In an act of intellectual bravery I recently decided to do one of my reports for my English class on the idea that written teacher easements combined with portfolios of students work were more accurate ways for students to show what they had accomplished during their education. I’ve read a little into the subject of using other forms of easement over letter grades and have found the arguments thought provoking however most of that reading was nearly a year ago.
So rite now I’m asking if anyone around these boards can suggest some articles, research papers, or let me know of any schools or colleges that don’t use letter grades to ease their students?
PS I’m not interested in starting a debate on the subject I just want data on it.
Not sure about Reed-- possible. I’m pretty sure, though, that Evergreen College (Olympia, WA) doesn’t, and instead uses some kind of joint teacher-student evaluation process.
Hampshire College in Amherst, MA doesn’t use grades. Spit out the likes of Ken Burns and John Falsey, but they pale in comparision to their most [sub]in[/sub]famous alumn.
University of California at Santa Cruz used to not give letter grades. I think that the practice is fading somewhat because some students have found that lack of grades causes grief when most every body has grades.
What exactly do you mean by grief? do emplyers look down on the school’s graduates becsue of the no grade system. Do they find it difcult to compare the school to thers with their system? Or do the students find it harder system to excel in?
I think Yale Law school does not use grades. Does St. John’s college in Annapolis? They probably have some reviews in their schools’ institutional documents (accredited schools have reviews every so many years).
Student portfolios and instructor notes would be hard for large mega-classes to do reasonably and protect against fakes.
My alma mater, New College in Sarasota, Florida, doesn’t use letter grades. You get a written evaluation somewhere from two paragraphs to two pages long and a satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating for the course. New College has an extremely good record for getting students in top grad schools.
Graduate schools don’t know how to handle applicants who don’t have a conventional transcript from their undergraduate school.
This is why at my alma mater St. John’s College (campuses in Annapolis, MD, and Santa Fe, NM) keeps grades, but does not give them to the student unless requested, and discourages students from asking.
The theory is that students should be working for the education, not the grade, and that there should be a more informative method of student evaluation than a simple letter grade. As I recall, approximately half of all students do ask to see their grades sometime during their four years, mostly because of concerns for grad school. Since I had no plans for grad school, I resisted the temptation until the end of my senior year, then I had to look. (No grade below B-, if you must know.)
Instead of grades, we have Don Rags, mandatory meetings at the end of each semester with the student and all of his/her tutors (all faculty are called tutors–no professors). The tutors report to the senior seminar tutor about the student’s progress during the semester, referring to to him/her in the third person. The student may ask questions or comment on the report. As I recall, the Don Rag takes 15-20 minutes (although it often feels much longer).
Interestingly, the official Web site at the link above is almost entirely silent about the grading process, perhaps because they are concerned the unconventional method would scare people off.
A caveat: All this was true when I graduated in 1984, and I have not heard of any changes since then. (I think I would have heard.) But there is a chance that everything is different now.
> Graduate schools don’t know how to handle applicants who
> don’t have a conventional transcript from their undergraduate
> school.
As I said in an earlier post, my alma mater, New College, has had an extremely good record at getting its graduates into top grad schools. Indeed, that’s what it’s best at. There was a thread a few months ago about Evergreen State and the large number of oddball artistic types it has produced. On the other hand, despite the hippie-weirdo-freak-commie-fag-junkie reputation of New College, it hasn’t produced that many oddball artistic types. What it has produced in large numbers is Ph.D.'s. It’s among the top ten colleges in the U.S. (in percentage of graduates) in producing Ph.D.'s. Bizarrely, the only two significant political figures among its graduates are a Republican congressman from Florida and the chair of the Republican party from New Hampshire.
The narrative evaluation system at UC Santa Cruz has been almost completely phased out. When I was a teaching assistant there, I had to prepare letter grades for every student regardless of whether or not they were requested. The problem was two-fold. First, in the really large classes (300+) students, individual evals are very cumbersome. Grading finals and then writing 45 evals at the end of the quarter when your own stuff is due is a real pain in the ass. The second problem was for students primarily in math and science where a GPA is pretty important for grad school admission.
As a provider and receiver of written evals I have to say that the system, in principle, works well. Getting a good, positive eval is very flattering and provides a ton of information about how a student performed in a class. Conversely, getting a bad eval is painful to even read and all things being equal, I would just rather have a grade.
> The second problem was for students primarily in math and
> science where a GPA is pretty important for grad school
> admission.
And let me note that I am a mathematician and the fact that I didn’t have grades didn’t seem to hurt my chances. Among the graduates of New College is a winner of the Fields Medal (which is sort of the Nobel Prize in math).
OK. In my experience, with the students I worked with (600 or so over a couple of years), ~90% of the math and science students requested grades and ~10% wanted evals. The numbers were reversed for art, social science, and humanities students. In fact, the university has a department which “translates” evaluations into grades for students who need a GPA for grad school admissions.
Perhaps it is more important for students who are coming from universities that don’t have the reputation of New College.
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