COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KRHD) — The Texas A&M University student body are among those college students advocating for changes to college transcripts that would better reflect the difficulty of their coursework, arguing letter grades don't always show the true academic performance in a class.
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Carter Mallory, student body president at Texas A&M, is leading an effort alongside five other student body presidents from universities across the country for transcript reform, including Landon Self, student body president at Baylor University.
"The goal is to make it a requirement sweeping, so that it's not detrimental to any one university," Mallory said.
Aggie students have written a letter to the Trump administration requesting an executive order that would require college transcripts to provide better context for individual grades.
One proposed approach would include the median GPA for each course on transcripts, particularly impactful for challenging classes, allowing employers and graduate schools to compare a student's performance against their peers.
"If a student got a B, but essentially the median grade was a C in that class, that's a great positive, whereas if they got an A and the median grade was an A, that A doesn't actually hold a ridiculous amount of weight," Mallory said.
The letter has support from more than 200,000 students nationwide.
Students behind the effort say they're concerned about the value of their degrees.
"Students that recognize that they could have gone directly into a trade or something instead of paying for an undergraduate education are disappointed with the lack of value it actually provides in the marketplace after graduation," Mallory said.
15 ABC asked Mallory how big of a difference this would make for recruiters.
"I think this would have much greater of an impact in finding work directly after undergraduate education," he said.
While there hasn't been immediate federal action on the proposal, Mallory said there's significant interest from the Texas Legislature to move forward with the concept during the next legislative session, potentially making Texas a leader in transcript reform.
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Read the full letter and executive order request below:
