Grade Inflation

This is a little outside my usual topics, but I think about various problems from time to time, and come up with solutions I haven't heard anywhere else.  

So the first responsibility of schools and colleges is to educate their students.  One of the ways they motivate their students is by distinguishing between poor work and quality work via grades.  But they have a financial incentive to inflate their grades because their students are in some sense their customers at the same time.  If your plumber criticized you to others, you would be less likely to call that plumber again, and less likely to recommend that plumber.  So the plumber has some incentive not to criticize you to others.  Colleges are subject to the same market forces. 

So grades have a tendency to creep upwards over time, which is called grade inflation.  Organizations asking for GPA's come to expect inflated grades, which provides additional pressure to inflate grades.

And employers and grad schools looking at grades may not be fully aware as to what extent any school has grade inflation.  For example, an A from a school that grades easily may not be as meaningful as a C from another school which grades evenly on a spectrum from F to A.

So schools can supply class ranking on transcripts.  This has some value, but it's not fully accurate.  A student who takes care only to take courses from professors who grade easily could have a higher GPA than a student who takes courses from a professor who grades fairly.

Professors, however, wish to maintain control over the grades they give.  If colleges demanded that profs give a certain percentage of F's, D's, C's and B's, they would strongly object.

But the grades different professors provide different levels of information.  The grades of a professor who gives his students all A's provides no information at all, whereas a professor who grades evenly from F to A provides maximum information.

So a college could convert the grades to a percentile based on the information provided.  The students of a professor who submitted all A's would receive a 50 for that course, whereas the students of a professor who gave an equal number of F's, D's, C's B's, and A's would receive 10, 30, 50, 70 and 90 respectively.

So in addition to their GPA appearing on their transcripts, students would see their percentile averages. And employers and grad schools asking for GPA's would also receive cumulative percentiles for the students four years, which would be a more meaningful measure than just a cumulative GPA.   

High achieving students would then have a motivation to pick course with professors who gave meaningful grades, and this would provide some pressure on the easy graders to provide more meaningful grades, instead of the other way around.