While colleges across the country have been accused of grade inflation, professors and administrators at Hopkins disagree about whether or not the University's grading policies have followed the same trend.
Dr. Adam Sheingate, director of Undergraduate Studies for the Political Science Department, felt that overall grades were higher for students today than in the past.
"I don't think it's any question that a C is not a median grade anymore and a B is probably the median grade today," he said. "Whether that's grade inflation is one question, and whether that's a problem is another question."
According to Paula Burger, dean of Undergraduate Education and Vice Provost, 26.7 percent of undergraduates from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences earned Dean's List honors this past fall.
In 2002, the percentage of students receiving Dean's List was 22.3 percent. The criteria for receiving Dean's List is to have a 3.5 GPA or higher with a minimum of 14 credits total (at least 12 of which are graded).
Burger noted that the increase was not necessarily indicative of grade inflation.
"The number of students earning Dean's List has increased, but that is what one might expect, given the increase in the overall quality of entering students over that same period," she wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
According to GPA data from the Greek Life Web site, the average undergraduate GPA over the past four years has been 3.23. The data did not show a significant fluctuation either upward or downward over the period.
The University does not have any grading standards that professors must follow. Instead, the administration allows individual departments to decide. Many of these departments leave it up to the professors.
"That is absolutely a matter of individual faculty discretion. That's about the last thing we would ever propose to tell faculty what to do," Paula Burger, dean of Undergraduate Education and vice provost, said.
According to Burger, Hopkins has not instituted any policies to set a fixed number of A grades.
"Some years ago when there were conversations nationally about grade inflation . . . I think Princeton faculty actually did decide that there were too many As being given out and they approved a policy where they told every department to restrict the number of As," she said.
"I don't think our faculty would ever propose to do that."
Sheingate stated that his department left grading guidelines up to the professors.
"We don't have a grading policy in the Political Science Department. Grading is at the discretion of each individual faculty member," he said. "Each individual course or each individual professors establishes those expectations."
According to Sheingate, grades in his course are assigned on the basis of not only effort but also quality of work, something he felt was important.
"I would say that effort is only one component of a grade," he said. "In my classes an A is only reserved for truly outstanding performance. . . For me a C is really more of a minimal effort grade."
The mathematics department, on the other hand, does set grading guidelines for professors.
According to Richard Brown, director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Mathematics, the department created "a general guideline for our professors."
"Our grading policy is set up much more in terms of plateaus you can reach rather than whether you can be in the top percentage," he said.
Despite the existence of a departmental guideline, Brown noted that professors still had freedom to create their own stipulations.
"There is a lot of discretion," he said. "Professors generally have a fair amount of freedom in determining what it means to get an A."
Even though there are no University-wide grading guidelines, Burger felt that this did not lead to grade inflation.
"Frankly it [grade inflation] was never raised here," she said. "We have awfully good students and the quality of our students continues to increase."
Ryan Fay, a sophomore, approved of individual teachers setting their own grading policies.
"I think that individual teachers [setting] grading policies is OK, because I think teachers just cater around their own style," he said. "I haven't heard of many unfair cases, so I think it's working well."
