Caucus on Grading

University of Arizona

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Welcome to the Caucus on Grading.

COG's concerns are grades, grading, and--especially--grade inflation at the University of Arizona. The concept of this caucus arose in a series of meetings in 1998 and 1999 by members of the Department of English at the UA, and colleagues from other departments have since joined. We welcome colleagues from every unit of the university.

Our purposes are

to stimulate wide interest in the problem of grade inflation
to examine our own grading practices
to generate ideas for the remediation of grade inflation
to invite consideration of such ideas by colleagues, by academic units, and by the university as a whole.

We shall include in these pages a collection of files that focus on the causes, consequences, and cures of grade inflation and that address particular questions such as, What can faculty members do about grade inflation? What can administrators or the Board of Regents do about it? What about faculty members who choose to give high grades? What are the arguments, both pro and con, over grade inflation? What should grades mean? Also, some UA faculty members have indicated their desire or willingness to make their cumulative grading histories--their GPAs, so to speak--publicly available on the Web for the information of students and anyone else who might be interested. We're working on a practical means of enabling that via this COG site.

If you would like to join our discussions and to contribute your own thoughts, views, or ideas about the issue of grade inflation or other matters involving grades and grading at the college or university level and particularly at the UA, we invite you to subscribe to the COG Listserv forum.

The introductory material on this Web site was written by Jonathan Penner, acting chair of COG, and the site is maintained by Carl Berkhout.

This page was last revised on February 6, 2000.