School with No Grades

This is a continuation of a hijack from “Grading on a Curve” thread.

I would like to talk about whether or not grades are a good thing in higher eduacation. For the record, I go to UC Santa Cruz, a school which currently runs on a pass/no record system with narrative evaluations and the option of grades. This system (very rare in a public university) has been under attack lately, much to my distress. It is not only that I feel that learning without grades is a better way, but I feel that people should at least have the option of a school that operates that way.

Here is why I think that a pass/no pass system with narrative evals is a superior system.

When you are in a graded system, the most important goal of the class is to earn a certain grade or percentage. You are striving to get an “A” or a “97%”. Actually learning something may be a bi-product of that, but it is not the focus. When grades are there, they are the end instead of the means. I believe that when you take away grades, the focus shifts to actually learning.

People say that not having grades allows people to slack off. I disagree. I think that not having grades leads people to seek a higher understanding. The threat of wasted time and money is enough of a threat to keep people from sliding the whole way through college. I work hard in school because I am there to learn, and I am spending a huge amount of money and a lot of my life to do that. Any slacking on my part comes with the consequence of wasteing that time and money and not learning. I don’t need the additional artificial threat of a low GPA or a big fat D to keep me on track.

But it is not all subjective fluffiness, either. The narrative evaluations I recieve are usually very detailed and very helpful. They have helped me realize what I am strong in, and where I need more work. When people mess up, their evals show it. For example, an eval may say that your work was up to par, but did not show much origional thought. Or they may say that your tests did well, but your attendance was spotty. They also often mention what your papers and projects were about and what the class tried to focus on. This provides a far more complete picture of you than a GPA to anyone interested in how you spent your college years and what you learned. In essence, every eval read like a letter of recomendation, for better of for worse.

I acknowlage that some people cannot suceed without something to measure themselves against. There are some who cannot run a mile without a stopwatch, and some that cannot diet without a scale. For them, there is any number of schools that offer grades. For those of us that wish to be free of those artificial constructs which hold us back, there are evals.

This is only accurate if the person is genuinely interested in a class. I can easily go through a Philosophy or Art class without caring about my grades (I aced my drawing and phil classes this semester, easily), but in a Math or English class, I’d need to know if I’m getting a B or a C in order to function. Some people are the opposite.

What’s so horrible about grades? The system is designed to let the world - future employers, private or government agencies, interested parties, etc. - know exactly how well you did academically. It’s one thing if you have straight A’s while everyone else got a C-average… but if EVERYBODY has the word “Pass” written on their transcripts, how can a possible employer know who’d be better-suited for the job?

And don’t tell me it should matter. If I’m going into surgery, I’d want someone who excelled in medical school holding the knife. If I’m going to court, I’d want a Law School whiz representing me. If I’m going to fly a plane, there is no way in hell I’d want someone with mediocre skills at the controls.

Is this elitist? Call it that if you want. I call it “common sense”. If Person A didn’t do as well in Math as Person B, I think it’s only fair for the world to know it.

Uh, SPOOFE, the idea isn’t to do away with grades entirely, but to use evaluations by the teachers for that purpose. For example, two people may both pass the class, but one might have on their transcript “He worked very industriously on his projects and offered much to discuss in class” and the other’s might say “He seemed listless and inattentive in class and missed 2 assignments.” This is much more specific and telling to the student as to how they can improve than a letter grade would be.

Whatever gave you the idea that school was made for learning? Grades are simply there to tell everyone “you worked hard” “you worked semi hard” etc. It tells nothing of wether or not you learned anything.

I like the idea, but I don’t think it should be confined to higher education. By the time most students reach college age, they’ve already fallen into most of the bad habits of thinking that letter grades encourage (that it’s safest to take an easy class where you can be assured of getting most of the answers “right”; that the primary purpose of any assignment is to impress the teacher; that original thought is dangerous; that cheating is part of the game). And it’s almost impossible to root out those ideas when students have taken them for granted for two-thirds of their lives.

As I think the other replies to this thread have indicated, grades serve the rest of the world. They don’t, in most cases, serve the student.

At my undergrad school, New College in Sarasota, Florida, we didn’t get grades in any classes, just a Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory, and Unsatisfactories weren’t recorded. Instead we got a written evaluation (anywhere from two paragraphs to two pages in length). I don’t know whether this would work well at other places, but it worked very well at New College.

Wow, even sven, your arguements are persuasive. Going into this thread I was dead-set against a nongrading system. I’m rethinking the whole thing now. That being said, my gut reaction is that generally it is NOT a good idea.

Quote:
“Actually learning something may be a bi-product of that, but it is not the focus. When grades are there, they are the end instead of the means. I believe that when you take away grades, the focus shifts to actually learning.”

[sorry I haven’t read up on doing real quotes yet]

Excellent point, and well stated. However, when the focus shifts away from “content” and toward “grade attainment”, practically speaking, that is really not that much of a shift.

Quote:
“I think that not having grades leads people to seek a higher understanding.”

Disagree in general. I simply don’t see most people, college-agers included (you are an exception, of course, even), wanting to jump on that plane of higher understanding. Bully for them if I’m wrong, but I believe a good majority of folks are more motivated by the concrete result of a final grade.

What school did you go to?

-Ben

Not to sound like a complete nimrod here, but if you learned the material, shouldn’t you be able to get that ‘A’? And isn’t that ‘A’ a good indication of whether or not a student has a grasp of the material.

Frankly, the ‘pass/no pass’ method seems to be invented by someone who has a problem with compitition. Check me if I’m wrong, but if 2 students both recieve the ‘pass’, you would be led to assume that they had an equal grasp of the subject. Some folks outside the college system, in the results orienetd world(those who hire or decide who gets into medical schools), may want to know whether you excelled or just squeaked by. I think the ‘A’ is much more feasible way of demonstrating that than the short summary or ‘narrative evaluations’ of a student’s progress.

Ben I go to one where people study. Hence they don’t actually learn the material except for a day or 2 before forgetting it all. Where if you get a 0 on every test you can usually pass through class and homework.

Grades changes the focus from learning to getting good grades. Teaching changes the focus from grades to learning. There is however little teaching at my school.

New College is in the top ten among colleges and universities in the U.S. for the proportion of students who earn Ph.D.'s. It also does well for the proportion of students who become doctors and lawyers. It can get students into top grad schools, law schools, and med schools because the admissions committees frequently recognize New College from previous students there who’ve done well, because they know that New has high admission standars (SAT’s average around 1330), and because New students do very well on the admission tests for grad schools, med schools, and law schools.

Does everyone do well with nongraded courses? Perhaps not. A certain proportion of New students drop out. Even those, though, say that while nongraded courses aren’t right for them, they work well for other people. In some sense, the people who go to New College are self-selected, since there are only a few nongraded colleges in the U.S. But in any case it’s simply not true that students wouldn’t learn without grades. New College is evidence that many students thrive in those circumstances.

Then how do you deal with the professor who writes for two pages and says nothing? The first example you gave, of a person who “worked industriously” and “offered much to discuss in class” doesn’t really say that much about a person’s performance. It can be positive, as you intended it to be, or it can be assumed that the professor didn’t have anything positive to say, but doesn’t want to hurt the student.

You can take two people, one who does work hard on their projects, turns in excellent work and offers cogent, appropriate topics to discuss in class, and that sentence would apply. You can also take a second person, who may work hard and still turn in poor work, and who may not bring anything of substance to class discussions. The sentence would apply to both students. (FTR, I’m not harping on that specific sentence as much as I am trying to point out that even written evaluations may be meaningless. Language is what you manipulate it to be.)

I would rather take a letter grade and have a semi-objective standard against which to compare myself and to the rest of my class than risk going through four years of college not really knowing where I stand.

Robin

My high school also used a pass/fail system with narrative evaluations. This grading system didn’t turn me into an academic slacker; I now attend a college that uses traditional letter grades and I am doing quite well. If anything I think the non-traditional system used in my high school helped me. Unlike most of my fellow students, especially the high-achieving ones, I am not particularly concerned with what grades I get as long as they stay high enough that I don’t lose my scholarship. Many other students will slack off on their reading, skip classes, and then resort to cheating and other underhanded tactics (such as writing a book review based solely on the back cover and table of contents) in order to get a respectable grade. They often manage to get the grade they want, or something close to it, but they haven’t learned anything except maybe that you can fake your way through life without knowing anything. That may be good enough for some people, but to use the surgeon example I’d much rather have a surgeon who worked hard in medical school and really cared about learning how to be a surgeon than one who cheated or faked his or her way to the top of the class.

During various times up to & including grad school, I was in places with gradeless systems.

In each system, some students thrive, some can’t stand it, and the majority do well. There are always overachievers/people who work their hardest all the time. There are always people who just slide by. And the majority of students work hard sometimes, slack off sometimes, and average out having done a pretty good job.

It really depends on the student and the teacher…

-amarinth

I took Zoology as a Freshman, and got a D. I attended every class, read the chapters, took notes and even made color-coded flashcards. I did well on the labs and dissections. Then the tests came. The tests and the quizzes are what killed me. I couldn’t remember any of the correct names! the latin names assigned to which phyla, which class, etc. got all mixed up in my head. So I almost failed the class. Although, a D, to me, is complete failure - and I’m not even one of those grade-a-holics.

Although that put a big black mark on my record, I still wouldn’t be much of an advocate of the pass/no pass system. Overall, I don’t think it would benefit enough people (like myself) to justify implementing it in most colleges.

That’s all. :slight_smile:

The same way you deal with a teacher who gives out a grade the student didn’t earn. At some point you’ve just got to trust that the system (and the teacher in particular) did their job.

Just to offer the other side to the “it worked for me”…

It sure as heck didn’t work for me (granted, this was at a younger age than most of what we’re talking about, but still). I was a demon-child, slacker, and something of a bully. Grades straighterned that right out. It was much easier for my father to say “if you don’t get a C or better you can’t play sports” than “if you don’t start getting more positive-sounding reports”.

I think I’d like it, but I can see the potential pitfalls.

For instance, I didn’t attend most of the lectures for my Pathology and Pharmacology classes last year, because they were awful and a complete waste of my time. While most of the class still felt compelled to go, I spent the same four hours every day at home studying. My grades and my understanding of the material improved considerably.

Sure, a good professor would explain all that in his evaluation. Others, though, would simply say that I never attended lectures, and make no mention of why. So the same step I took to help me learn the material would hurt my evaluation in the end.

Since clinical students are assessed mostly through written evaluations, I can tell you that it is an inexact science. You can shine like a star for most of the rotation, and if you did one thing wrong, that’s what goes on the evaluation. It’s just the way it is when you have a lot of students, and not a lot of time to think about each one.

I think that grades should be a reflection of one’s grasp of the material, and not of “how hard you worked”. That’s why I don’t like giving credit for attendance or for jumping through hoops. If I don’t ever show up for class and don’t ever turn in a homework assignment, but I demonstrate on the test/paper/whatever that I have grasped the material on an A level, then I should get an A, period.

That said, I am near the end of the higher education ladder, and I think I’m more self-motivated than most, so that works for me better than it would for others. A system like you describe would work very well with motivated students and high-quality teachers in smallish classes, but it goes downhill from there.

Dr. J

I agree that a no grade system can work fine with good teachers. Almost any system will do OK with good teachers. The trouble is you get a lot of porr teachers. Just because someone is a brilliant scientist, or whatever, and a valuable asset to a university does not make them a good teacher. A remarkable number of brilliant people who get the job of professor are poor teachers. Their main job is research or writing or whatever, but they have to teach a certain number of courses also. Sometimes there are classes with 200 people in them and the professor gives his lecture and leaves with no oportunity to ask questions. All questions are saved for the TA who may or may not speak English.

If you’re going to have a school with onlyl knowledgeable teachers who are interested in teaching and with all class sizes under 50, then I think you’d have a good chance to turn out good graduates regardless of whether you use a grading system or not. Personally, I like competition and always wished that final grades were given in percentages instead of A-F so that I could have seen more precisely where I stood compared to my class mates.

The BEST way to get an A is to learn the material. Getting A’s consistently without learning is tough and the people who are capable of it could probably achieve the same result easier by actually learning the material. I did accomplish this in a couple classes where I was particularly uninterested in the material. It would have been a nightmare to try that with EVERY class. There are a few people who are gifted in scamming their way through. For these few, it is easier to fake it than to actually learn. They party their way through college and then get jobs in sales or, worst case scenario, occasionally law. This doesn’t bother me. I doubt anyone manages it in medicine. Passing Med School takes a lot more than a talent at BS.

So, in conclusion, I say that when you have good teachers, the issue is moot. But when you have poor teachers, grades are the way to go. Also, grades make things more competetive, which can be good or bad.

As someone who has had to hand out grades, a gradeless system sounds like hell.

After facing down one student after another who thought they deserved a B instead of a C or an A instead of a B (Why? Well, just because!) I shudder to imagine defending a totally subjective evaluation. “You said here that I worked industriously. But don’t you think I really worked very industriously?” I can just picture a student charging into my office because I wrote, “Writing skills were poor, and didn’t follow directions.” Students get torqued off about getting a C, but with specific negative comments they have a world of wriggle room–not to mention fodder for a lawsuit. I’m just guessing that UCSC has an extensive handbook on what it’s okay to say and what’s grounds for litigation.

Also, I can’t imagine how this system could work with a class size larger than maybe 20 students. Instead of a spreadsheet, your grade book would be a novel! Making personal comments about 200 students in an 101-level lecture would be impossible!

Sometimes it’s a bit confining to have to boil a student’s performance down to a letter, but in most cases, I think it’s satisfactory . . . and much more efficient.