More thoughts on Cum Laude

Hi everyone,

I appreciate the thoughtful comments that have been made in response to my blog about Cum Laude. They raise a number of points, some of which I agree with. As just one example, like Chip I am leery of too much reliance on character as a qualification, regardless of whether we are talking about Cum Laude or some successor honor system. I suspect we can agree that a recent verified plagiarism or cheating episode ought to disqualify someone from an award for academic excellence, but the further we get from such clear-cut standards, the more it begins to look like a popularity contest and the less I like it. I was not specifically advocating the use of character or "love of learning" criteria but just mentioned them since they have come up in our discussions.

On the other hand, I disagree with those who cited the flexibility of Cum Laude (other than the rigid 10%/20% rule) to argue against the need to consider alternatives. Here, I would point out that, while Cum Laude does allow us the freedom to include or reject any of our better students based on standards of our own choosing (currently, attendance and course rigor), we in fact have NO standard with respect to grade point average. According to Mr. Gillespie, he cannot recall that we have ever admitted fewer than the maximum allowed number, except for the rare occasion or two where the cutoff fell between two students whose records were indistinguishable. When that happened, we took neither rather than make an impossible choice.

So, other than those rare exceptions, our de facto admission standard is, "as many as will fit". Does this produce a fair result? For some data with which to address this question, I asked Mr. Gillespie to provide me with the junior and senior GPA cutoff each year for the last nine years (i.e., the lowest GPA of anyone admitted each year).

For seniors, the cutoff was different each year, but for the last six years it has fallen in a narrow range of 3.91 ± 0.07 (it was slightly lower, in a narrow range around 3.75, in the three years before that) These numbers refer to a quirky scale in which A+ = 4.7, A = 4.3, A- = 4.0, so this cutoff represents a high B+, I think.

For juniors, the cutoff in seven of the nine years was also in a narrow window of 4.05 ± .05. But in the other two years, the cutoff was markedly higher – 4.17 in one year, and 4.21 in the other. In those two years, according to Mr. Gillespie, there were 6 and 8 juniors, respectively, whose GPA was 4.05 or above but they were not admitted to Cum Laude as juniors even though their GPA was as good as those admitted in other years. They couldn't be considered because the quota was filled. These two years starkly illustrate a fairness problem that a quota system can never address no matter how we tweak our process (the problem can affect seniors as well, but we've been lucky so far and the number of seniors affected has been small, most likely). On the other hand, a system based on admitting qualified students, regardless of their number (or percent of a class), strikes me as much fairer. If a particular class happens to have an exceptional number of exceptional students, bestowing honor on all of them does not dilute the honor accorded each one individually. They all will have met a tough standard.

A system based on admitting qualified students does not have to mean admitting more students or admitting ones of marginal quality. Mr. Harris's point that the ranks of the qualified thins our pretty quickly below the 20% line I think is arguable at best. That has rarely been my impression when we look at the list of students ordered by GPA and see who is in and who is out. Whatever one thinks, a system based on a standard will force us (faculty, with Senate guidance) to decide what IS the standard for receiving this honor; then it would be up to the faculty (or a smaller screening committee, as we have been discussing) to uphold the standard.