Imagining College Without Grades

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades

by robg • 17 years ago

30 41 17 years ago

Why "imagine" college without grades, when there are plenty of (healthy, well-functioning, accredited) colleges without grades out there, with decades of experience?

robg• 17 years ago

True, but don't those also tend to be schools with vastly different curricula and non-traditional teaching methods?

For instance, I know about Hampshire College. I know there are other examples. But if you're a traditional school, the prospect of removing grades but not changing too much else may be too difficult to fathom. They might, rightly, see grades as tied to their identity. Change one and you change the other. That may sound absurd, but I understand it especially when institutional inertia often spans tens of decades if not over a century or more.

wheels• 17 years ago

Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University

mattmcknight• 17 years ago

I think they should at least move away from reporting overall GPA. I know too many people that were taking easy classes or professors to keep their GPA up. No one else benefits from that move. Moving away from grades probably makes sense too. Unfortunately classes are too unique to have simple objective standards and there is no way for anyone to make useful sense of them.

The overall goals of grades, to measure students knowledge of the subject is only useful if you are comparing a student with another student who took the same class from the same professor. Since no one really needs that limited of a comparison, a more objective standard is needed.

That's why programs with specific

chris112• 17 years ago

There are some students who are now saying that paying attention to your overall g.p.a. is counter productive. Cal Newport just recommends that students find the best way to learn the material, and focus on grades from tests and homework. In other words, focus on the process and use the short term results for feedback, don't stress about the long term results

He wrote a book on doing well in college, and interviewed about fifty straight-A students. Oddly enough, the ones who payed the most attention to their overall g.p.a, for example dropping courses before they affected their g.p.a., did the worst. Link: http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/11/14/the-unconventional-sch...

Shamiq3• 17 years ago

Pardon me, but I'm in an Algorithms class, and I'm seeing "Greedy Strategy" written all over that.

DaniFong• 17 years ago

I knew a kid who desperately wanted straight A+'s. He was really sharp, and took physics and math. But when he got to third year, quantum mechanics loomed ahead, and, reportedly, he wasn't sure if he could ace it. He abandoned physics, and switched to chemistry.

He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.

yummyfajitas3• 17 years ago

In other news, people standing on their toes makes measuring height meaningless. Therefore, we should stop measuring height.

paulgb3• 17 years ago

Clever analogy, but it oversimplifies the problem. There is a precise standard unit for height, but it's impossible to create a precise standard unit for knowledge.

yummyfajitas3• 17 years ago

Problem: measurements are noisy, biased, and sometimes vague.

Solution: stop measuring stuff?

Height is a good measurement because it is standardized and objective: I stand on my heels, fully erect, adjacent to a ruler. The marking parallel with the top of my head is my height.

What we should be doing is trying to bring grading to a similar level of objectivity and standardization, not throwing it away completely.

markessien3• 17 years ago

The problem with not having grades is that the students who are best at social interaction will tend to do better than those who are not. Scores need to be objective, not subjective, and scores are necessary to give an impression of a persons ability, when he later applies for a job.

niels_olson2• 17 years ago

> scores are necessary to give an impression of a person's ability

That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.

markessien3• 17 years ago

How do you standardize a test of ability in computing? I'm not talking of computer science, but of plain programmers - how do you test their capability in some type of standardized test? It's very difficult.

Medicine is different because it's about a lot of knowledge and being able to product that knowledge when required (same with lawyering). Programming is different in that you look up the information, the body of relevant info often changes, paradigms change constantly. You can't standardize this field (yet).

oldgregg3• 17 years ago

But the real problem here is that we treat everyone the same. Who wants a C- doctor vs. an A+ doctor?! If you really cared about the unique differences in people then one person would take 2 years, and another person would take 6-- but when they finished they would be competent. Unfortunately, treating people like machines by grading them is really just a form of moralism that tries to categorize and rank people. We love to justify our existence by comparing ourselves to others, and "objective standards" provides nice self-validation.

markessien3• 17 years ago

If a guy took 6 years to learn how to program and another guy took 6 months, the 6 month guy will be more productive when we decide we are going to use a brand new language. People ARE machines - but a lot less reliable and much softer. It's not moralism to want to categorize people, it's efficiency. The process of categorization is weak, but it's better than none at all.

I much prefer that I be ranked on my grades objectively, than I be ranked on something else like 'he attended oxford', because the second is likely due to the wealth and influence of my parents.

When a professor gets to subjectively evaluate a student, who do you think will fare better, the student who speaks like him, also plays golf and whose parents attend the same country club, or the other ghetto dressing slang talking student?

An exam is hard and objective. It speaks the truth, because it's judgment is cold and not affected by any preconceptions.

Excellence should always be as objectively graded as possible, because humans have too many biases.

jff• 17 years ago

So because of grade inflation, colleges want to get rid of grades. Ok, sure, rather than give the grades earned and hurt those poor freshies' feelings (and get the calls from mad mothers), we'll just give some sort of general evaluation of success. Oh wait, now professors are inflating the evaluations.

baddox• 17 years ago

I'd rather imagine college with a reasonable grading system. Your grade should be EITHER the average (weighted, perhaps) of your homework and test scores (like most grades are now) OR the average of your test scores, whichever is higher. This would allow people who understand the material to not waste time doing homework so long as their test scores are satisfactory. Also, assignments and tests should be hard enough that getting a 50% on them isn't considered failing; grade inflation is rampant and frankly stupid. Letter grades should be done away with, or only used as a shorthand way of expressing a final grade: making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic. GPA should be done away with. Nearly all university grades are done on a computer, and computing the average of a decimal percentage is no harder than assigning a score for letter grades and computing the mean of those on a scale of 4.0 (or 5.0, etc.). Also free beer at college would be nice.

mattchew• 17 years ago

I'd love to see grading and ranking and sorting separated from teaching and learning. IMO grading (as opposed to guidance and correction) is destructive to real learning.

At the least, we should separate the teacher from the grader. To me it is just nutty that the person who teaches should be the one who proclaims how well the student has learned.

eisenkr• 17 years ago

Many top business schools today have grade non-disclosure policies that stop employers from asking about grades and stop students from sharing their transcripts. The students love the policies because they claim it increases collaboration and teamwork, but my own experience suggests that the students also love not working hard. The undergrads at a place like Wharton (who have grade disclosure) often look for classes with loads of MBA students (who don't) because the MBA students pull the curve down.

When people are going to school to learn, I don't think removing grades will hurt performance, but learning can suffer when people go to school for credentials and a job. Career-oriented students seem to listen and learn more when there's a meaningful grade waiting for them at the end of the semester.

helveticaman3• 17 years ago

I don't give a shit about my grades, but I still go to class and work hard because I want to learn more. I want to be the best. This is because, ultimately, my success in the startup world will depend on what I learn.

But I may be an exception.

Shamiq3• 17 years ago

But I may be an exception

You're not the only one, buddy.

niels_olson2• 17 years ago

My medical school, like most top medical schools, did away with grades in the first two years. Every student does take the same class from the same professor. The professors can still calculate an ordinal rank order of the students because they have all the test grades. And it's mostly trivial anyway because the residency programs aren't nearly as interested in your grades as they are in your standardized test scores.

The only thing that happened when we did away with grades was that the students lost the only quantitative feedback they had. We even had professors in the beginning refusing to give us our test scores.

chris112• 17 years ago

How has this affected acceptance into residency programs? Do students mostly use recommendations while applying?

rp2• 17 years ago

Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal" your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.

akd• 17 years ago

I always thought it was Harvard which was consistently rated #2 after Yale.

rp2• 17 years ago

You are right; I had it reversed. I will add that Harvard Law is switching to a pass/fail system in 2009.

oldgregg3• 17 years ago

The age-graded system is a dehumanizing legacy of the industrial revolution. It has nothing to do with teaching people how to think but was purposed to shoehorn people into "productive" career paths. "Liberal arts" education today is structurally flawed in such a way that people only receive incoherent bits of information without ever learning to think cohesively.

So you end up going to class and learning to recite Maslow's theory in Psychology, History, Poli Sci-- they just dump information on you without seeing how any of it is inter-related.

I'm just hopeful that the new economic reality will reveal the education system for what is really is-- in most cases-- doing more harm than good.

endtime• 17 years ago

I agree that grading has nothing to do with teaching people how to think, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. As a student, I would hate not to get feedback on my performance. Also, I've definitely gone over and above on assignments when extra credit was possible, and that has often forced me to learn more than I would have if things were, say, pass/fail. Sure, I could have had the discipline to go above and beyond anyway, but honestly, having an artificial motivator is nice sometimes.

And if I were an employer, it would make it much harder to determine who to interview. If you remove "dehumanizing" numbers like grades and test scores from resumes, how does Google (for example) know whether to interview you, who had a 3.8 CS GPA and a 1550 SAT, over the guy who slept through class, turned in code that didn't compile, and can't explain the difference between = and == (yes, I knew people like this as an undergrad)?

That said, this is all from the perspective of an engineering student. I suppose it's much harder to quantify performance for the liberal arts (which is probably part of what initially pushed me towards engineering, now that I think about it).

oldgregg3• 17 years ago

Yes, feedback is hugely essential. It's more of a question whether feedback should come as an impersonal mark on a paper that provides minimal direction, or if it should come from a person who knows your unique strengths/weaknesses and can direct you in a way that will help you thrive.

As for SAT/GPA, they are terrible indicators of an individual's effectiveness. Hackers know this intuitively. (because so many of them drop out!) It's this use of artificial measurements that makes "MBA types" so despised.

If those 4 years has been spent developing real projects and interacting with real people (more like an apprenticeship than modern corporate-education) then you wouldn't need artificial measurements because people would graduate with a body of meaningful work.

helveticaman3• 17 years ago

My experience is that your parents and teachers won't allow you not to care about your grades. I'm in an elite school right now and am trying to ignore grades. However, I'm finding the powers that be are really trying to stop me from learning for its own sake.

dill_day• 17 years ago

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

-- Emerson

nickmolnar• 17 years ago

As a related question:

Could you learn as much taking a free course online (MIT OpenCourseware or Stanford's free courses)? No grades, no need to hand in assignments, no mandatory exams.

I'm trying it as an experiment right now. Any bets on whether I finish the course and/or learn anything?

blasdel• 17 years ago

I went to The Evergreen State College, which is the only public gradeless school I know of. Instead of grades, everyone writes narrative evaluations of themselves and their cohorts. Nearly everyone takes one fulltime multi-disciplinary course at a time.

What often ends up happening is that professors will attempt to be rigorous by tying awarded credit in a section of the class with the % of the work you turned in -- but then if they take credit, they excise the portion of the evaluation that would have described your failings.

access_denied• 17 years ago

When I was a kid-nerd, adults would ask me what I would like to do when grown-up. You know, in the manner they do this to be polite. And I figured, when I respond "I want to go to university and study!" they would smile and be happy. So there I had my slogan. Thing was: I also meant it. I imagined a place where I could work on projects of my own choosing as opposed to the stuff the teacher would come up with. That's what I thought means "to study". You are completely free, choose your subject and fight to master it and achieve great things that are a blessing for humanity. Oh, well.

Imagining College Without Grades

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