Fact: Virtually all our students were in the top ten percent of their high school classes (most in the top five percent).
Corollary One: Ninety percent of these will not be in the top ten percent here at Cornell.
Corollary Two: An average grade in a course at Cornell demonstrates a level of competence that puts a person into the top few percent of her or his age group.
Grade inflation is a term familiar to readers of the national press. In the College of Arts and Sciences, as in most institutions, grades inflated considerably during the early ’70s and then stayed just about the same for over a decade until the last few years, during which there has been a small upward blip. The average college grade of between B and B+ is similar to most of our peers, but grading patterns vary in different kinds of courses.
Grades in large introductory science and social science courses with a diverse audience (especially in commitment to the subject) tend to "curve" themselves in the expected way: large middle with tails at the upper and lower ends. Instructors usually assign the middle clump a B-/C+, a bit above the middle of the range of possible grades (C is the absolute middle). This is not a conspiracy to torture students or to make them enemies of one another. "Curving" allows correction for too hard or too long a test and distinctions between one grade and another according to performance clumps rather than decimal points of numerical scores.
Versions of introductory courses requiring strong preparation, usually much smaller classes, have higher average grades because the students in them, usually seriously interested in the subject, on the whole achieve a higher level of mastery than students in the elementary courses. Qualified students who take the more difficult and usually more theoretical introductory courses do not suffer grade-wise.
Upper-level courses, which include well-prepared and committed students, and courses in the humanities, which often include revisions of written work as normal assignments, tend to have higher average grades.
Instructors have absolute responsibility and authority for assigning grades in their courses. They have the obligation to grade fairly and according to criteria they explain to students. They also have the obligation to review grades students think may be incorrect. But once an instructor determines that a grade is correct, that grade stands. No one -- not the department chair, the dean or the president -- can change it. There is no appeal.