International Survey of Research University Faculty: Trends in Grading & Student Attendance

The study presents data from a survey of 500+ faculty from more than 50 major research universities about the grades that they are assigning, trends in average grades awarded and student attendance levels, pressures for or against grade inflation, the efficiency of the grading process, the role of incompletes and withdrawals from class, and other factors and issues in grading in research level academic institutions. Just a few of the many findings from the 116-page report: More than a third (33.65%) of assigned grades were A+, A or A- (or number grades corresponding to these letter rankings in the opinion of those surveyed); the median was 25% and the range 0 to 100%. Faculty in business, economics and finance were the most likely to consider themselves tough graders while faculty in media and the visual and performing arts were the most likely to consider themselves generous graders. 16.42% of grades assigned in Australia/New Zealand were in the D range, much higher than for other countries, For faculty in Engineering, Mathematics and related disciplines, 30.42% of assignments were graded by someone other than the main course instructor. The more conservative a faculty member is politically, the more likely that they are to feel that they have been pressured by retention administrators to award higher grades. The data is based on a survey of more than 500 scholars drawn from more than 50 major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Data is broken out by various criteria, such as type of university, scholar’s country, gender, political views, academic subject specialty, academic title and other criteria. Scholars from the following institutions were surveyed for the report: Australian National University, Baylor College of Medicine, Brown University, Carleton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Curtin University, Drexel University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Griffith University, Imperial College London, James Cook University, Massey University, McGill University, Monash University, Penn State University, Queen Mary University of London, Reading University Rice University, Rockefeller University, Rutgers University, Saint Louis University, Swinburne University of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, UConn Health Center, University of California, Davis, University College Dublin, University of Alberta, University of Birmingham, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Idaho, University of Leeds, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Nottingham, University of Reading, University of Tasmania, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Western Australia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Washington State University and Yale University.