While there is some evidence that Augustana Seminary used letter grades as early as 1860, the first historically verifiable record of assigning a letter to denote student progress occurs in 1883 at Harvard, some six years after the same faculty adopted the rather familiar 100 percent numerical system: 90 and above denoting the highest student achievement, 80 and above the next highest level, etc. Mount Holyoke fully merged the two systems in 1897, though 95 and above equated to an "A", 85-94 a "B", and so on. In this system, a student whose percentage was below 74 failed, with a corresponding letter grade of "E". In time, "F" replaced "E" as convenient shorthand for failure.
Letter grades began migrating into elementary and secondary schools around the same time in unequal measure. By the 1930's, various districts began standardizing their use of letter grading to record student progress, but the assignment of these grades by an individual instructor was remarkably subjective. From the beginning, scholars called into question the merits of these grading systems. In 1913, I.E. Finkelstein argued, "When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument..."
In education, objective grading is something of a "Holy Grail". Educators seem to believe in the possibility of objective grading, they just have never seen it, and debate how we might arrive at such a system. There is also the problem that grading and learning are not necessarily the same thing, just as teaching and learning can be two very different things. Human achievement is the result of myriad factors that may be expressed in remarkably distinct ways that don't necessarily lend themselves to categorization. Determining achievement may actually be far more intuitive--a "you know excellence when you see it" because it is not commonplace kind of phenomena--than we would like, especially when we are trying to be fair in the broadest sense.
Grade inflation is one of the bogeymen of our age -- it's actually been a hot topic for about a century--for it plants seeds of doubt about how and whether student progress is accurately assessed and reported. Furthermore, it gives rise to the notion that such a phenomena lowers standards of excellence and floods admissions markets with impostors. There is a rise in grades, especially in secondary schools, and a consolidation of students at the top of the grading scale. Whether or not these rising grades are accurate representations of student progress is subject to debate, but this overcrowding has a real effect on GPAs, and correspondingly on college admissions.
But before we freak out, here is a little known fact: one third of all American colleges and universities accept every applicant. There are 4600 Title IV degree-granting institutions in the United States. This means a little more than 1500 of these schools accept all comers. Granted, many of these schools are diploma mills, some have questionable curricula, and all are happy to accept your money whether or not your student will complete a course of study. The point is that we live in a time of fear about our children, but the fear that they won't get into college doesn't hold water. Getting into a high-end, first choice college or university is an altogether different question. And another truth: there are so many different numeric grading systems being used among the more the 24,000 public secondary schools alone (10 point, 8 point, 7 point, 5 point, 4 point, 4.5 point, etc.), and so many different weighted escalators (for honors courses, for Advanced Placement coursework, etc.), and so many disregarded courses, that many colleges and universities recalculate GPAs during the admissions process. It's also why they rely so heavily on standardized tests like the SAT. Whether an "A" really is an "A" is fundamentally contextual.
I've somehow written an entire page about grading without talking much about learning, which is really my point here. That "B" on my history paper back in school never really told me much other than I was doing okay relative to some standard that, frankly, I wasn't real clear about, and which seemed to be different for each of my teachers, suggesting no standard at all. The grade certainly didn't give me any real feedback that informed my learning or helped me improve my understanding of core concepts or my application of critical skills. This is why we are working so hard to grow our assessment approaches at Baldwin School, and why our commitment is to learning. Besides, when you focus on learning, all the other stuff, including grades, seem to work out.
Thankfully, nobody has asked me about my ninth grade first semester English grade recently!
See you around campus.