What do these have in common?

1. What do these have in common? • Looking over a fellow student’s shoulder during an exam • Telling a police officer your speedometer is broken • Omitting some income on IRS forms • Claiming that you didn’t touch the ball before it went out of bounds, when you did • Submitting a term paper that someone else wrote • Using your grandmother’s death as a reason for a late homework assignment, . . . for the 5th time • Using a ball, bat, racquet, etc. that isn’t approved

2. Ethics of Grading +/- Grading, Grade Inflation, Teacher Evaluations

3. Panelists • Dr. Mark Richter (past Faculty Senate Chair) • Background for the decision to use +/- grading • Ashley Hoyer (SGA) • Student Perspective • Don Simpson (Enrollment Mgt & Services) • Effects of the +/- grading • Dr. Arden Miller • Effects on grade inflation • Effects on teacher evaluations • Dr. Tom Tomasi (Academic Integrity Council) • Effects on violations of our AI Policy

4. Plus/Minus GradingOverview for Academic Integrity Week“Ethics of Grading” Panel Discussion

5. Implementation of Plus/Minus Grading The plus/minus grading system will be implemented in fall 2009. Faculty will have the choice to utilize plus/minus grades, but they are required to indicate their grading scale on their syllabus. The policy will apply to transfer work as well as to courses taken at Missouri State. In general, a “C-“ grade will not be acceptable when a prerequisite requires a “C” or higher. The academic status policy that requires undergraduate students to have a 2.00 GPA (and graduate students to have a 3.00) to be in good standing will remain unchanged.

6. Comparison of Credit Point Multipliers

7. How will the plus/minus grading system affect my GPA? It is likely that fewer students will graduate with a 4.00 grade point average. With that exception, the implementation of a plus/minus system should have no significant impact on grade point averages.

8. Example Which will result in a higher GPA?

9. Both result in the same GPA

10. Will the change affect my eligibility to renew my scholarships and/or financial aid? Your eligibility to renew your scholarships and aid will be based on your GPA. Unless your scholarship requires that you maintain a 4.00 GPA to renew (the highest GPA required for renewal of university scholarships is 3.50), the change is likely to have no impact on your renewal eligibility. An exception policy has been established.

11. Scholarship Renewal and Plus/Minus Grading The University is implementing a plus/minus grading policy for the fall 2009 semester. Scholarship renewal criteria are not being changed.   While we do not expect the change in the grading policy to have a significant effect on scholarship renewal, students who can document that the plus/minus grading policy adversely affected their grade point average and caused them to lose their scholarship will be granted an exception by the Scholarship Coordinator. This applies only to students who began prior to the fall 2009 semester.  Exceptions will only be granted if students can show that their cumulative grade point average, if recalculated under a straight A, B, C, D, F scale, would meet the renewal criteria.  In the recalculation, an A- becomes an A, a B+ and a B- both become B’s, and so on.  The recalculation must be done on the student’s entire record, not just the record for one semester or one year.

12. New Repeat Policy This new policy, effective with courses taken fall 2009 and beyond, will allow students to repeat any class, regardless of the grade and number of attempts, with no special permission required. All attempts at the course and the grades earned (including those resulting in w and Z) will appear on the transcript. The grade from the most recent attempt at the course (excluding W, I, or Z) will be the one used in GPA calculations. For example, if a student takes the course four times and gets a D, B, C and W, in that order, then the C would be their official grade. Also, it is important to note that the course credits (earned hours) only count once for graduation purposes. The policy will apply to transfer credit as well as to courses taken at Missouri State University.

13. Repeat Policy (continued) The new repeat policy will apply only to courses taken for the first time during or after the fall 2009 semester. Academic history will not be changed. The only instances in which courses taken during or after the fall 2009 semester will replace grades earned prior to fall 2009 are those in which students have taken a course only once and earned a D or F. That is, in those instances the “old” repeat policy will be applied. As a result of this policy, students have more potential than in the past to raise their cumulative grade point averages.

14. Questions?

15. Consumerism is the root cause of grade inflation.

16. Grades By College

17. Does consumerism and the university-as-a-business put learning second to administrative goals? administration initiatives to have schools with high retention. popularity of faculty (student evaluation) as a basis for awards, promotion, and merit pay desire to be popular leads to faculty permissiveness

18. Conclusion: We can do a better job of predicting evaluations with the grades given than we can from knowing the faculty ratings in another course in the same semester.

19. Conclusion: TAs and Per Course faculty give higher grades and are rated more highly. As proportion of regular faculty decline, grade inflation will increase.

20. Ethical Behavior • Marsh (1987): Surveys showed faculty perceive ratings are biased by leniency and course workload. • Retention, Merit pay, promotion influenced by ratings • Making non-tenured & per-course most vulnerable • Result is grade inflation and permissiveness

21. Fail no one; and never chastise for cheating or lazy behavior On a scale of one to five, where the faculty average is four, a one has three times more impact on the mean than a five. Permissiveness is often the greatest for less motivated students.

22. Comments?

23. Will +/- Grading Affect the Incidence of Policy Violations (i.e., the amount of cheating)? • If a student is just one point from getting the next higher grade (for example,79%), is he/she more likely to take “shortcuts” in order to get that higher grade? • Is he/she more likely to violate our AI Policy to get the higher grade if on the borderline?

24. How many “borderlines” are there in the old & new grading scales? A B C D F A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D F 10 4