I visited colleagues in the U.K. and France a couple of weeks ago over spring break. Definitely interesting to compare grading approaches with ours here in the US. Both still have end of the semester in class exams which count for a large majority of the grade.

Things I really appreciated: in the U.K. model - the professors job is not to teach; instead they provide reading material/assignments via which the student will learn by themselves. In the French model grades are out of 20. I asked what fraction of their students get a 20/20 in a class every year, and they looked at me confused - “Students never get a 20/20. A good grade is a 16/20!”.

In France, tuition is essentially free. I think expecting every student to finish in 4 years is a huge loss compared to my experience at big state school in the late 90’s where people routinely did 5 or 6 years. I think we can widespread meaningful learning, accurate grades, and fixed duration programs, but not all 3!