Every semester at Tulane University, the same conversation echoes across campus: Do business school students really have it easier than the rest?

It is an academic tale of two cities: one where curves rescue students when organic chemistry and differential equations have them stumped, and another where students’ perfectly respectable A-minus mysteriously becomes a B-plus because the class GPA is “too high.” If you are in the A.B. Freeman School of Business, you already know which city you live in.

The Freeman School curiously has maximum, not target, GPAs, but “no minimum class GPA guidelines,” meaning professors can grade as harshly as they would like, but if the class performs too well, they must adjust grades downward. 

Freeman’s grading guidelines explicitly instruct instructors to cap GPAs for core classes between 2.7 and 3.0 and business electives between 3.0 and 3.3. 

Meanwhile, the School of Science and Engineering, School of Liberal Arts, School of Architecture and Built Environment and Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine follow the Newcomb-Tulane College requirements, where they are not bound by a maximum GPA and are simply instructed that students must graduate with a GPA above 2.0. 

In most non-Freeman courses, the curve is typically used as an emergency parachute. Professors curve grades up when students unexpectedly bomb an exam or when they realize they have asked their class of freshmen to solve what is essentially a NASA launch simulation.

But in Freeman, the curve is more of a ceiling. Even if everyone in the class performs well, the policy requires the professor to force the GPA down, making students feel like their grades are pre-determined by policy, not performance.

The U.S. Department of Education justifies the policy as a way to keep a school competitive and academically rigorous compared to peer institutions. And yes, business programs nationwide are notorious for grade inflation, but they are also notorious for well-paid graduates and high course demands.

Employers do not ask for your class GPA; they ask for your overall GPA. And when two Tulane students — one in economics, which can fall under the School of Liberal Arts, one in finance in Freeman — apply for the same internship, the student whose school punishes high performance is at a clear disadvantage. 

This hits hardest for students pursuing graduate school or entering the notoriously selective finance recruitment pipeline. Securing even an entry-level internship in finance has become a battlefield where a single decimal place on your transcript can determine whether you land an interview or get filtered out by an algorithm before a human even sees your résumé.

A GPA cap punishes collaboration and turns the classroom into a competition, transforming peers into threats. In a school that claims “collaborative engagement” as a core value, this contradiction is hard to ignore.

Ending the semester with an arbitrary B-plus, not because of the students’ own work, but because of the work of others, is demoralizing. Worse, it kills curiosity. 

The solution is not radical. Plenty of top business schools, like Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, use suggested ranges or guidelines instead of rigid caps. They allow professors to use their judgment and trust students to excel without punishing them for doing so. Tulane should move in the same direction.

Academic rigor comes from challenging work, meaningful assessment and honest evaluation. Tulane owes its business students the same fairness afforded to every other school on campus.