388 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SCIENTIFIC VEESITS PERSONAL DISTRIBUTION OF 



COLLEGE CREDITS 



Br President WILLIAM T. FOSTER 



REED COLLEGE, PORTLAND, OREGON 



EARLIER articles in the Popular Science Monthly and in Science 

 have shown that grades in college courses have no exact mean- 

 ing. 1 Yet college honors are everywhere awarded on the na'ive assump- 

 tion that grades in college courses are distributed on a scientific basic. 

 For many important administrative purposes we assume that an A in 

 one course is equivalent to an A in another course; that the 80 per 

 cent, of one instructor indicates an achievement equal to the 80 per 

 cent, of another instructor. Accordingly, we estimate the fitness of 

 candidates for admission, determine eligibility for athletics, assign 

 annually hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships and fellow- 

 ships, award commencement honors, elect men to Phi Beta Kappa, and 

 confer degrees wholly, or in large part, on the evidence secured by merely 

 counting the number of As, the number of Bs, and so forth, that each 

 student has to his credit. The question is pertinent to what extent 

 our assumption of the equivalency of grades is warranted by the facts. 



Our universities and colleges vary so little in this phase of the 

 administration of the curriculum that the detailed distribution of the 

 grades of a few institutions for a few years will fairly represent the 

 practise, except in two or three universities, throughout the country. 

 The grades A, B, C, D usually represent degrees of excellence between 

 100 per cent, and 60 per cent, of some undefined thing and are all pass 

 marks. The grade E commonly indicates failure. In the figures here 

 presented, the grades have these meanings. The per cent, of the 

 students in each subject who receive each grade is graphically shown, 

 so that a glance reveals the central tendency for each grade in each in- 

 stitution and the extreme deviations in both directions. In all cases 

 the names of instructors and the exact designations of the courses are 

 omitted, at the request of the several institutions concerned; though 

 one may be pardoned the query, what objections could there be to pub- 

 licity, if grades were distributed on a defensible basis. 



Figs. 1 and 2 show the proportion each grade is of the whole number 

 given at Harvard College in each of the elementary courses in twenty- 

 one subjects during one academic year. Thus, the range of the highest 



1 Pophlae Science Monthly, Vol. LXVI., pp. 367-378, 1905, by J. McKeen 

 Cattell. Science, N. S., Vol. XXVIII., No. 712, pp. 243-250, 1908, by Max Meyer. 



