20 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 20-33
The Grading Curve and the Moral Ascent: A Virtue-Centered Approach to Improving Student Scores D. Glenn Butner, Jr. Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry Sterling College
Though commonly used, the grading curve remains a controversial aspect of assessment in higher education due to its effects on the learning process and student/teacher relationships. Typically, a grading curve is used in one of two circumstances. In the first, a curve is meant to combat grade inflation on assignments or tests in courses where a significant percentage of students attain a high score. Redistributing scores across a wider range fights against grade inflation, but the outcome is sure to hurt student satisfaction, reducing grades to a rare commodity instead of indexing them to concept and skill mastery, and distracting students from mastery of a subject by causing them to focus on comparisons with peers instead (Lang 141; Breese 108–9). The second use of curves is meant to solve the opposite problem, providing an opportunity for more students to pass a class in circumstances where a significant percentage have done poorly on a large assignment or test. However, increasing scores by using a norm-referenced grading curve has been shown to reduce students’ sense of selfefficacy and motivation, while widespread poor performance in an assignment or exam is likely to suggest that the professor should change expectations or teaching methods (Haley; Lang 141). Admittedly, in some circumstances a professor has reasonable expectations for learning outcomes that assessment is gauging, yet the class may perform poorly as a whole to the extent that there is pressure on the professor to reduce expectations to unreasonably low levels, in which case a norm-referenced curve may be more appealing. This article proposes an alternative to using a norm-referenced curve and to lowering learning outcome expectations in contexts where student performance across the class is poor due to factors not obviously related to faculty methods or expectations. In such circumstances, a method I have come to call a retroactive curve may be a viable alternative. Retroactive curves are characterized by three features: 1) retroactive curves increase the score of an assignment based on performance on future assignments of a comparable nature; 2) they are optional, requiring students to “opt in” through some mechanism; and 3) the preferred mechanism for opting in to a retroactive curve is some form of remedial instruction or exercise that addresses the problems leading to poor performance in the assignment to which the curve will apply. Retroactive curves are not curves in the sense that they distribute student scores in the entire class along a bell curve, but they do curve the scores of an individual student over the course of the
