Northwestern’s report card should have a couple of high grades, and one big F.

Research and teaching are the two main purposes of a university. Research expands knowledge, and NU gets an A here. Teaching communicates what we learn from research, and we have our highs and lows, but overall we deserve a good mark.

But part of teaching is evaluating performance so that our students know how they have done relative to their peers and can communicate this to graduate schools and employers. And we have no real standards for grading, which hurts everyone. Grades are too high on the average, and too variable across classes.

Here NU fails (and most of our peer institutions also deserve Fs).

We are giving C students B’s and removing the incentive for our best students to work hard for excellence, when merely being in the top third of a class or worse can bring a top grade. Graduate schools and employers increasingly discount grades that colleges give in favor of test scores.

We are destroying the ability of grades to be an incentive for hard work in pursuit of excellence and to be a signal of that excellence once obtained.

NU’s students get better each year, and this is captured by the rising prestige of the NU degree. Grades should indicate how a student does relative to this average quality. A grade of A should mean well above average, B above average, C near average, D below average and F failing.

As things are now, with some school GPAs tending toward 3.5 and above, the great can hardly be distinguished from the good or even the average.

Furthermore, we are misleading our students about where their best abilities lie. Imagine a student last fall who was in the top 29th percentile in Political Science 220, the 30th percentile in my Economics 201 and the 40th in Sociology 110. She would literally have received a B in political science, a B+ in economics and an A- in sociology. If she believes the grades we give her, what should she think is her greatest strength?

I don’t want to give my students lower average grades just because they were foolish enough to take my class, nor do I want to be luring people into economics when they really are better at other disciplines. But when I give my grades, I don’t know how others are giving theirs. In economics, we try to follow our historical averages, but we don’t really enforce that.

Hard grading is hard work. It’s difficult to draw distinctions among student performances, and students come in to complain if their grades are lower than they expected (and leave us alone if better than expected, except for those who ask for recommendations).

What could fix matters?

Instead of faculty assigning grades, we could just rank all our students in order of performance, and NU could assign fixed proportions of each grade, perhaps with dispensations made for size of class and level. Or we could include the class GPA with each grade on a transcript (that B doesn’t look so hot in a class with a GPA of 3.2 — then it looks like a C.)

Academics, including those here, claim to be on a mission to discover and communicate the truth. Unfortunately, their methods for grading create lies and spread confusion.