teaching - Would I get into trouble if I give out "too many" A grades?

In the next semester, I will be teaching for the first time a seminar course which is composed of about 25 students. I am not sure how to respond to prospective students who have asked me about the grade distribution of the course.

For courses with large enrollments, I have the impression from my colleagues that I have to follow the "typical grade distribution" at my university, which is something like 25% As, 50% Bs, 20% Cs, and some Ds and Fs if the students really did poorly.

However, for the new course that I am teaching, I am wondering if I will be given more leeway in the grade distribution because the course has a small enrollment. I would like to give grades based on the students' performance.

• So if many of the students perform well, I would like to give 90% or even 100% of the students A grades (A-, A and A+).


• Conversely, if most of the students perform poorly, I would like to be able to give a low proportion of A grades.

Every semester, a committee made up of members of my department which will meet to discuss the grade distributions of each and every course offered by our department. I am hesitant to recommend grades that deviate too far from the "typical grade distribution" at my university because I am afraid of receiving pushback from the committee members.

Questions:

• Should I fight for the freedom to assign grades according to my academic judgment, without necessarily following the "typical grade distribution" at my university?


• Is this a fight that I could win, and if so, how do I go about winning it?

Update

I had forgotten to include an important and relevant piece of information. The goal of the course is to teach students how to analyze and present business case studies. Consequently, by its nature, the evaluation of the students' performance in the course will tend to be more subjective, rather than objective (as it would be for a course on say, calculus).

The grading of the course is based purely on continuous assessment; we do not have a final exam for the course. (Given that the purpose of the course is to develop students' presentation skills, a written examination does not seem to be the right way to assess students' learning.)

Answer

You won't get into trouble if all your students earn grades of A. It has always been my hope that I'd have a class with all A grades, or even all A and B grades. It has never happened.

If you "give out" all grades of A, someone, perhaps your department chair or the committee you mention, is going to ask you to explain yourself.

Your course (presumably) has a set of learning outcomes. You should assess your students against those learning outcomes, at a level of difficulty suitable to the students' standing, e.g. a greater level of difficulty for seniors than for freshmen. When you've done that, the grades will take care of themselves, and if everyone earns an A, you've done an outstanding job with the course!

Edit: based on the update to the question: For the purpose of providing useful formative feedback, you need to assign a grade to each piece of work you assess. Doing so has the added benefit of covering your posterior. Such grades should be assigned according to a rubric that the students have seen before beginning work. There is a brief example of developing such a rubric here.

Even in a course such as you describe, grades can be assigned granularly and with objectivity. If you've done that, your students will thank you and your defense when questioned by chair or committee is that the students got the grades they earned and earned the grades they got.