There was an article in BusinessWeek about MBA grade disclosure. Wharton, HBS, Stanford, and Chicago don't disclose grades to employers. At Wharton, there is sort of grade disclosure in that the top 10% of students can claim to employers that they are on the Director's List. Soon there will be a new bracket for the top 25%. This may ultimately lead to total disclosure because people who are identified as "bottom 75%" may want to show employers that they excelled in their areas of interest, i.e. tell Kraft that they DS'ed Marketing.

I think grades should be disclosed at Wharton for two reasons:

Wharton's competitive advantage is in its academic rigor and quantitative focus. Grade non-disclosure reduces the efforts that many students put forth. This is not to say that people are slacking in general--people at Wharton are competitive by nature and are driven to excel even if nobody knows their grades but them. But there is a portion of the population that sees an MBA as brief reprise from 80-hour work weeks.

Grade non-disclosure has actually put more focus on Director's List status by employers and focuses too much on past measures such as GMAT and undergraduate grades. By not disclosing current grades, but disclosing past grades, we are saying that employers can judge us by the past achievements but not by our current efforts, even though they are more applicable. Furthermore, analysis has shown that more Director's List recipients have been funneled to top consulting firms, investment banks, and PE shops since the non-disclosure policy came into effect. This is because a bank can no longer ask a student how they performed in Finance, so Director's List is the only measure they have available.

Below are some quotes from two of my favorite professors at Wharton, Dean Anjani Jain and Professor Ed George:

It's a debate that's flaring up on B-school campuses across the country. And nowhere is it more intense than at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where students, faculty, and administrators have locked horns over a school-initiated proposal that would effectively end a decade of grade secrecy at BusinessWeek's No. 3-ranked B-school. It wouldn't undo disclosure rules but would recognize the top 25% of each class -- in effect outing everyone else. It was motivated, says Vice-Dean Anjani Jain in a recent Wharton Journal article, by the "disincentivizing effects" of grade nondisclosure, which he says faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement.

Just how contentious are things at Wharton? In cross-listed classes, Jain wrote, undergrads outperform MBAs, and the gap is widening. Annual student surveys, he wrote, show that the amount of time students spend on academics has fallen by 22% in just four years. Some of Wharton's best faculty have stopped teaching MBA classes altogether, he added. And those who continue now go to great lengths to keep students in check. Many prohibit late arrivals, talking, and cell phones. Others take attendance, as Harvard Business School does, or give weekly quizzes to make sure students show up for class. "Just like with traffic," says Edward I. George, a Wharton statistics professor. "You need traffic lights to function properly."