The road to a new A+ policy

Complaints about Columbia’s A+ policy are nothing new. With every new class of Phi Beta Kappa inductees comes a new round of anonymous Bwog comments, bashing the system and the “injustice” it breeds. And, to be sure, those comments are not always without merit. As it stands today, most schools have transitioned away from the system used in Morningside Heights. Indeed, Columbia and Cornell are the only Ivy League schools that still award A+ grades, weighted at 4.33 for calculating GPA. It is clear that Columbia needs to change its A+ policy. The question is how.

The Office of Academic Affairs has declined to reveal the precise distribution of A+ grades, but a report released by Columbia to the Law School Admissions Council reveals that the average GPA among Columbia’s undergraduate population is a 3.55, and that about 3 percent of Columbia undergraduates have GPAs above 4.0.

The arguments against the A+ are as convincing as they are numerous. The thrust of these complaints is that the best students in a hard science are more likely to receive an A+ than are the best students in the humanities, and that this discrepancy unfairly undermines humanities majors during the selection processes for Latin honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Although the selection process for both does involve subjective elements such as recommendations, the system is still heavily dependant upon GPA. In order to be eligible for valedictorian or salutatorian, for example, a student must have a GPA above 4.0. The process seems even more unfair when one considers that certain academic divisions, such as the Chinese department, have standing policies not to give out the grade of A+.

What can be done? There would seem to be two options.

The first would involve eliminating the A+ designation entirely, so that the grade of A is the highest available. This policy—used at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth—would guarantee that the strongest students in every class receive the same grade.

Alas, in a world where A-range grades (A+, A, A-) are handed out to nearly half the students in every class, the complete elimination of the A+ removes the ability of the professor to indicate that a student’s work is truly exceptional. Under this system, the student at the 76th percentile of a large lecture would receive the same grade as the top student in the class.

The second option would be to keep the A+ but to weigh it as a 4.0, and to require that an A+ be somehow justified by a professor. Such is the system at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, where professors may only assign an A+ after explicitly explaining to the administration why the standards for an A have been surpassed. The use of such a roadblock, such that assigning an A+ becomes patently inconvenient for a professor, has gone a long way in limiting the use of the grade to the few situations who truly deserve it.

Adopting this policy would also extend an advantage to Columbia students who apply for admissions to graduate schools. Many admissions boards, such as the Law School Admissions Council, will reweigh an A+ as a 4.33, no matter how it is treated by the student’s university. Thus, the nominal use of the designation would give Columbia applicants an inter-school leg-up in graduate school admissions, without contributing to the intra-school unfairness that has caused such strife at Columbia.

There remains the difficult question of how to navigate Columbia’s bureaucracy on an issue as complicated and loaded as university grading. Two years ago, when the call for A+ reform was at its fever pitch, Barnard Professor Herbert Sloan was quoted as suggesting that changes were “under consideration by the relevant faculty and administrative bodies.” Exactly what that meant was unclear, and it remains so today.

Although the exact chain of authority is unsurprisingly nebulous, it would seem that the committee with jurisdiction is the “Task Force on Undergraduate Education”—a deeply ambiguous, interdisciplinary panel of professors who have spent the last four years “[reviewing] broad aspects of undergraduate education.” Despite the committee’s shrouded and opaque inner workings, no one could say they haven’t gotten things done—both the sweeping 2009 changes in the Major Cultures requirement and the university’s response to the 2007 hunger strike were based on the recommendations of the Task Force.

If the Task Force wanted to change the A+ policy, they could. But, like so many other decisions affecting Columbia undergraduates, this one is likely to be made behind locked doors in Low Library. And so, for those of you who are bothered, know that the solution does not lie in anonymous internet comments or half-baked complaints to your friends. There is a way to get this changed—simply contact one of the 35 professors on the Task Force, ask to have a chat, and change their minds.

James Dawson is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He is a Columbia University tour guide. Low Politics runs alternate Tuesdays.