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BY CAROLYN KLARECKI
Published March 21, 2011
Building the perfect class schedule is an art. The moment the course guide goes live, the eight-page paper due tomorrow takes second priority as students attempt to craft a four-day weekend with no classes before 11 a.m.
IN PRINT
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Within each department, students spread the word as to what courses to avoid and which to fit in before graduation. If you must take that painful pre-requisite, most have an idea who the best professor is to tough it out with. Students pick apart and analyze their professors for their peers — he talks too fast, she makes good jokes, his readings are interesting — but perhaps the most vital piece of information for schedule builders is how their potential professor grades.
The University holds its students to a high standard. However, according to data obtained by The Michigan Daily from a Freedom of Information Act request, there are large disparities in grades across professors and departments. The data includes the grade distribution and end-of-the-semester course evaluations of 2,329 professors, lecturers and Graduate Student Instructors for the fall 2009 and winter 2010 semesters. In analyzing the information to determine the easiest and hardest classes, the Daily excluded courses with less than 15 students and omitted courses in which the majority of students received incomplete grades. The FOIA data excludes information about certain schools.
If you’re longing to graduate with a 4.0 GPA, the math department is one to avoid. Compared to the other departments listed in the FOIA data, in the 2009-2010 academic year, math instructors gave the lowest combined average grade to students: a B-. While the math department appears to be the most difficult at the University, the easiest is LSA’s small Aerospace Science department, which consists of four courses where professors give an average grade of an A.
Obsession over grades has been a large feature of most students’ academic lives ever since high school. Parents, teachers and guidance counselors alike let us know that if we wanted to get into top-ranked schools, we were going to have to prove we deserved admission. Now that we’ve made it, it’s hard to shake that itch for an A. Maybe graduate school is on the horizon or you need a prestigious internship to make your résumé more competitive. Either way, for most students, the drive to secure a high GPA continues unceasingly into the college years.
But before you switch your major to Violin Performance — another program with an average grade of an A — it’s important to understand why there are these discrepancies in grades. We all go to the same University: Shouldn’t we all be held to the same academic standards? When an instructor gives an average grade of a C and another one awards nothing lower than an A+, there is likely to be an explanation beyond, “my GSI is so evil.”
The “easy” courses
Jennifer Yim, lecturer and director of the Global Scholars program, could be considered an “easy grader.” In the 2009-2010 academic year, she gave an average grade of an A for her Global Understanding course, which had 28 students total in the fall and winter semesters. Seven students received an A+ and 21 received an A. However, she maintains that her course isn’t an easy A.
The course she taught is a highly specialized class restricted to students in the Global Scholars living-learning community, which students are eligible to apply for at the end of their freshman year. Yim said students’ passion for the subject material is reflected in the grades her students receive.
She added that many Global Scholars courses are highly cooperative, with students depending on one another for their success in the classroom: this class style pressures students to put in more effort.
