Stanford Faces Tightening of Grading Policy : Education: The Faculty Senate will vote on a proposal to restore use of failing grades. Current standards are among the most liberal in the nation.

Stanford University senior Cory Sammons knew he was in over his head as soon as he opened the final exam in his introductory physics class two years ago.

Juggling three other classes, holding down a part-time job and playing on the ice hockey team, the 22-year-old engineering major had not spent much time reading his textbook or memorizing formulas. So Sammons nonchalantly did what many Stanford students do in such a situation--he deliberately flunked the test.

If the faculty gets its way later this week, the cavalier attitude here toward bad marks will end with the return to Stanford of the failing grade.

At Stanford, unlike most colleges and universities, Fs never appear on a student’s transcript. Students here also enjoy a host of other relaxed grading policies, including the ability to retake classes an unlimited number of times to get higher grades.

As a result, more than 90% of all letter grades are A or B, and the median grade in undergraduate courses last year was an A-minus. Cs and Ds are virtually nonexistent.

Such statistics have prompted the faculty to propose a thorough overhaul of Stanford’s grading system that will reinstitute a failing grade and limit the number of times a student can retake a class.

“Our fond hope is that this will make the C a respectable grade again,” and reduce the number of A and B grades given, said Gail Mahood, chairwoman of the committee proposing the changes.

Under the proposal, there would still be no F grade. A failing grade would be known as NP, for not passed. Also, university transcripts would become all-inclusive dossiers of a student’s academic successes and shortcomings.

“The Stanford transcript is unique in that everyone knows that there’s a lot of information not reflected in it,” said Stanford Registrar Roger Printup at a recent meeting with students. Employers and graduate schools “often have a lingering suspicion that maybe something else is there that they should know about.”

Consequently, graduate schools put little stock in Stanford transcripts, giving more weight to standardized test scores and personal recommendations, Mahood said.

No major college or university, other than Brown University, has such liberal grading policies, she said.

Economics may also be motivating the proposed changes. The university’s chemistry department estimates that it spent $85,000 last year to pay for extra teaching assistants for students who repeated introductory chemistry courses.

The increasing number of retakes is wasting faculty time and driving senior professors away from teaching introductory-level classes, Mahood said.

Students, however, have a different view of the issue. With the competition stiff for spots in medical and law schools, many Stanford undergraduates scorn any grade lower than an A. Pre-medical students frequently retake their core classes in chemistry and biology to replace B and B+ grades with A’s.

The proposed changes have been the talk of campus in the past few weeks, from town hall meetings with faculty to spirited dining hall discussions.

David Sherman, 20, a sophomore economics major, said the new policy does not sit well with him. Last fall, thinking that he might be interested in majoring in international relations, Sherman took a German language class. But toward the end of the quarter Sherman realized that his true calling was in economics. Facing a likely C in the class, Sherman dropped it just before the final exam--a move that would be prohibited under the revised policy.

“I still learned a lot, but I was grateful for the freedom to not be burdened by a poor grade in a class I was just trying out,” he said. If he had gotten the C, Sherman feels it would have hurt his chances of getting into graduate school.

While students like Sherman have been vocal in their opposition to the changes, many on campus, according to a recent poll by the Stanford Daily, said they favor reinstating the failing grade that was dropped in 1970. However, students overwhelmingly oppose other components of the proposal, including measures to limit course retakes and stiffen course-dropping policies, the poll found.

Although student response has been mixed, the faculty staunchly supports the proposed changes. A university survey of professors last year found that about three-quarters of all faculty support bringing back the failing grade.

But Jeremy Cohen, a professor of communication and a member of the grading committee, said he believes the failing grade will harm students, not fix grade inflation. With a failing grade and more stringent course-dropping policies, students will be discouraged from taking challenging classes, he said.

“If faculty want to give Cs, nothing is stopping them from doing so now,” he said. “This proposal is simply going to limit students’ ability to experiment in a broad liberal arts tradition.”

Grade inflation is not unique to Stanford, of course. It has been a topic of discussion in higher education for many years. Northwestern University’s school of arts and sciences gives 88% of all grades in the A and B range. A’s account for 40% of the grades given at Princeton University. And at Harvard University, Harvard magazine reported last year, 43% of all grades there were A’s.

Stanford’s Faculty Senate is scheduled to vote on the proposal Thursday.

If it is approved, Sammons said he and other students will no longer be able to take “the easy way out.” But, he said, that may not be such a bad idea after all.

“I found out later the class average was so low that if I had finished the physics exam, I probably would have done pretty well,” he said.