Imagining College Without Grades
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
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.
But I may be an exception.
You're not the only one, buddy.
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
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...
He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.
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.
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).
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.
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.
[Edit: Additionally any course may be taken Pass/Fail, so students who prefer a no-grade experience can have it.]
It's a good compromise between grades and no grades. There's still numerical feedback for those who need it (and for those whose future grad schools or employers need it) but it is in broad buckets.
It's not that hard for professors to group their students into a couple of broad categories. I always felt when I got a B or C that I knew exactly why.
As a result of the relaxed system, Brown is one of the happiest and most curious campuses among its traditional peers. The psychological difference between the students at Brown and friends who would visit was always striking. It reminds me of pg's controversial essay about the differences between hacker employees and hacker founders.
Of course, I went to Brown so keep your salt shaker handy.
-- Emerson
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It really depends what role marks play. If they are used exclusively as a guide to the student of how much they are absorbing, then they could be useful because people would have no incentive to game them.
If people are standing on their toes in a height test (perhaps because Princeton Review told them to), the problem is not the use of standardized inches. The problem is that we aren't forcing people to stand on their heels. And even a bad test isn't useless; most people on their toes are shorter than me on my heels, and the bad height test will reflect this.
(1) Even though there is no official inter-university standard calc test, they are pretty much all the same.
That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.
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).
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.