Disclosure of grades to recruiters and others has been an important topic of discussion on several business school campuses this fall. At Harvard Business School, 87 percent of the MBA student body, according to one poll, opposed the administration's decision to allow the voluntary disclosure of their grades by individual students, presumably to organizations in which they might be attempting to secure jobs.
Among other things, students argued that even voluntary disclosure would: (1) pressure everyone to disclose their grades, (2) lead to competitive behaviors injurious to the learning process in the classroom, and (3) place too much emphasis on one dimension of behavior whose predictive reliability of future performance is dubious at best. Administrators maintained that voluntary disclosure: (1) leaves the matter up to the individual, (2) will allow outstanding performance in a particular course (which would go unrecognized if it did not lead to more general "honors" recognition) to be disclosed to other interested parties, and (3) would create subtle pressures that would raise the quality of preparation for, and involvement in, class discussion and other academic activities.
The issue may be seen by some as one of a general category related to transparency in business. In recent years, the predominant practice among leading business schools has become one of voluntary disclosure. It is certainly one favored by recruiters seeking all the information they can about prospective job candidates. And it can be argued that it offers students with highly variable grades the opportunity to disclose selectively only the best of those grades to recruiters who might have the most interest in them, a practice that might be regarded as relatively harmless academic "spinning" of information.
One can argue that those preparing themselves for management will have to face the "judgment day" of public knowledge of their performance at some time in the future, although public knowledge rarely extends very deeply into an organization. But is the management classroom the place for increased transparency? Not only might non-disclosure foster a more cooperative classroom culture, but it can also be argued that it shields poorer performers from the glare of at least semi-public knowledge of their academic performance while they are attempting to hone their skills. Interestingly, few executive education programs of which I am aware provide any kind of post-course evaluation to the participants' sponsoring organizations. Most schools resist all requests for such information.
Should the quality of the educational process be the primary concern in the debate over grade disclosure? If so, what are the effects of grade disclosure, even voluntary, on the process? Are there other, more important ways of injecting greater transparency into the educational process? For example, should more emphasis be placed instead on the measurement of performance of entire schools, faculties, and graduates? Or should the issue of transparency even be extended to education for management? What do you think? 