Other business schools, including University of Michigan’s Ross Business School and Columbia Business School, also enforce set grade distributions.
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Some faculty members at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business have been instructed to eliminate grade rounding, remove the A-plus grade option and keep average section GPAs between 3.3 and 3.5 for the fall semester.
The grading changes aim to “address grade inflation and promote rigor across our curriculum,” according to an email sent to faculty in the Communication, Professional and Computer Skills (CPS) department from business writing course coordinator Polly Graham, which was obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, [CPS] grades elevated, and in recent years, grades have remained high. In recent semesters, some instructors have awarded 100% A’s in standard (i.e., non-honors) sections, and others have awarded extraordinary numbers of A+’s and incompletes,” the email said.
The new grading policy was sent to instructors in early August without faculty discussion or approval, according to a faculty member in the CPS department who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The department, which does not have its own governance or bylaws beyond what governs the business school writ large, is the only one in Kelley that is staffed entirely by lecturers who do not have tenure protections. So far, the new grading policies apply only to courses in the CPS department, the faculty member said.
Instructors of standard, nonhonors courses must make the GPA of each section average between 3.3 and 3.5, and honors course GPA averages must fall within 0.2 points of the “section’s cumulative student GPA,” the email stated. Faculty members should not round up final grades “even if the student’s grade is very close to a higher letter grade,” and each instructor will complete two check-ins with CPS leadership—one before and one after midterms—after which “formative support will be provided to faculty as requested or needed.” It’s unclear what form the support will take, but the faculty member suspects it could be additional assistance from the chair on lesson plans or grading strategies.
It’s not unusual for business schools to enforce a set grade distribution. At the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, for instance, core class instructors must follow a distribution that allows 40 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn an A-minus or higher, 90 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn a B or higher, and at least 10 percent of undergraduates must earn between a B-minus and an F. Emory University’s Goizueta Business School also enforces a grade distribution, as does Columbia Business School.
The Kelley School will also enforce an attendance policy for CPS classes this fall. Students will be allowed up to three absences without a grade penalty. After the fourth absence, they lose one-third of their final letter grade, and after five absences, they lose a full letter grade. Six absences will result in an automatic “failure due to non-attendance,” the email explained. The school will allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
All Kelley students are required to take courses within the CPS department, including a business presentations class, a business writing course and three “Kelley Compass” classes that teach soft business skills such as team building, interviewing and conflict management. Like the lab time that accompanies physical science classes, CPS courses offer skills-based training that encourages mastery, the CPS faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. Faculty are concerned that the new GPA targets put an artificial limit on students’ success.
A spokesperson for the Kelley School did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the grade recalibration and instead provided the following statement: “At Kelley, faculty design courses to be both rigorous and fair, while supporting student development and career preparation. Our longstanding priority is to ensure that grades reflect the quality of each student’s performance and that grade distribution is fair and consistent, including across multiple sections of the same course.”
The statement language echoes what faculty have been instructed to tell students and parents who ask about the grading changes, according to the CPS faculty member.
Indiana’s Kelley School has become more popular of late, and administrators appear to be tightening admissions standards in response. The school has fielded some 27,000 applications for approximately 2,000 spots in recent years, the faculty member said, though the Kelley spokesperson did not confirm or refute these numbers.
In March, Kelley promoted Patrick E. Hopkins, an accounting professor who has worked at the business school since 1995, to dean. Just over two months later, on June 2, incoming Indiana University prebusiness students were notified that the minimum grade for automatic admission to the Kelley School would be raised from a B to a B-plus, starting with their cohort. Christopher Duff, the father of an incoming Indiana prebusiness student who plans to seek admission to Kelley, said the change was a “bait and switch.”
“To be crystal clear, I have zero issues with the Kelley School of Business changing their admission criteria. I do, however, have a major issue in the timing of this change. We made our decision based on clearly stated information at the time of commitment. We jettisoned all other schools, offers and financial aid to pursue a degree from Indiana-Kelley,” Duff told Inside Higher Ed. “You want to change the criteria? Fine. Do so with the incoming class who will be aware to make an informed decision. We did not get that choice. It was made for us and when we complained—and we all did—we were essentially told to take it or leave it.”
Duff said he met with Kelley’s undergraduate admissions director, Alex Bruce, in June to discuss the change, and in that meeting Bruce told him the school had overadmitted for the incoming class and received commitments from far more students than they anticipated.
“I asked [Bruce] if the admission department was telling the academic departments to grade harder, to weed out even more students than prior years,” Duff said. “He assured me that admissions and academics are separate entities and have no control over each other. I do not believe anything he told me that day.”
