This past semester, grade modifiers took effect for 1000, 6000, and 7000 level courses. Grade modifiers add A-, B+, B-, C+, C-, and D+ to the course professors’ grading lexicon, to be used at a professor’s discretion. Though the change for this year primarily affects freshman and graduate students, in Fall 2006, 2000-level courses will be able to be graded with modifiers, and in Fall 2007, so will 4000-level courses. This is significantly different from the implementation of most academic policy changes at RPI, which are usually included in the catalog for incoming classes and do not apply to upperclassmen.
According to Sharon Kunkel, the RPI registrar, 97 percent of eligible undergraduate engineering courses and 44 percent of eligible graduate courses used grading modifiers this past fall. She indicated that “More than half of RPI’s students are on the Dean’s List—with a GPA of over 3.0 … and that number has not changed much.” The cumulative undergraduate GPA for Fall 2004 was 3.09, and following the introduction of modifiers, the cumulative undergraduate GPA in Fall 2005 was 3.08.
The discussion on grade modifiers began almost four years ago. Kunkel mentioned that the Faculty Senate’s Curriculum Committee began studying grade modifiers in the wake of a discussion related to grade inflation. They benchmarked other institutions’ fairly wide use of the system and recommended its implementation at RPI.
The Student Senate then sought student feedback and opinions on the proposal. Class of 2006 Senator Mike Goldenberg led the effort as then-chair of the Academic Affairs Committee. Among several other initiatives, a forum was held to discuss grade modifiers. Kunkel recalled, “One comment that stuck out in my mind was from a transfer student who remarked that at her previous college (that used grade modifiers), there was more incentive to work hard to move from a B to a B+ or even an A-.”
On March 24, 2004, the Student Senate unanimously condemned the grade modifier idea. Later that semester, the Faculty Senate approved the proposal following a vote by 43.6 percent of the faculty in which 74.8 percent approved of the system. Goldenberg felt that there was a certain “lack of foresight by the people behind [grade modifiers] as demonstrated by the lack of a policy requiring all sections of a course, such as Physics I, to have the same grading policy.” He continued, “top students are now going to be less competitive when they apply to medical, law, and graduate schools because maintaining their grades will take away from their undergraduate research and other areas of community involvement.”
This past October, despite a “major system upgrade” to the software used by the Registrar’s office, the grading system itself worked with only minor problems. Kunkel indicated that early on, several professors called asking about the use of modifiers in their classes, but no further problems with the system were reported.
Student reactions to grade modifiers seem mixed. Marcus Griep ’07 said that grade modifiers (which will affect him this semester), “won’t be a huge problem for me … but I sometimes cut it close with grades, which may hurt my GPA a little.”
Brian Cass ’07 said “I think it’s a good thing … it helps distinguish grades … but at the same time, [modifiers] will disperse student’s GPA’s more widely than they are now.”
