Is the A-F grading system bad for students?

Great Debates
1

One of the required texts for my Sociology 101 class is called “This Book is Not Required.” The first chapter is a critism of the grading system used in the US today.

The book suggests that by giving grades beginning in early education, we teach children that learning for knowledge is not necessary, and all that is needed are the skills to pass tests and play the game the teacher is playing.

I can’t believe that the idea of a gradeless school system could be presented as a serious option. The book says that people too often “internalize” the grading rules and become preoccupied with competition and their comparative value, but in my experience, grades just keep us informed of our progress, so we know where we are.

So, here’s the question: What would the effects be if the grading system was more of a pass/no pass thing, instead of the current A-F system.

2

Actually, Ooner, the Pass/No Pass system is used in many Universities, esp. in things like art and other unorthodox classes. It gets pretty good reslts, because many students, no longer worried about keeping up a GPA, are happier and more able to focus. So it does work, i guess, but most likly with people who WANT to learn. Lazy or uninterested people do not get any extra benefit.

3

Competition, while not pretty, is essential to a childs development. Some kids are smarter than others, but some kids study harder. Some kids have physical disabilities, some kids have learning disabilities. etc. Grades are a long established and viable method of determining competency. “Pass/Fail” sounds pretty nebulous.

The world is an extremely competitive place, and the US is no exception. Learning is hard work, there’s no way around it. While it might be nice to shield little Jonny and Suzy from reality and pamper their self esteem (and possibly the parents as well) it will hurt them more in the long run.

4

IIRC, one of the UC’s (Santa Barbara? Santa Cruz? I can’t find the reference; does anyone know which one it is?) was at one point on a stricly pass/no credit system for all students. If my memory IS correct, it seems to me like it ought to be possible to just compare the results after four years of college at that UC with the results after four years at other colleges with similar profiles for the entering students.

My guess is that having a pass/no credit system is a disincentive to hard work. My own college did pass/no credit for the first semester freshman classes, and I found that by the end of the semester my study skills and work ethic had degraded somewhat because there were classes that I positively hated, and without any real incentive to work hard in them other than learning the material (stuff I couldn’t have cared less about at the time), I didn’t put the work in I would have had I been graded. It allows students to relax, but I am not convinced this is a good thing.

On the other hand, we were also allowed to take one class/semester on a pass/no credit basis (provided that this class was an elective and you hadn’t taken a class pass/fail from that department already that year), and I found this to be helpful the one time I actually did it, since I wanted credit for that 8th class that semester but (understandably, with 7 other classes) I didn’t know that I’d be able to give it as much time as it deserved.

5

Students, especially K-12, need evaluation. Now, you can abandon formal grades, but you are going to have to replace them with some other systemized feedback. The problem is that for feedback, quanity matters as much as quality–learning is a series of baby-steps, and every step along the way needs to be evaluated–you don’t want to let a kid work on a big project for 6 weeks, dedicate hundreds of hours to it, and THEN tell him, gee, you really messed up right at the beginning and that more or less screwed the whole thing. Feedback needs to come throughout the learning process. It is impossible to give in-depth, individualized feedback to 70-120 kids every day. So teachers fall back on the shorthand of grades for most kids most days and try to augment that with more in-depth, insightful, personalized feedback as they can.

6

In the Montessori system of education, students are never given a final grade for the class or graded on any assignment during their first few years of school. At the Montessori schools that I’m familiar with, parents meet with their child’s teachers several times a year to get a more thorough evaluation of their child’s progress. In my somewhat limited experience, this is good for some students but bad for others. Certain students are interested in the subjects that they are studying and will perform better without the pressure, but others will slack off and take advantage of the system.

One solution that I’ve thought of is that the most academically successful students could move to advanced classes without A-F grading and remain with that system as long as they kept up their academic performance.

7

This was the case with UC-Santa Cruz. Starting with this year’s freshman class(which I am a member of), 3/4s of your classes must be taken for a letter grade.

At orientation, the speaker gave some statistics about their graduate school and job placement success. I can’t remember the exact statement, but it was pretty impressive. I’m sure you can find exact statistics digging around with a search engine.

8

The majority of my schooling didn’t have A-F (or some kind of equivalent) grading. And for me, those systems worked better for me than grades did. This is not true of all students, possibly not true for most students. But a gradeless system is not without merit.

From my experience, the lack of letter grades did not mean the students slacked off, it didn’t mean that there wasn’t competition, and it didn’t mean we didn’t get feedback (in fact, it was usually the opposite). We just didn’t have grades.

9

In grade school I got letter grades but not A-F. Theye were U (Unsatisfactoy) NI (Needs Improvement) S (Satisfactory) and E (Excellent). Now, of course it is almost the same but I will say that these grades are at least explanatory.

In Middle school and High School I was graded on a 100 point scale with 65 being the minimum passing grade. This system is Much more accurate IMHO than the A-F system. A 92 and a 99 grade both indicate “excellent” or “A-quality” work but there is a difference in quality between them.

In college of course we had the 4 point system.
So, I have never been “letter graded” although I have been graded by various other methods. I have also never, to my knowledge been “graded on a curve” ie a statistical bell curve with 10% receiving A’s, 30% recieving B’s, etc. That system is appalling to me.

10

My high school used a pass/fail system with written evaluations instead of letter grades. The evaluations were in three sections: a description of the class and content covered, the student self-evaluation, and the evaluation of the student by the teacher. The teacher’s section consisted of a detailed description of the student’s work, with strengths, weaknesses, and the student’s personal progress noted. I found this much more helpful and satisfying than a letter grade.

11

Whatever you think of the rest of the book, Robert Pirsig makes some interesting points on ‘gradeless’ teaching in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (relevant section linked below):

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~chopper/zen/part3.html

He claims that motivated students will work just as hard as ever, and that unmotivated students will take advantage of the lack of penalties and turn up less and less, eventually dropping out. Unsatisfied with the dead-end jobs this limits them to, one day they’ll return to education with a genuine motivation to learn.

I think this may be quite naive, personally, but it raises some interesting questions about motivation and grading.

12

I teach freshman English at a state university, and I would love to see the grading system go.

There are some exceptions, but on the whole, grading produces students who are too focused on what the teacher thinks to figure out what they think. It makes them afraid to ask questions (because the system penalizes not-knowing), afraid to work things out by trial and error, and – worst of all – afraid to express unpopular opinions. None of this is what real learning is all about. Learning is messy. It involves taking risks and making mistakes. It requires you to admit your ignorance at times. But by the time most students reach college age, they have already decided that questions and experiments are dangerous, and the safest course is to memorize, repeat, and tuck everything into a neat plastic binder.

That said, I haven’t got the slightest idea what I would replace letter grades with (the written evaluation sounds like it would provide more useful feedback, but it still encourages teacher-pleasing rather than self-direction). I’d favor some system where the students have to produce a given result to pass a class (write an article that gets published, design and build a working machine of some sort, beat the instructor at chess) but have an unlimited amount of time in which to accomplish this goal. Unfortunately, some of the course design problems this system would raise are beyond me.

13

Seems like nobody has considered the sciences. I think using an A-F (or 0-100) scale with a curve is one of the better options out there. Most of these classes teach you hard facts and proven techniques for solving problems, and it’s easy to say student X got this problem 75% correct, etc. In those cases the A-F scale is just fine. As for curving, that makes sense sometimes, in that it’s a decent gauge of how students do compared to each other. Frequently a professor’s test are too hard or easy becuase they are a little out of touch with how much the average student will learn in one course, so the curve evens things out, otherwise everyone could pass or everyone could fail. Yes it is possible that all the scores are real low, and if you curve it, people will pass even though they don’t know much of the material. That’s why professors should have some discretion when grading. The last point is that even with pure sciences, there is a place for critical thinking skills and student evaluation, where abolishing the A-F scale would make sense. For example the classes that teach you how and why theories and techniques are used. But the A-F system works pretty good for classes where you are taught methods and techniqes, and your ability to apply these needs to be measured.

14

On a tangent, I have seen some cases where the curve system seems pointless. The one I’m thinking of is a particular math professor at the college I attend - only the most well-prepared students get more than 40% on any test of his, and most people get between 20-30%. Students still pass his class, though, because of the curve. He is essentially telling his students “You have all failed at learning this material, but I guess I have to pass some of you,” regardless of how well any of them did learn the material.

15

lawmill, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that evals are still being given out in addition to the letter grades.

I graduated from UC Santa Cruz last year, and don’t have a GPA to my name. I couldn’t care less. UCSC graduates are accepted to grad schools at about the same rate as graduate from other UCs; problems only come up when the student is applying to med or vet schools, but when I was there, grades were optional, and everyone planning on going to med or vet school simply selected grades. Here’s one interesting statistic: UCSC did a poll of various grad schools across the country, asking them if they preferred/disliked recieving eval transcripts. Well, some percentage said they liked it, some percentage said they didn’t. BUT the schools that said they didn’t like it accepted UCSC grads at a higher rate than those who said they did. Weird, huh?

Getting evaluations instead of grades does not make things easier. Believe me, a bad evaluation is much worse than a bad grade. But the lack of a GPA does eliminate most of the competition that I saw back in high school. Additionally, different teacher grade in different ways - one A might be entirely different than another A given in the exact same subject. An evaluation is an evaluation is an evaluation - if you do a poor job, it will be reflected in your evaluation.

I don’t know that this system would work for younger kids, though. It works if you’re a self-motivated adult, but children might need the competition to use as motivation.

16

One of the drawbacks of using a A-F system–at least on some levels–is that it occaisionally leads to unhealthy levels of competition.

I was in a “smart people’s” program during high school. In that program, the grading scale remained A-F (Well, maybe A-E…I don’t remember what they used in high school, having never gotten those grades myself :wink: ). What was interesting is that the number of students earning high grades (As and Bs) stayed rather high, but the competition between students became fierce.

There were catfights over who would be valedictorian. People would argue with teachers for hours in order to get an 89.95 or higher. Over a single point. The numbers, rather than the concepts being learned, became the most important thing in these people’s minds.

This sucked for people like me, who really didn’t give a rat’s bum over grades in general. Those of us who just wanted to learn the damn concept sometimes lost out. We wouldn’t argue over some point on the test that could be kind-of ambiguous just so that we could have THAT much more of an edge over the others. And some of us who actually liked to learn lost out, as well. I took two languages my sophomore year, burnt out, and ended up “screwing my GPA” so that I couldn’t possibly be in the “top 10” (That would be top ten people, not percent. I was in the top 10 percent :P). By screwing my GPA, I mean that I got a B in Spanish and a C in Latin. A lot of people didn’t take hard classes because they didn’t want to mess up their GPA.

In that kind of case, grading is bad…however (there’s always a flip-side), grading is also an incentive, which is good. When people know you’re going to grade something–and therefore evaluate it–they will usually do a better job.

I think, therefore, that grading is good…but that grades and relative rank should be given less notice than they are at the moment. Especially when it comes to bell curves. I mean, what if everyone in the class did well? You can’t fail someone if they’ve done what’s expected of them…

17

This is a subject that I feel strongly about.

I am a UCSC student, amongst one of the last classes that has the choice to remain GPA free. The move to letter grades is destroying our school. Lawmill, UCSC is a wonderful place, but sometimes it can seem like a funeral. So much of what makes it wonderful is withering away. I hope that you, and future classes, can keep the spirit alive. It’s tough, but it’s possible. I hope the UCSC I graduate from will be the same UCSC that I was admitted to.

Anyway, I have found pass/no pass coupled with letter grades to be a vastly superior system. I am a fairly gifted student, but ever since about 7th grade I have gotten fairly mediocre grades. All that changed when I went to a gradeless college. Suddenly I have become a steller student, and I put in an amazing amount of work into my education and get an amazing amount out of it.

Grades made my education feel cheap. I felt I was doing it for the sake of a letter, and frankly that wasn’t much motivation for me. And, I hated the fear that comes along with letter…the fear that I will lose my position in the class. The fear that I will fail. The false compitition. In my high school nobody would take challenging classes because the feared screwing up their class rank. For example, we had the option of taking an extra period for electives. None of the “academic elite” would do that because the extra period was not honors (as in not a weighted grade) and therfor it would “dilute” their GPA and ruin the chance at valedictorian. It was riduculous.

And, it was too easy to pull of decent grades. I could get As with no effort whatsoever. There was no motivation to work any harder than the bare minimum, because the bare minimum still got me that prized letter on my report card. None of it had any meaning for me. If it is all about that letter- why work any harder than you need to?

All of that inspired me not to give a damn. I saw that all my work would go to false rewards, so I opted out. The rebellious side of me took over. I was an academic rebel. I read long Russian novels during science class. I worked for hours a day on after-school drama productions. I spent my time doing all kinds of academic stuff- just not the stuff that was assigned for class.

But in a gradeless school, my education suddenly had meaning. I wasn’t doing this for a letter. I wasn’t doing this for prestige or competition or anything like that. I was doing this for me. What was most important was not what letter I got, but how much I learned. My education was truely my education, and it was up to me to get as much out of it as I possibly could. The change was amazing, suddenly I became devoted to my work. I will spend twenty hours straight on an essay. I do research outside of class just for the sheer pleasure of it. I love and care about my education. I am learning like mad, excelling in what I do, and I am loving it!

And evaluations tell more than a grade ever could. They tell me what I need to work on. They tell me exactly what I excelled at. They are a tool, not just an ends.

Of course, different people need different things. Some people need a carrot dangleing in front of their faces to do anything. Thats cool- there are schools for them, too. But for some of us that carrot is an insult. It demotivates us. It distracts us. It inspires us to fail out of spite.

Please leave us out few havens where we can learn for the sake of learning, not carrots.

18

I think the one thing that can be agreed is that no one system is right for every student.

Unfortunately, we simply cannot individualize evaluations to that extent.

I had the standard Outstanding/Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory system in grade school, a percentage system in high school, and the 4-point system in college. I was validictorian of my high school class of 120 or so; I graduated college with highest honors.

I’m proud of those accomplishments and the recognition I received for attaining those goals. The difference in GPA between myself and the salutatorian was miniscule, and number three wasn’t far behind either. Not one of us, out of the group of us at the top of our class, ever (to my knowledge) avoided challenging classes to maintain or improve our class ranking. The thought never once crossed my mind, and I’m sure it was the same for most of the others.

Most of us took college-level courses for college credit during our junior and senior years, but these courses were not ‘weighted’ any differently than normal courses. I admit I was confused by that reference earlier in the thread, as I’d never heard of such a thing. We never slacked off or anything due to competition. And many of us were well-involved in extra-curriculars, too.

I like the grade system, but perhaps that’s because it benefitted me (in granting me recognition that I might not have gotten otherwise). An evaluation system probably would not have worked well for me (teachers have a tendency to focus on bringing the lower students up and ignore the upper students because they’re meeting the requirements; an evalutation of “he’s doing fine, I have no concerns” isn’t incredibly helpful or motivating).

But that’s just it – such a system would be perfect for other students. How do we strike a balance? I’m not sure we can. I don’t think eradicating the letter-grade system is the way to go; there must be someway to combine the objective (well, as objective as possible) letter/percentage grades with an organized system of evaluation and feedback.
Powers &8^]

19

Well, yeah. sure.

The problem is, school is an artificial environment-- it’s a matter of motivation and rewards. Call it carrots if you want, but that’s what makes the world go around. Incentive.
If there are no grades, no rewards, no recognition, there is no incentive to succeed, to kick ass and take names.

Somebody has to be the ‘loser’; whether it’s a football game or a calculus exam. The real world isn’t gradeless, that’s the kicker. Reality grades on a curve, I’m afraid.

20

Excuse the brevity of this post, but this is politically correct BS.

It’s not a matter of forcing competition. It’s cause and effect! You put more effort in, you get a higher grade. You put less in, a lower one. What’s the problem?