Incorporating Procedural Justice into Grading Systems in Post-secondary Management Courses: a Report from the Firing

This is the first in a series of papers to report on my endeavour, over more than seven years, to incorporate procedural justice into the grading systems I used to evaluate the performance of students in managementrelated courses. I enumerate the similarities between the organizational and academic contexts within which equity-based resource distributions are made. I summarize Leventhal’s (1980) Justice Judgment Theory for assessing the procedural justice of such resource distributions and show how the theory applies in the academic context. I then describe the management courses that provided the context within which I pursued the application of Leventhal’s model to my grading systems. Most importantly, I describe my experiences in trying to enhance the fairness of probably the most important component of a grading system – setting ground rules. And to conclude, I identify both research and practical implications associated with extending PJ theory into the realm of evaluating student performance in post-secondary courses.