Most grades at Michigan universities are A’s but some programs give out more than others – MLive.com

Michigan State University’s James Madison College stood against easy A’s from the start.

When the college opened its doors in 1967, the idea was to buck some of the trends that were already reshaping universities, “giganticism and bureaucracy, the increasing problems that students had with writing,” according to M. Richard Zinman, one of its first professors.

The leadership of the college, a liberal arts and publicly policy residential program, believed that “every student should be challenged to rise above themselves…to be better than they were when they entered in all sorts of ways,” Zinman said.

The emphasis on intellectual rigor “got translated into the notion that it should be hard to get high grades.”

Which may be why, in the fall of 2023, James Madison College was the only college at a public university in Michigan where the most common grade was something less than an A.

A’s or their numerical equivalents are not only the most common grades at Michigan’s public universities, they are a majority of the grades at every school but Grand Valley State University and Lake Superior State University.

But undergraduate grade data from the fall of 2023 for each college and school within Michigan’s public universities shows wide variations, ranging from the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan, where more than 89% of grades fell in the range from A+ to A-, to the College of Innovation and Solutions at Lake Superior State, where just 38% of all grades did.

Some of the takeaways from that data, obtained by MLive through public records requests, fit squarely into the category of things you already knew. Science and business programs, for instance, tend to give fewer A’s than programs in the liberal arts, though in some cases the differences weren’t particularly stark. (You’ll find the statistics for each of Michigan’s public universities below.)

Some are less obvious, like the fact that education schools and arts programs also tend to give out a lot of top grades, likely for different reasons.

The fundamental difference between the grading habits of different academic disciplines, according to Paul Courant, an emeritus professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan who has published on the subject, is the level of subjectivity involved.

“There are some fields in which grading hard is relatively easy for faculty to do, and there are some fields in which grading hard leads to a set of quarrels between faculty and students that nobody wants to put up with,” he said.

That is, it’s relatively straightforward for a chemistry professor to tell a student that she has miscalculated the molar solubility of sodium sulfate and less straightforward for a French literature professor to ding that same student for a clumsy reading of Marcel Proust.

Which doesn’t mean individual schools don’t deviate from the general pattern. A study that Courant co-authored in 2009 found, for instance, that “Michigan introductory physics and chemistry labs grade much easier than second-year French courses.”

The overall result of that dynamic is that, rather than quibble over subtle shadings that separate a B+ from an A-, professors in the more subjective disciplines often err on giving students what they want.

At least 60 years

This is not a new phenomenon. Though overall GPAs have risen steadily at U.S. universities for decades, the differences between disciplines have remained more or less the same.

“The gaps have been present for at least 60 years,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has been studying grade inflation since the 1990s. “I remember seeing those gaps even in 1930s Dartmouth grading.”

He chalks it up, at least in part, to the different functions of different academic programs.

Chemistry departments, for instance, were at one point expected to weed out students aspiring to go to medical school, he said, and so it made sense for them to grade stringently.

Education schools, on the other hand, “have a mission to produce teachers, not weed them out,” he said. “Hence the higher grades.”

Which is not how Kendra Heard, the associate dean for undergraduate education and educator preparation at UM’s Marsal Family School of Education, explained the school’s remarkably high percentage of A’s.

She said it’s partly a result of the fact that most undergraduates are in the teacher preparation program and typically don’t start taking classes in that program until they’re juniors.

“By the time students come to our school or are taking our courses, they’ve got some experience being a collegiate student,” she said, “and they’re taking their studies very seriously. They’ve figured out their study habits…They tend to be very passionate, very thoughtful. They want to do well and they do do well.”

Courant’s research did find that upper division classes – the ones students take in the final years of college and that are typically in their major – tend to have higher grades, presumably because students want to be there and have shown at least some aptitude for that particular course of study.

That effect also seems to prevail in arts programs, which generally require auditions on top of normal college applications.

MSU’s College of Music, for instance, has a “rigorous secondary admissions process,” according to Michael Kroth, the college’s associate dean for undergraduate studies.

“It really ensures that we’re admitting students that are ready to perform at a collegiate level,” he said, “and we already know that they’re passionate and dedicated.”

Last fall, 77% of the undergraduate grades in the college were 4.0s, the highest percentage at MSU.

The converse effect is also true. Courant found that all of the lowest grading departments at Michigan taught large, required courses. That is, courses that students might not have chosen for themselves.

Education programs

It’s quite common for schools of education to take the top slot at the respective institutions. At Oakland University, for instance, nearly 85% of the grades in the College of Education and Human Services are A’s or A minuses. At Eastern Michigan University’s College of Education, it’s 78%.

Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri economist, examined the phenomenon more than a decade ago and found that it wasn’t because education students were the most qualified. In fact, he said, “in terms of the basic academic qualifications like SAT scores, GPAs in high school, things like that, these are not very strong students.”

Hearn did suggest another reason, the fact that grading UM’s education programs is “the fact that our instruction really is designed for students to demonstrate competency. We really strive to have as many of our students as possible demonstrate that mastery of those particular practices and skills.”

Meaning there’s no grading on a curve. It’s possible for every student to get an A.

“It’s not so much that we necessarily are wanting everyone to get an A,” Hearn said, but they do want their student “to really master the skills that we have identified as what they’ll need to be effective educators.”

The grades, she said, reflect that mastery.

Grading on a curve is less common than it once was, and the increased popularity of competency-based grading is one of the trends university leaders cite to explain the phenomenon of rising GPAs.

That is also one explanation for relatively lower grades in the programs that do grade on a curve. At UM’s Ross School of Business, for example, only 40% of the students in a core class are permitted to get a grade of A- or higher. For electives, it’s 60%. Still, nearly 57% of undergraduate grades last fall were in the A range.

Tim McKay, the associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, s an interview earlier this year that the business school had preserved that grading system because “they are themselves interested in ranking their students and some of the employers that they regularly work with have some interest in that, as well.”

Is it a problem?

Is it a problem that different disciplines grade differently? It can put students in lower-grading fields at a disadvantage for certain scholarships and for the sorts of jobs that use a GPA cutoff to winnow down the number of candidates.

But, in general, Courant said, the differences are reasonably well understood.

“Everybody knows that chemistry is a relatively hard-grading field, and so a B in chemistry could signify a very good performance, whereas in English it doesn’t,” he said. “If people have some idea of what the distribution is in different fields, they can account for it.”

James Madison College’s leaders declined a request to talk about the college’s grading practices, but communications manager Jane Deacon said in an email that the college’s “commitment to intellectual development translates to strong outcomes for our graduates.”

“The college’s post-graduation placement rate for the last five years has met or outpaced MSU’s average,” she said. “Our students are consistently recruited for and accepted into top-notch graduate and professional school programs across the U.S. and internationally.”

In other words, the relative scarcity of 4.0 grades doesn’t hurt them.

Madison students seem to agree.

“James Madison classes are typically just a lot more work than other MSU classes,” said Nicolas Carrizales, a senior who is studying international relations and vice president of the James Madison College Student Senate. “Lots more reading, lots more writing than any other class I’ve taken at MSU.”

But it’s worth it, he said, “because you do learn a lot” and because the college was a reputation that precedes it and helps connects students to potential employers and graduate schools.

“Which is a much greater benefit than having a high GPA on a transcript,” he said, “because they help you get your foot in the door in a lot of places.”