Sir

Your Editorial “Against grade inflation” (Nature 431, 723; 200410.1038/431723b) raises an important question in US higher education that affects both the efficacy of our assessments of student performance and the credibility of those assessments.

Back when I was on the other side of the lectern, my impression was that a grade was a statement of relative academic performance. A “C” was actually defined in the academic catalogue as “average”, along with “A=excellent”, “B=above average”, “D=below average” and “F=failure”. These days I see that the academic catalogue defines a “C” as “satisfactory” and a “D” as a “minimum passing” grade. This change reflects the lamentable fact that grades no longer hold any real contextual meaning.

I believe that change is long overdue. If professors are too nervous about appeasing students and parents to stick to the definition of “C” as average, then student grades should be reported, as they were at my undergraduate institution, along with the average for the class. So instead of receiving a naked “B”, a student might receive a “B−, 3.4/3.62” — indicating that this student was actually 0.22 grade units below the class average of 3.62, despite receiving a grade higher than a “C”.

This approach would work well for universities' internal use, but what about external evaluation? Perhaps US colleges and universities could be ranked using some system analogous to the impact factor of journals, a ranking that might be derived from the performance of its students on standardized national exams.

To avoid potential difficulties, such as ranking a department with a superb record within a mediocre university, it would seem sensible to perform this ranking on a departmental as opposed to a university-wide basis.

In this way, a student could be more or less objectively evaluated by a graduate school or prospective employer as having a “3.44/3.12 grade-point average from a 1.76-ranked US university chemistry department”. Wouldn't that be a more scientific approach to measuring student performance in the academic crucible?