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Let's introduce our topic with a pop quiz. You've given a 20-question multiple-choice test. A student gets 15 right. What's the letter grade?

You might think: "15/20 is 75%, which is C," but that's a poor answer. If the items were hard, 15 out of 20 might be brilliant; if they were easy, it might be shameful. The raw score doesn't mean much by itself. But before we can decide what score means what letter, we need to know what letters mean.

Let's idealize. Imagine a large 100- or 200-level class whose members are a fair sample of Maryland students. They've done a multiple choice test, and your sense is that they performed "respectably": not unusually well, not unusually badly. If the average score was 15 out of 20, it seems reasonable to translate this into whatever letter grade means that a student is on track –"average" in a sense that carries no shame. What is that letter grade?

Naively, one might say C. Two things suggest otherwise.

First, "C" is a 2.0 on the numerical grade scale. A student whose GPA dips below 2.0 goes on academic warning. If we gave Cs to students we took to be doing respectable work, then a student who performed respectably in all courses would be one slip-up away from academic warning.

Second, every college in this University has a higher average (mean) grade than 2.0, though there's lots of variation. In one college where most 100-level courses are activity-oriented, the average 100-level GPA in fall 2006 was 3.63. In another, science-oriented college, it was 2.73. In yet another strongly-quantitative college, it was 3.51 for 100-level. The figure for ARHU, my college, was about 3.0, right around the University average. That suggests that 15 out of 20 on our hypothetical test means B work.

Is B the new C? If so, what should we make of this?

Some people insist that, dammit, C means average, and that saying otherwise means caving in to grade inflation. But if they grade accordingly, they impose a cost on their students, whose progress towards degree, not to mention requirements for keeping scholarships, don't fit with treating "C" as a pat on the back.

We can also ask just what we mean by "grade inflation." I don't have data, but I'm willing to guess that 25 years ago, the average grade was lower. However, our students are mostly better now. How should we factor that in? I'd resist "grading on the Bell curve." Ideally we should be grading to standards, and if all the students in my class meet a reasonable standard for earning an "A," that's what they should get. But operationalizing this is hard. It calls for a campus-wide discussion of what our standards should be, whether they should shift as the caliber of students improves, and how our expectations should map onto letter grades. It would be wonderful to see a conversation like that happen.

An addendum, however. I doubt that we're likely to go back to using "C" as the average grade. If not, all the more reason to fully implement the +/– grading system.

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