11–20 of 43 posts
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.
Why "imagine" college without grades, when there are plenty of (healthy, well-functioning, accredited) colleges without grades out there, with decades of experience?
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…
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.
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.
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.
That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.
In other news, people standing on their toes makes measuring height meaningless. Therefore, we should stop measuring height.
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.
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.
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 stud…
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...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the sort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University
[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.