Supporting Faculty During the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Submitting Fall Semester Final Grades

Yes, the joyful season has arrived: Faculty are wrapping up their classes, giving final exams, and posting course grades. They will then exhale and try to shed the tension calculating final grades often creates. We are talking not about the tension prompted by anticipating the complaints from students unhappy with their final grade but rather mean the tension caused by the administrative expectations and contradictions that circulate around grading and faculty achievement. On the one hand, there’s administrative pressure (or at least administrative claims) that faculty should be upholding academic rigor; on the other, there’s the seemingly contradictory belief that low grades can reduce retention rates. We will wonder, therefore, as we hit the “submit” button after carefully assessing our students’ work and reviewing our calculations, whether our grades will be judged to be too low or too high, whether our grades will be used against us in our next annual evaluation, and whether our grades will hurt or help our institution’s financial position.