If there is a hell, entrance will certainly be bell-curved, and University of Toronto students will be particularly well prepared. U of T’s great leaders are altering students’ grades with little regard for the ethical status of this practice, or what questions it might raise about the university itself.
As a student assistant in a college registrar’s office, I’ve dealt with the issue of grade adjustment more than once. Without fail, the affected student wants to know what he or she can do about it. The answer I have to give is squat. The system is stacked firmly against students, as it so often is at U of T. Bureaucrats and bureaucratically-minded professors make the rules—all we can do is follow them.
The Faculty of Arts and Science Calendar outlines the procedure for adjusting grades. It states explicitly that “the departmental review committee, through the Chair, and the Faculty review committee, through the Dean, have the right…to adjust marks where there is an obvious and unexplained discrepancy between the marks submitted and the perceived standards of the Faculty.” Students take note: administrators have the right to change the grade you earned if they don’t like it. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Several important issues are raised here, including the autonomy of our instructors. As U of T students, we’ve all heard the adage that at Harvard, if a professor gives out too many C’s, she has to go before a committee to defend her grading policy. At U of T, the inverse holds true: if a professor gives out too many A’s, she has to go before a committee to defend her methods. This could cue a discussion about our inferiority complex, but more importantly, it demonstrates that professors are not truly in control of the grades they hand out. Concerns about “Faculty standards” outweigh worries about an instructor’s professional judgment, eroding the fundamental relationship between teacher and student on which a university is built.
The premise that the grade you earn should be the grade you get is perfectly fair. Alterations to earned grades, whether they are inflated or deflated, are faulted in both the simplest sense—students do not receive what they have earned—and in the sense of the long-term value of a university education. If marks are no longer based solely on a student’s performance as evaluated by a professor, it breaks down that fundamental relationship.
For anyone who cares deeply about the future of higher education and about the University of Toronto specifically, grade alteration ought to provoke outrage. A university of this size invariably has a small army of administrative personnel, including many professors who have become administrators in one capacity or another. However, the threat that this army poses to the relationship between students and professors cannot be ignored. If the university has any hope of remaining relevant—and I’m sure that it does—we have to protect the autonomy of instructors and the rights of students. Among these rights ought to be the right to receive a fair, unadjusted grade reflecting your performance, not the perceived standards of the Faculty of Arts and Science.
