• Open Access

Relative impacts of different grade scales on student success in introductory physics

David J. Webb, Cassandra A. Paul, and Mary K. Chessey
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 16, 020114 – Published 27 August 2020

Abstract

In deciding on a student’s grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point scale (where each whole number 0–4 corresponds to a letter grade) and the percent scale (where letter grades A through D are uniformly distributed in the top 40% of the scale). This paper uses grading data from a single series of courses offered over a period of 10 years to show that the grade distributions emerging from these two grade scales differed in many ways from each other. Evidence suggests that the differences are due more to the grade scale than to either the students or the instructors. One major difference is that the fraction of students given grades less than C was over 5 times larger when instructors used the percent scale. The fact that each instructor who used both grade scales gave more than 4 times as many of these low grades under percent scale grading suggests that the effect is due to the grade scale rather than the instructor. When the percent scale was first introduced in these courses in 2006, one of the authors of this paper, who is also one of the instructors in this dataset, had confidently predicted that any changes in course grading would be negligible. They were not negligible, even for this instructor.

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  • Received 15 March 2019
  • Revised 24 April 2020
  • Accepted 4 August 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020114

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Physics Education Research

Authors & Affiliations

David J. Webb1, Cassandra A. Paul2,3, and Mary K. Chessey4

  • 1Department of Physics, University of California–Davis, Davis, 95616 California, USA
  • 2Department of Physics & Astronomy, San Jose State University, San Jose, 95192 California, USA
  • 3Science Education Program, San Jose State University, San Jose, 95192 California, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, University of Maryland–College Park, College Park, 20742 Maryland, USA

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Issue

Vol. 16, Iss. 2 — July - December 2020

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