UCI’s New A-Plus Grade to Accentuate Positive Performances

UC Irvine biologist Howard Lenhoff rewards his most outstanding students with “lollipop-A’s” a mark of A, accompanied by a lollipop, the offer of a mentor relationship and a letter of recommendation.

“These are my select students,” said Lenhoff, who is chairman of UCI’s Academic Senate. “I want to reward their performance and give them an honor to work for.”

Beginning this fall, however, Lenhoff and other UCI instructors will have a new grade option to distinguish the truly exceptional students from the merely very good. An A-plus will top the grade scale, but the question of what sets an A student apart from an A-plus performer will be left to each instructor.

The new grade, recently approved by the Senate’s Academic Council, is to be used infrequently, to note extraordinary performance. Although the superlative will carry no additional grade points, it is likely to provide top students with a valuable edge in the competition for jobs, graduate school admission and fellowships.

“It is something that is recorded on a student’s transcript that says, ‘This student is really superior,’ ” Lenhoff said. “It allows us to give students a pat on the back that lasts.”

Lenhoff, who estimated that in a lecture class of 400 he might award a handful of A-plus marks, is among many UCI academics who welcome a way to reward stand-out ability. Others, though, caution that increasing the level of recognition risks grade inflation.

“There are times when you get such an extraordinary piece of work that you don’t feel that any of the grades in the normal range can do it justice,” said Murray Krieger, a distinguished professor and director of the UC Humanities Research Institute at UCI. “Anyone who has been blessed by having such a student would feel frustration at not being able to give a special mark of excellence beyond excellence.”

Krieger, who said he has used A-pluses to reward undergraduate and graduate papers so good that they were worthy of professional publication, opposes use of the new grade to rate an entire quarter of effort.

“The A-plus really confesses that there are too many A’s around, and how are we going to tell who is really good?” Krieger asked. “Is there no one on the faculty who would abuse this? Of course there are some.”

University faculty members, who traditionally enjoy great independence to set grades, will be free to choose whether and when to award A-pluses.

“I would never use it,” said Harold Moore, dean of the School of Biological Sciences. The college, considered one of the toughest at UCI, counts nearly a quarter of all undergraduates as majors.

“We grade pretty hard in this school, and that generally means that 10% of a class might get an A. In my 24 years of experience, I have not seen someone who is so far above the top that they would merit an A-plus. It’s basically cosmetic. It doesn’t carry any value. And I think it would lower the value of an A.”

Political science professor Mark Petracca, who has from 400 to 600 students, said he would be likely to award an A-plus “once or twice a year.” Unless an instructor includes the A-plus on a strict distribution curve, guaranteeing that a certain percentage of students in each class will get the highest mark regardless of actual performance, the mark is not likely to proliferate, he said.

“The A-plus possesses a mystical quality that suggests even if you were grading on a curve, you would use it infrequently,” he said. “If you use it to give students a symbolic reward, without additional grade points, you won’t inflate the GPA.”

The roots of the new grade policy date back more than a decade, when the faculty senate sought to make grades more precise. The university’s curriculum-setting body inserted plus and minus grades into the straightforward scale of A, B, C, D and F, but did not provide for an A-plus. The result was a new numerical grade point that set the value of an A, at the top of the scale, at 4.0 and C, in the middle, at 2.0. The new C-minus was worth 1.8 and was no longer considered a passing grade.

“It became punitive,” Lenhoff said. “A student who would have gotten a C now gets a C-minus and no longer passes the course. If we are going to balance the scale, those who do much better than the average A should get a plus. It’s logical.”

Lenhoff advocates making the top reward even sweeter. Eventually, he would like to see an A-plus grade worth 4.2 for grade-point purposes. The idea is not radical; Johns Hopkins University allows a grade of H--for honor--worth 5.0 on a scale that ordinarily goes only to A, or 4.0.

In the UC system, four other campuses allow A-plus grades, but, like UCI, limit grade-point credit to 4.0. Now that A-plus is part of the grading repertoire at UCI, the debate will turn next to the issue of weighting that mark, Lenhoff believes.

“I don’t think that would inflate grades,” he said. “It would reward rare performance.”