For courses numbered 1 through 57, the department targets a reported median grade of B+ after course drops are finalized. For culminating experience courses (60 and 80 level seminars), the target median is A-. 

One of the purposes of these standards is consistency across students, instructors, and courses. Many Economics courses are taught multiple times a year by a changing set of instructors, each of whom may have a different intuition about what B+ performance looks like. Without shared standards, two students who take an identical sequence of courses could end up with meaningfully different major GPAs, not because of any difference in their performance, but because they took courses in terms when it was graded differently than when their classmate took it. Research using our own grade data showed this effect was large enough to matter.  There was nearly a full letter grade between the maximum and minimum median GPAs for the same set of courses before we instituted our standards. That level of arbitrary variation in academic records was inconsistent and unfair, and our median grade targets address this.

According to Dartmouth’s Scholarship Ratings,  a B+ median target suggests that a typical Dartmouth student, working diligently over the term, should be able to achieve outcomes that are at the border between good and excellent.  The B+ target is not an after the fact adjustment, and it is not a ceiling. If the students in a class perform exceptionally well with most students doing excellent work, the median can exceed a B+.  For example, if over half of students are scoring in the 90s on exams, instructors are not expected to curve grades down to meet the B+ median. 

However, the standard shapes course design and course expectations. Instructors are asked to build courses that are sufficiently challenging that an excellent performance is not easy to achieve and requires hard work and engagement.  Assessments should be designed to genuinely distinguish between good and excellent work, so that grades reflect real differences in performance in courses that genuinely challenge typical Dartmouth students.  We will always acknowledge excellence against this standard.  In practice, we find that there is typically a distribution of performance that is consistent with a B+ median.

There is substantial evidence that grade inflation is partly driven by the relationship between grades, course evaluations, and section enrollments.  Instructors who grade more generously tend to receive better student ratings, creating pressure on those without tenure or in contingent positions to give higher grades. By establishing clear, publicly stated standards that apply uniformly across the department, we insulate instructors from that pressure. An instructor who holds to the B+ median is not making an idiosyncratic choice that students might penalize in evaluations; they are following department policy. This matters most for untenured and non-tenure-track faculty, who are most vulnerable to grade evaluation dynamics, and it is one of the reasons we have chosen to make our standards explicit and public.