Imagining College Without Grades
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Imagining College Without Grades
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Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#2Why "imagine" college without grades, when there are plenty of (healthy, well-functioning, accredited) colleges without grades out there, with decades of experience?
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#3I 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
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#4[deleted]
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#5In other news, people standing on their toes makes measuring height meaningless. Therefore, we should stop measuring height.
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#6Why "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. That may sound absurd, but I understand it especially when institutional inertia often spans tens of decades if not over a century or more.
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#7The 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.
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#8So 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.
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#9In 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.
Re: Imagining College Without Grades
#10I'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.