Thursday, January 08, 2004

By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The campus vice president's memo was direct. Point Park University suffers from grade inflation, and department heads should consider if the number of A's awarded -- to more than 80 percent of students in some classes -- is justified.

Such worries about grade creep are common nowadays, from the halls of the Ivy League to community college campuses. By itself, the Aug. 25 directive to deans at Point Park was not extraordinary

But what followed apparently was.

Officials with the private Downtown school confirmed yesterday that half a dozen faculty, including at least two tenured professors, were docked $1,000 in merit pay, in effect, for giving out too many A's.

Neither the university nor faculty leaders divulged the individuals' identities. They received letters notifying them of the reduction, said William Breslove, a business professor and president of Point Park's faculty assembly.

"I'm outraged," Breslove said yesterday. "Frankly, I'm less outraged about the financial aspects of this than the intrusion by the administration on academic freedom. How to grade students is, frankly, something that any competent faculty member should be able to decide.

"This has never happened here before," he said.

Point Park President Katherine Henderson said the university hasn't decided whether to make the awarding of A's a permanent criterion for setting the size of a professor's merit award. She said the six faculty members performed meritoriously as a whole, but a review earlier this year of the classes they taught showed a rate of A's beyond what would be expected for undergraduate classes.

So, instead of getting $2,000 merit awards, each got $1,000. She said she reviewed each of the cases and concurred with the decision to reduce the awards.

"They taught undergraduates only -- no graduate students -- and they gave A's to more than 50 percent [of their] students, in some cases as much as 70 [percent] to 80 percent," Henderson said

She said the university has repeatedly urged faculty not to inflate grades generally, but would never order faculty to grade a specific way or punish them based on how they grade. She said the merit raises are not regular pay but a reward, and reducing the amount of that award was intended to send a message of, "Let's all work together to grade undergraduates realistically.

"It's very unusual in any undergraduate class of any size to have half the students deserve A's. It's very, very unusual. I'm not saying it's impossible," she said.

Henderson said she'd like to see the campus grade point average stay at 3.0, but she's been troubled to see the campus average creep upward in recent years.

In Arts and Sciences, Business and the Conservatory of Performing Arts, the grade point averages now range from 3.1 to 3.43.

Henderson said any of the six who got merit pay reductions could have defended the grades they gave by appealing the university's decision, but none opted to do so.

Jonathan Knight, an official with the Washington, D.C-based American Association of University Professors, said he knew of cases in which a single faculty member's contract was not renewed, and grades were alleged to be a factor.

But the Point Park case appears to be different, said Knight, director of the association's academic freedom and tenure program.

"I'm not familiar with a case where a group of faculty has suffered an economic loss because they allegedly graded too easily," he said. "I don't think we've seen a situation quite like it."

The existence of the Aug. 25 memo surfaced through discovery and hearings before the National Labor Relations Board. The hearings, which continue today, stem from the university's challenge to the right of full-time faculty to be represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which in October filed a motion with the NLRB to organize them.

The university has 81 full-time faculty and 260 adjuncts.

In the memo, deans at Point Park were asked to review grade distribution data for the spring 2003 semester and take steps with their department chairmen and the faculty to address artificially high grades.

"The evidence of inflation is clear," the memo states, referring to the rate of A's at Point Park. "It seriously undermines the work of students who really earn our commendation for the high quality of their performances"

The memo was signed by Rex Stevens, then vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. A call to his office was not returned.

In a move the university said was unrelated, Point Park announced yesterday to the campus that Stevens was leaving his post to assume the job of vice president for academic affairs at Stephens College, a women's liberal arts college, in Columbia, Mo.

The resignation was effective immediately because Stephens needed to fill the vacancy this month, Henderson said.

E-mail this story   Print this story