What would go wrong if all the department professors got together before the semester and agreed on a grading system for the entire department/major's classes?
Senior undergrad Mechanical Engineering student at a smallish uni, taking distance classes from a much bigger school in our uni system. I'll acknowledge that I'm asking this out of frustration with how my TSAD class is graded.
One of the big curfuffels students face in college is inconsistent grading systems between classes. 2 classes can require fundamentally the same work, with said work given the same effort by the same student, but one grade could be lower than the other entirely based on the different professors' idea of partial credit, for example. I was wondering, what would happen if, before every semester, all the professors of a department had to get together and agree on the same grading scale/system across all of the classes they teach in their program?
There's a ton of issues with this idea, of course, which is why I've never heard of any uni doing this. Differing personalities and different requirements for classes throughout the program are obvious things to point out (tho what I'm thinking of would exclude classes outside the major program that are still required for credit. The comp professors wouldn't have to meet and agree on the grading scale with the engineering or film professors, that'd be beyond stupid to suggest).
I feel like, even in an ideal scenario where all the classes in the program are similar in work and effort enough to be compatible across a uniform grading system, there's something inherently wrong with this idea that prevents it from having been seriously considered.
What am I missing here? Has there been an attempt at this idea in higher education?