Some of the “Best” B-Schools Don’t Disclose Student Grades (Because the STUDENTS Demand It)

From Business Week (Biz Weak around here): a couple of uncharacteristically good pieces about graduate students getting by with what a seventh-grader who is struggling in school can only dream of.

First, the inmates running the asylum controversy (requires subscription; bolds throughout this post are mine):

Campus Confidential

Four top-tier B-schools don’t disclose grades. Now that policy is under attack

Students at some top-ranked B-schools have a secret. It’s something they can’t share even if it means losing a job offer. It’s one some have worked hard for and should be proud of, but instead they keep it to themselves. The secret is their grades.

At four of the nation’s 10 most elite B-schools — including Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago — students have adopted policies that prohibit them or their schools from disclosing grades to recruiters. The idea is to reduce competitiveness and eliminate the risk associated with taking difficult courses. But critics say the only thing nondisclosure reduces is one of the most important lessons B-schools should teach: accountability.

It’s a debate that’s flaring up on B-school campuses across the country…. And nowhere is it more intense than at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where students, faculty, and administrators have locked horns over a school-initiated proposal that would effectively end a decade of grade secrecy at BusinessWeek’s No. 3-ranked B-school. It wouldn’t undo disclosure rules but would recognize the top 25% of each class — in effect outing everyone else. It was motivated, says Vice-Dean Anjani Jain in a recent Wharton Journal article, by the “disincentivizing effects” of grade nondisclosure, which he says faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement.

Who in the world ever let the STUDENTS decide whether or not grades are disclosed?

Not surprisingly, students without the incentive to perform often don’t work as hard, don’t excel, give the faculty headaches, and force some profs to treat them like children:

Just how contentious are things at Wharton? In cross-listed classes, Jain wrote, undergrads outperform MBAs, and the gap is widening. Annual student surveys, he wrote, show that the amount of time students spend on academics has fallen by 22% in just four years. Some of Wharton’s best faculty have stopped teaching MBA classes altogether, he added. And those who continue now go to great lengths to keep students in check. Many prohibit late arrivals, talking, and cell phones. Others take attendance, as Harvard Business School does, or give weekly quizzes to make sure students show up for class. “Just like with traffic,” says Edward I. George, a Wharton statistics professor. “You need traffic lights to function properly.”

What are potential employers supposed to do without grade information? More work than they should have to:

….. Professors aren’t the only ones complaining. Recruiters say nondisclosure forces them to resort to interview techniques that test a candidate’s quantitative skills. One is the “case interview,” which requires job candidates to dissect complex case studies on the spot. In the absence of grades, Andrew Schwedel, who oversees recruiting at Bain & Co.’s San Francisco and Palo Alto (Calif.) offices, asks detailed questions to evaluate a candidate’s potential — everything from study group experiences to the courses they took.

What would happen if enough major employers said “We don’t interview anyone who won’t tell us their grades, and we won’t come to a school that prohibits disclosure of grades”? (Better yet, recruiters visiting Wharton could make job offers to the undergrads who are outperforming their supposedly more gifted graduate classmates, and save those they hire a ton of grad-school tuition. That would get someone’s attention, wouldn’t it?)

It turns out that not everyone has lost their bearings:

At No. 1 Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and other top programs, including those at Cornell and Duke, students have opted to forgo nondisclosure, believing the value of their degrees would suffer. The University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business may even expand grade disclosure. If the proposal is approved, the school will release grades on team projects — an important indicator of whether a student pulls his or her own weight and works well with others. Says Dean Mark Zupan: “A business has a lot of team dynamic to it, and how well someone performs on a team is a valuable piece of information.”

Nondisclosure policies were born during the dot-com boom, when MBAs had a choice of five or six job offers, each with promises of big signing bonuses and bloated benefits packages. At that point, grades didn’t matter; MBAs were going to get job offers whether they graduated summa cum laude or at the bottom of their class.

Times have changed, but the policies have not — and they’re unlikely to anytime soon, since student support remains strong at schools that have them.

Again, why are STUDENTS deciding this? Further, why is the decision binding on every student?

The second Biz Weak item editorializes on the non-disclosure idea, and says things that shouldn’t need to be said:

Join the Real World, MBAs

It’s not what you know, but where you went to school. Or so believe MBA students at top-ranked business schools Chicago, Wharton, Stanford, and Harvard, where students have in recent years adopted policies that prevent them or their schools from revealing grades to potential employers.

….. grade nondisclosure eliminates three defining features of the business world: risk-taking, accountability, and often ruthless competition. By removing grades from the B-school equation, the students are doing themselves a huge disservice — creating the illusion of a noncompetitive world that will be shattered upon graduation when they will find themselves poked, measured, and prodded like everyone else.

The irony is that these men and women will, as managers, be required to take others to task for their actions, doling out pay raises and promotions based on measurable performance. Maybe accountability is a lesson they should learn right now.

MAYBE? The fact that many students at four of the “best” business schools can bank on the institution’s reputation, coast while in school, and often get away with it without immediate negative consequences is an academic scandal. No wonder we have so many corporate executives who think they’re entitled to multimillion-dollar golden parachutes even whey they have run their companies into the ground.

A final question: What would happen if the annual “Best of” list compilers like Business Week and US News decided not to include schools where student disclosure of grades is prohibited?
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September 20 Outside the Beltway Jammer.