At 26 seconds past the hour, hundreds of students refresh their MyUCLA class planner in a frantic dash to snag spots in a desired professor’s lecture.

The unlucky losers of this race find themselves condemned to a quarter of arduous, uncurved midterms, destined to struggle while they watch friends in a parallel course receive A’s for simply showing up.

Most departments at UCLA do not have any mandated grading guidelines, instead defaulting to the UCLA Academic Senate’s guidelines that give instructors full control over grading. However, this lack of guidance often leads to disparate and inconsistent grading that harms students and faculty alike.

UCLA must encourage departments to implement department-wide grading policies to ensure consistent grading across all courses.

The lack of formal, departmental grading policies is most notable when different professors teach the same course concurrently.

“It’s truly like you are taking different classes based off different teachers, based off how they distribute grades,” said Sam Svonkin, a second-year civil engineering student.

Svonkin added that he has experienced this variability firsthand. He said he believes most students would agree that grading for many prerequisite courses varies widely by instructor.

Departments have addressed these challenges in a number of ways, with the Department of Mathematics recently implementing new grading standardization policies designed to ensure consistent grading across courses.

“The change is primarily just to make sure that we have coherence between the grades of students who are taking one of the lectures in a parallel course,” said Marcus Roper, the department’s vice chair for undergraduate affairs. “They have the same learning objectives, and students shouldn’t have their grade be dependent on which lecture they’re enrolled in.”

Policies like these iron out inconsistencies between courses and allow for fair comparison of students. When different cohorts of students are graded under fundamentally different criteria, it becomes impossible to know which students have mastered the content and what individual grades represent.

Beyond simple fairness, uneven grading harms students in other ways.

“The reputation of teachers and how they go about their class has so much to do with how people enroll,” Svonkin said.

Facing an increasingly competitive academic environment, students strategically choose courses to protect their GPAs. However, when a student’s primary focus is shifted from learning and knowledge toward grades, their long-term achievement suffers.

Some students, however, are not enthusiastic about the mathematics department’s new changes.

“It creates an environment where it’s more competitive, … and that overall brings down the environment of learning that education institutions should strive for,” said Fredric De Quiros, a first-year electrical engineering student.

While standardized grading does bring an element of competitiveness to the classroom, interstudent competition will be prevalent regardless of grading methods. Grades are simply a measurement – an indicator of how versed a student is in a subject.

If all students’ grades were identical, employers would use other metrics – such as extracurricular activities – to evaluate applicants, shifting competition into these areas.

Still, there are ways to mitigate excessive academic competition, as shown by the policies of the Statistics and Data Science Department. Robert Gould, the department’s undergraduate vice chair, said grade standardization needs reform, especially in cases where multiple professors teach the same course.

“Informally, they (professors) talk to each other,” Gould said. “But increasingly we’ve been adding formal meetings to these classes.”

Policies like these make meaningful strides toward aligning grading policies, while also allowing professors flexibility to adjust grading policies.

The rigidity of preordained bell curves does not allow for natural differences between classes. It is unrealistic to expect that different cohorts of students, taught by different professors, will display identical patterns of achievement in the subject. However, without coordinated grading schemes, variability between courses becomes problematic.

A better balance can be found by implementing both policies simultaneously. All departments at UCLA should host formal meetings for professors to align grading policies and adopt clear department-wide grading recommendations – but not requirements.

With fewer unknowns about grading schemes, students and faculty alike will be able to refocus on the essential goal of all universities: knowledge and learning.