Dispatch box: Academic dis-integrity at McGill?

By JEREMY COOPERSTOCK

Published: Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Letter grades of A and B typically correspond, respectively, to evaluations of "excellent" and "good," while C is considered mediocre or borderline. Such distinctions are all the more important in professional disciplines such as medicine and engineering, where students, following graduation, often end up working in safety-critical areas. If given the choice between flying on an aircraft where the flight control electronics were designed by an A student versus a C student, the response for most would be obvious.
It is normally the prerogative and responsibility of the instructor to evaluate the learning of students by assigning such letter grades. To maintain academic integrity, these should be assigned fairly and consistently. However, last year, following the complaints of two students who received C+ grades in my 500-level class on artificial intelligence, the dean of Engineering abandoned such principles and inflated each of these marks to a B. The rationale for doing so was that according to the undergraduate calendar, "In Engineering, letter grades are assigned according to the grading scheme adopted by the professor in charge of a particular course," though no such policy is articulated in the graduate calendar.
This would be quite sensible were it not for the fact that most professors in Electrical and Computer Engineering do likewise, yet their grading decisions have not been overruled. A survey of grading practices found that only a relatively small percentage of 500-level courses actually follow the graduate studies guidelines-37.5 per cent of courses used a threshold that was within one percentage point of the suggested 65 for a B--and of the courses that do not follow these guidelines, none of the professors informed their classes of the numeric-to-letter grade scale used. Moreover, the grade inflation from C+ to B fails to consider whether or not the students' performance actually warranted the higher marks. If the graduate studies' formula was specified as the rule at the start of term, the difficulty of assignments and final examination would have been increased, and the resulting letter grades would likely have ended up the same.
For the graduate students in question, the difference between a C+ and a B is significant. The latter is a pass while the former requires that they retake the course. While this certainly explains why these students might complain, raising their grades is not the solution... it is simply unfair.
In the interests of academic integrity, the faculty must apply its policies consistently, not just to a few students, nor to all the students in one class, but to all the 500-level classes in Engineering.

Further details concerning this matter are available at www.cim.mcgill.ca/~jer/courses/grading.html. Jeremy Cooperstock is an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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