The first no grade, no class, publicly funded Liberal Arts college in America has a great 25 year tradition of producing excellence in students. Do Matt Groenig and Michael Richards ring any bells. Has anyone on this thread ever read “Summerhill” by A.S. Niel? Self empowered people are the happiest and most productive.
Happy learning
When I saw the thread title and a poster named “goeduck”, I knew it had to be about my alma mater.
One problem though, and I kinda hate to bring it up, but it’s spelled “geoduck”.
Bad “grades” in spelling at evergreen. Just wasn’t my forte.
I think it also depends on what you are trying to learn. In a highly disciplined field (law, medicine, engineering), people need to know procedures and methods. They can demonstrate how well they know this in exams and come out with a grade. This can be highly subjective (for example in engineering, there is no ‘correct’ answer to half the questions in the latter years - well there wasn’t for me), but people demonstrate their knowledge so the grade fits.
I am always a little dubious of grades in English, History or Philosophy. Basically because there is no way to check between teachers and equate them. A teacher could say that a particular student is the best they have ever had, while another hates them. Talking from personal experience. I was first in the class for one semester and then last in the next because we had a change of teacher.
My point being that gradeless schools with written reports work well for subjective courses, because it is easier to compare written evaluations than a grade.
I have always had percentages as my grade, and some people can get incredibly incensed over a ½% difference. So maybe a more general classification system is a way to avoid this.
My experience at New College was that ungraded courses worked just as well in “non-subjective” courses as in “subjective” ones (although I don’t even think that distinction makes much sense). Those of you trying to theorize about how well ungraded course should work really ought to look at some colleges that have tried it - New College, Evergreen, UC Santa Cruz, etc. You’re claiming it can’t work when the fact is that it has worked just fine. I’m not claiming it’s for everyone - perhaps the reason it works so well is that only a few places do it, so the student body is self-selected - but it certainly does work for many people.
Incidentally, Evergreen isn’t the first public nongraded school. New College has been public since 1975. It was chartered in 1960, took in its first class in 1964, and became part of the Florida state system in 1975.
VileOrb notes that it would be hard to do evaluations for a class of 200 students. Agreed, which is why a monster class at New College was 40 people. 200 students in a class is a hard job regardless how you do it. Even in universities that have such huge lecture classes, they’re handled by a professor spending a huge amount of his time, plus 4 to 6 teaching assistants grading tests and doing smaller seminars.
I normally wouldn’t nitpic over trivia but I must defend my honor. the evergreen state college is the “first” publicly funded “no grade” institution as declared by the following:
“Dan Evans Signs Olympia’s College Into Law”. Daily Olympian 3/21/67
Dan Evens was the Govenor of the State of Washington at the time.
goeduck, you wrote that Evergreen is “the first no grade, no class, publicly funded Liberal Arts college in America” with “a great 25 year tradition of producing excellence in students.” This would seem to imply that it opened in 1975, the same year New College became part of the Florida state system. You also write that its existence was signed into law in 1967. Could you explain this? Did it take eight years to be opened after it was authorized (possible, I suppose, since it took four years for New College)? If not, what do you mean? If it opened in 1975, Evergreen and New would be in a tie for first.
Incidentally, what do you mean in saying that Evergreen has “no class.” Besides having ungraded courses, New College had no course distribution requirements. You could either do a major in something or you could do a general studies degree. You had to do a senior thesis. You had to do a certain number of Independent Study Projects. A course was anything you got a professor to agree to. A successful term was anything you got your advisor to agree to. It was standard to create a few independently devised self-study courses with the agreement of a professor during your time at New. It was also common to do off-campus study at another university. A major was anything you got two professors to agree to. A senior thesis was anything you got three professors to agree to.