have to put out. :)

That, said, I think you should take this tack: Basically, talk about how happy you are with how it's gone, with how engaged the students are, and how this certainly gives you the perfect opportunity to increase the difficulty/scope next time and that you have some guidelines/recommendations for the course in the future to help make it so effective every time it's offered.

Basically, act slightly naive, but completely positively: relentlessly keeping focus on the benefits that have come solely from your hard work, and those that are still coming

Esco
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It's a tough situation that you are in... You feel like your class deserved the grades you gave them, while the department wants to limit the grades.

I assume that you had a grading rubric for the various subtasks? If yes, great...If no, ok too. There's a difference either way. The good thing for a rubric is you can later point to it and justify grading -- both positive and negative.

My thoughts are to either go to your supervisor and say that this class deserves the higher grades because while people were required to do X they did Y, which was beyond the scope of what they had to do, so they deserve more.

Or, re-calibrate the grades so the people who minimally met the requirements would get an 85%..if they exceeded the minimum, they'll get more -- and rightly so.

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The question of distribution of a good (in this case grades) has been extensively discussed in public finance. Warning: if you consider the way economists usually handle questions of distribution cynical, you may not want to continue reading and save yourself from throwing a fit.

Here is how this problem would be addressed from a public economics standpoint. Consider obtaining data on the performance of the students in other classes. If the students consistently scored highly, you may present this as evidence to the department that high grades are justified. If your course is new and has an exotic title you may have a sample of students that is not representative of the overall student pool. This violates the idea that grades should be independent across courses but throwing away (potentially) useful data would be irrational.

However, you may also find out that your students actually perform very poorly in other classes. In this case, you may ask yourself the question whether the criteria by which you score the course are likely to be uncorrelated (or even negatively correlated) with performance in other courses. For example, if you teach an acting class to econ majors...

A third reason why students performed well could be that your teaching style is very motivating or the topic of intrinsic interest to the students. In this case, you need to decide for yourself (or by department policy) what you consider the function of grading the students. (This is where the cynical bit starts.) If you consider grades only to be a job market signal of a student's ability, you may not want to give high grades if the achievement was not due to ability but due to your teaching style/course content. Notice that in most countries grades have exactly that function. Better grades mean (on average) easier admission to further degrees, more job interviews, better jobs. If instead you consider grades to be a measure of the degree to which a student understands the material, you may insist on giving high grades. Just remember that in this case you are perhaps slightly distorting the job market outcomes.

Now here is a strange bit from public finance. You may also care about interpersonal equity between students. If you reward students with high grades, then students who could not attend your class (class size restrictions, limited information) are disadvantaged. Here things become a bit complex. First of all, you would need to check if your student sample is currently worse off or better off than the remaining student pool. Next, you need to balance the efficiency loss due to a worse signal against a potential improvement in interpersonal equity. Luckily, if you do not have any information about the expected lifetime income of your student pool, you may simply ignore this aspect.

tl;dr: I would be highly skeptical of my own grades if they were to vastly differ from the department's and consider it important to find out the reasons for such differences. Once you have found out the reason, you will know whether you want to act on it.

HRSE
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This is your first problem:

I feel this is somewhat unfair to the students who worked hard for their presentations.

You think just about your students. What about students that got 80 for the work that you are willing to give 95? Is that fair to them?

Your second problem:

Course is too easy. Now it is too late to fix this, but for the future you should make sure students have hard time "maxing out" easily. Not to torture them for fun, but to make sure that the spectrum of outputs is recognized(instead of half of the results piling on around 95).

This brings us to your current situation. You should rescale the grades, but unfortunately this will hurt some students because since course is easy precision of the measurement was bad. But it is unfeasible for you to do anything about it now.

NoSenseEtAl
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  • It is absolutely not clear that the course was too easy. it could be just a graduate course or a course with good people. Good outcomes does not necessarily mean that the course was to easy. If it is the courses goal to aquire a certain skill and everybody managed to do that, why should one make it artificially more difficult? – user111388 Oct 02 '20 at 13:09