To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades
npr.org
npr.org
The whole idiocy of linear education makes me furious. I have only gotten motivated to study certain topics later in my life, where it's effectively impossible to return to college because I would have to study a whole bunch of unrelated crap and get the degree or go home instead of gaining a small portion of it and perhaps finishing the rest later.
And let me just take the exams when you have nothing to teach me! I mean, seriously, why would I have to enroll and attend just to get certified for Linux system administration when I make living off it? Just give me the module. Same with software development, databases and so on.
Sure, I will take the OCSP / BGP advanced networking classes when I have time for them, but don't force me to study routing now (or you won't have enough credits for this semester and you'll have to go away).
Aaaaargh.
HN story where someone got a CS degree in three months by speedrunning the tests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467900
My personal record was 14 courses (standard being 5-6 per semester) due to narrowly avoiding dropping out thanks to talking with the dean and getting approval for making up for my failures in the previous semester. I failed three of them, but that was still enough to stay afloat. Can't imagine actually going through this every semester.
That does not inspire confidence at all.
I did IB, competed in high level science and math competitions, did dual enrollment... and CLEPped the maximum per semester I could in college.
Is that such a shock if I'd already covered the material at a higher level?
Pass/Fail already exists as an option if students want to use that.
Grades aren’t about proving learning, they are a demonstration of competence. I took many classes with prerequisites that required a C or even B in other classes before allowing me to take it. This was because of demand for classes as well as out of necessity of prior knowledge. It was possible to get a waiver from the professor, and some did. But many wouldn’t even meet because they were too busy to meet individually and assess a student’s knowledge.
How will this work without grades? It seems like this is just opting for short term happiness and pushing the actual reasons for grades down the road.
Certain kind of examination will take pretty long to be comparable with what a university can assess. A course project, one that demonstrates some breadth and depth of knowledge of the course's material, may take weeks or months to complete. Which, on the other hand, should be fine, both in a traditional university setting, and outside it.
At the end of the semester some guy showed up and gave you an oral exam followed by a written exam. They were usually a professor at another nearby university that actually offered the course. If you passed both you got a passing grade for the course.
Some schools without grades use a portfolio system where you have to complete projects in various areas and some sort of capstone project or thesis to graduate. Graduate programs largely work that way as well. They may have a qualifying process, but actual letter grades are largely irrelevant.
Students still get feedback on their projects, and they graduate with a CV and work portfolio that they can show to employers or graduate programs.
> If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, "they didn't learn anything," said Greene. And "if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot."
Sorry, Jody Greene, you're out to lunch here. The grade is assigned by the lecturer of a course, as a confirmation that the student knows a thing or two about certain fixed topics. If the student learned about those topics somewhere else before taking the course, they earned that A just as much as someone who learned it in the course.
It is extremely important to intellectual freedom that the time and place where some knowledge or skills were attained is considered immaterial. The idea of someone not getting accreditation in a course because they already knew the material beforehand and so didn't learn anything is completely wrongheaded and abhorrent. I dare say, an attack on Western civilization's intellectual legacy.
> And so if we were to shift our focus on to learning and away from grades, we would be able to tell whether we were graduating people with the skills that we say we're graduating them with."
To "tell whether you are graduating people with skills", you need a test of those skills. That's a grade.
A skill test could actually be a lot harder than earning grades in some disciplines.
For instance, if we expect that computer science graduates ought to be skilled software developers and start testing that, it will be a shitshow.
But also, you know what they call the dude who got C's at medical school? Doctor.
Also, the fuck they didn't. They learned patience (have to listen to/discuss other people's questions even if they're stupid to you) and the ability to do tasks that are boring/tedious/something you've already done before - 2 qualities that are excellent to have when working. If you're used to picking things up quickly, learning to handle boring and tedious environments is probably the best skill you could take out of your schooling. How many meetings have we all sat in where we just have to sit there until somebody important reaches the conclusion we reached in 10 minutes?
That's an idea of what grades are and what they're for. It's not the idea. I would call this an ideal, often fallen short of, and often misguided.
In practice, grades are used in all sorts of ways for all sort of reasons. Many times, they are used for no good reason.
The idea that tests are impartial accreditation is abstract. It rarely plays in reality. There's a place for GMEDs, bar exams, TOEFLS and whatnot... but it's limited.
>It is extremely important to intellectual freedom that the time and place where some knowledge or skills were attained is considered immaterial.
> The idea of someone not getting accreditation in a course because they already knew the material beforehand and so didn't learn anything is completely wrongheaded and abhorrent
It's abhorrent only within the accreditation framework of ideals. This just isn't reality. That objectivity ideal for education is always betrayed because it doesn't work.
People don't value exam results, in their own right, because they're not that valuable in their own right. A course's job irl is to educate, not accredit.
But a course is part of a larger system which is built on accreditation. Universities no longer have a monopoly on information/education so accreditation is really the main value they hold. Erode that and there’s not much vocational reason to go to college (we could argue about the role of higher education, but it’s been more vocationally focused than civically focused going back to the Morrill act in the mid 1800s)
Again, I think this is idealistic thinking... and doesn't have much to do with universities irl.
Whether or not an MIT degree is an accreditation, it is not an objective, grades based accreditation. It never was. There has never been a world where your bar exam results matter, and no one cares about where you went to law school.
An MIT degree does not mean "passed the MIT exams."
Universities never really had monopoly over knowledge. Every university teaches the same accounting courses. They're also online. There is even a well respected 3rd party accreditation. People still care about where they, their employees or their accountants were educated.
We can debate why this is the case. We can't ignore that it is the case. The university matters, almost always, to the people involved... Accreditation matters sometimes, but usually only as a minimum bar. Neither education nor accreditation guarantee ability.
To a certain extent, bar exam results do matter. If you disagree, try practicing law without passing the bar. What I’m not saying is that degrees of passing matter. But the results absolutely do. (Same goes for medicine, engineering and other professions). The way the system currently measures it is via grades. Going to pass/fail will relieve stress and help some, but it will also create an incentive to do the bare minimum for others.
I personally think this move is, in part, also a reaction to the rampant cheating that occurs when people mistake the measure (exams) for the target (ensuring a base level of knowledge). I think schools are struggling with how to manage cheating, especially as online courses expand. The article quotes a student whose grades faltered because they couldn’t manage juggling the rest of adult responsibilities. The “un-grading” idea seems like it’s just trying to remove a barrier and extending adolescence rather than creating resilient adults. And I’m not sure that’s a college’s job.
We can probably agree that accreditation doesn’t “guarantee” competence. But neither does any other license or certification. It’s an imperfect measure, but it’s largely the measure that society has settled upon (for now). Just because a manufactured part comes from an ISO 9001 certified factory doesn’t mean it won’t fail. But it does increase confidence and lower the probability of failure. It’s the same for hiring. HR is more concerned with minimizing false positives than false negatives (ie they care less about missing the best candidates than ensuring bad candidates don’t get through) and accreditation helps them in that regard.
And, of course, was never an absolute monopoly on education but there was enough friction in the system to make it a practical monopoly. What’s changed is that a lot of that friction is gone, eroding that monopoly. It’s pretty easy to learn all the material you’d get from an MIT degree (they even tell you what you need to know through ABET standards and offer MOOCs) and that was my point. That point won’t matter as much when you’re competing for a job with someone who actually has that MIT degree. Until that changes, accreditation matters.
MIT's accreditation is based on MIT's reputation, not tests. They can do tests however they want.
The article is about course grades, not tests.
Also, accreditation is not based on reputation. MIT (and most other reputable colleges) are accredited by outside organizations, not via something fickle and subjective like reputation. E.g., an MIT engineering degree is accredited because it is vetted by ABET, not because of MITs reputation. Whether or not they meet ABET requirements lends itself to their reputation, not the other way around. (You can see this when colleges lose accreditation and their reputation suffers)
Can't see how there can be any other idea for grades as long as they're being used as a measuring stick for completing a class, and if they aren't something else will just using another name. You need to be able to know enough about a topic to pass a class, and there needs to be a way to measure that, sure the measuring can be often flawed but unless the class itself if a "learning to learn" class you can't have the goal to be maximize how much you learned about a topic, instead of if you know the topic presented.
> People don't value exam results, in their own right, because they're not that valuable in their own right. A course's job irl is to educate, not accredit.
I agree that the commoditization of higher education is horrible and leading to a decline in something that should be about curiosity and not as a -now, often needlessly mandatory- career stepping stone, but the "free" curiosity part of it should be open classes and such, even in this kind of more relaxed regime you still have limited resources from labs and such that need to thin out their option for candidates and accreditation will come into play sooner or later for those that wish to follow into serious research, particularly in areas where you actually need access to tools that realistically only research labs have. This isn't a huge problem in maths or computer ""science"" but most hard science fields you just can't do advanced research without specialized stuff.
Tests have different reasons, good and bad. Feedback for teachers, students and parents. Discipline. To force/encourage students to study. To report to school boards.
Tests are often a trap because people grab onto objective measures, no matter how flawed. It's like a measurable goal or performance criteria in business. People quickly forget that the KPI is not what the business is producing.
Yes the journey is valuable but the purpose of classes isn’t to measure learningness as a process, but to measure the knowledge and skills gained.
If someone already knew material and learned nothing and got an A, it means they have knowledge of that topic and now there’s a little more signal of that knowledge. It doesn’t matter that they went from 90% knowledge to 95%.
If someone got a C+ and went from 0-78% knowledge they learned much but still can’t demonstrate much knowledge.
If we wanted a course on learning processes specifically, then create one. But thinking that the point of grades is measuring how much was learned seems so backwards.
It’s good to recognize effort, but the point of effort is to achieve an outcome, not the outcome itself. “Prepend is so great, ve works so hard. Totally sucks and is stupid but works so hard.” Is silly if used for ability to do a particular thing, but useful in measuring grit and discipline or whatever.
I'd spend the remaining 15 minutes before class correcting the errors in the assignment and submitting those to the instructor as proposed revisions.
I had a high school professor that just gave us the university's Chemistry introduction series (200 level, if that matters) as our high school curriculum. I didn't learn much in those classes at university, mostly because I had already completed the work.
You may be surprised to learn that quite a few well-regarded universities adopted this sort of policy years ago. In particular, grading freshmen pass/fail is not uncommon.
>The idea of someone not getting accreditation in a course because they already knew the material beforehand and so didn't learn anything is completely wrongheaded and abhorrent.
Whoa, Nelly! No one is talking about refusing degrees to students who read too much. I don't know where you got that idea. It definitely wasn't from Jody Greene.
Right now, attending university is both an education and a credential. These two goals are in tension, and both are compromised as a result. Students should be able to pursue an education without fear that trying something challenging will permanently affect their career. Employers looking for proof of knowledge shouldn't care where or how that knowledge was learned.
>To "tell whether you are graduating people with skills", you need a test of those skills.
Right.
>That's a grade.
Wrong. Traditional letter grades are one way of measuring mastery, but the interviewees in this article describe a few alternatives.
Sadly they don't describe these alternatives in detail. I wish this article were a bit more nuts-and-bolts. It leaves more questions than it answers.
No, this is a sales tactic to improve customer retention.
By lifting restrictions, anxiety, undue pressure, the customer (freshman) is more likely to commit to the product (4-year degree). After the customer has committed for a year, they are less likely to change or drop the brand (the college). Then it's business as usual. Four full years of tuition, less customer churn.
They don't care about their students "adapting". They care about lots and lots of money.
MIT has had first years go pass/no record for decades for exactly this reason. And I see the exact same pattern in my undergrads at CMU.
(And yes, we really do care about our students adapting, at least at the faculty level. We're educators, for crying out loud. You don't think we take the industry pay cut because we feel guilty about earning money, do you?)
What better lesson could the colleges teach them to prepare them for the business world?
This is one of Jonathan Haidt’s points about what has led to many of the problems at universities. When the “students” are treated as “customers” it causes universities to work against their stated missions in order to placate their customer base.
> A majority of state legislatures spent far less on public colleges and universities in 2020 than they did in 2008, an NEA analysis shows. This means colleges and universities must rely on students to pay the cost of college—and those students are borrowing to do it.
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/state...
What if the “customer” just wants to pay money to get a piece of paper without any of the associated work? Should that customer/client agreement be honored?
My chops as a computer science graduate was about my mastery of algorithms, compilers, and automata when I was 22, not of discrete math when I was 18.
When applying to grad school, I had to provide a GPA so I made an estimate (which I clearly stated was an estimate) and gave myself a 3.5.
I believe UCSC has moved towards having more conventional grades. But, for me, not having grades was really nice. I hated the whole race to get high scores. But I don't think narrative evals really make much sense in classes with 100+ students.
They had grades by the time I went there and I used them for grad school applications.
But, they still have the narrative evals (Please be right!).
My evals were critical for my grad school applications. All the PIs that I talked with said that they reviewed mine, mostly because it was so unique to have a 50+ page transcript. Their reviewing of my evals was what got me into a few places.
Personally, I treasure those evals. Some were pretty bland and report-y, but enough are good descriptions of myself at a young age from otherwise unbiased observers. Those deeper and longer evals are fantastic and really helped me grow as a young person. Taking them seriously and chewing through them allowed me to choose the right major and the right path, for me, at the time.
Likely, they're gone by now, subsumed into the grind of academia. But I hope they aren't. They were really special and really helpful.
Apparently UCSC didn't have grades for the first 35 years of its existence:
https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-Santa-Cruz-To-St...
I think it's good for UC to have different campuses with different academic environments.
When I started at university in a technical major, it was a real kick in the teeth. The material was substantially more difficult, but the hardest part for me - and the biggest piece of learning - was the realization that I had to study consistently and be purposeful about managing my time in a way I never really had to before I got there.
My grades freshman year were abysmal. But they also helped me internalize that I needed to buckle down and put in the work. I'm glad that that happened in a relatively forgiving environment like school, instead of in the workplace.
WPI has had similar things to the point where getting Fs wiped off your record can result in what was called "snowflaking" or a blank transcript for a term...
RPI uses whole letter grades. A/B/C/D/F. Those are the only valid grades. A high GPA was far from guaranteed, because A- to B+ is a big shift.
Overall, I think Pass/No Record is good. I think it results in less stressed out Freshman especially at elite schools, where some of them will get their first B or C, later on. They need to understand as a friend so eloquently put it:
At MIT, you take all the kids who sit in the front of the class, and put them together. Guess what... at MIT there will be a kid at the front of THAT class.
(And likely... it isn't you.)
People need time to adjust their world view, or suicide rates, etc.. aren't pretty, they aren't great as IS. Many of us know someone who took their own lives, or just left after falling apart.
It's heartbreaking to hear of a student dying from suicide. These are young people with amazing potential. And they're our fellow humans.
That’s how my university did it (many decades ago) and it did help me adjust without feeling like there was a long shadow being cast.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
This is a faulty premise. The point of grades is not to reflect growth or improvement. Instead grades are meant to represent mastery of a certain topic / subject.
So what's really going on? While the article uses carefully couched phrases, reading between the lines i think the actual motivation is the drive towards "equality". These misguided social reformers are responding to a disparity in educational outcome, not by improving the quality of the education, but by manipulating the results so that everyone is now "equal".
I am assuming here that a combination of College, Degree and Grades determine the student's job prospects.
Now an employer might value students from a particular college less as they don't have grades.
Of course, everything comes down to student's actual capabilities. But then why should a Degree from a college be required for a job when grades aren't necessary.
One could simply do courses for a lot of professions, learn on their own and apply to a job. May be after some professional certification that's not tied to a degree. Note - Not applicable to things like Medicine or Engineering, but can be to may other professions.
I imagine a Ph.D. graduate's thesis and publications are quite a bit more important than grades.
We waste a lot of time during middle school and high school grooming them for liberal arts prep.
Instead, high school is when kids should be allowed to narrow down, cultivate, and build their foundational skills of interest.
Sports? Technical? Arts? Then in the final years allow them to branch if they wish but also to demonstrate and show how much they don’t know.
Instead, every high school has turned into liberal arts college prep; then we do it again for bachelors.
Waste of time classes for me: Spanish 2/3, English and composition, general sciences (the broad one that covers all sciences in one course)
Why foist a year of biology when they have no interest and aptitude for it?
- Eliminate grades K-12
- Eliminate grades in college
- Free college for everyone
- Keep standardized testing like TCAP to assess *teachers*
- More industry standardized testing, like the actuarial P1, the bar exam, ASE certification, or AWS CSA, to facilitate hiring
We can debate the merits of different models of assessment, but totally skipping assessment robs the participants of useful feedback.
Too much stress might be bad, but there's an optimal level of stress and it is definitely not zero.
Software that doesn't get tested will be full of bugs, students that don't get tested will misunderstand the material.
People need reward function. They need clear motivation. If they don't have money / grades / other goals, very few will be internally motivated enough to do things out of sheer will. Just like communism doesn't work because people need to see the carrot in front of their face to be motivated.
By the way, in actually communist countries, their education was even more stressful and competitive. If you decide to not use carrots, you're very likely to find yourself using sticks.
I struggle with raising children. Post-Covid the grading system is really weird with lots of things not being graded or allowing infinite retakes. My kids frequently say “I’m not doing that, it isn’t graded.” Even though it’s practice or homework for grades things.
If the entire freshman year isn’t graded, will students choose to do assignments? Will they actually learn and be ready for future study? How will they self-assess?
This seems like a nice idea that will incentivize not learning and instead lead students to prioritize many other things that are interesting freshman year.
To be fair, depending on how old your kids are, that isn't too bad. Knowing when to take a break/prioritize and skip an assignment is also a skill. Even pre-covid, it was common at my uni for classes to allow 2-3 skipped assignments per semester with no penalty. Used to be really convenient when needing to focus on something else, like an exam/project for another class.
It was a much more healthier learning arrangement than in highschool where it was normal to get assigned a bunch of homework from all classes simulateneously with no real flexibility.
Grades are already largely irrelevant in many graduate programs with a thesis requirement.
if its pass/fail only freshman year, fine. thats usually very basic anyways. but if it spreads to the entire degree then its a problem.
I guarantee history will not judge any of these people kindly. the destruction their bullshit will have over decades will be looked upon with disgust as to how we tolerated this dumbing down.
Maybe there should be courses in "adulting." Then again, this is about non-tech schools, isn't it? Probably too practical.