
Imagining College Without Grades - robg
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades
======
eisenkr
Many top business schools today have grade non-disclosure policies that stop
employers from asking about grades and stop students from sharing their
transcripts. The students love the policies because they claim it increases
collaboration and teamwork, but my own experience suggests that the students
also love not working hard. The undergrads at a place like Wharton (who have
grade disclosure) often look for classes with loads of MBA students (who
don't) because the MBA students pull the curve down.

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.

~~~
helveticaman
I don't give a shit about my grades, but I still go to class and work hard
because I want to learn more. I want to be the best. This is because,
ultimately, my success in the startup world will depend on what I learn.

But I may be an exception.

~~~
Shamiq
_But I may be an exception_

You're not the only one, buddy.

~~~
helveticaman
It's good to hear that.

~~~
Shamiq
This atlas ain't gunna shrug.

------
mattmcknight
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 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

~~~
chris11
There are some students who are now saying that paying attention to your
overall g.p.a. is counter productive. Cal Newport just recommends that
students find the best way to learn the material, and focus on grades from
tests and homework. In other words, focus on the process and use the short
term results for feedback, don't stress about the long term results

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...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/11/14/the-
unconventional-scholar-ignore-your-gpa/)

~~~
DaniFong
I knew a kid who desperately wanted straight A+'s. He was really sharp, and
took physics and math. But when he got to third year, quantum mechanics loomed
ahead, and, reportedly, he wasn't sure if he could ace it. He abandoned
physics, and switched to chemistry.

He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.

------
oldgregg
The age-graded system is a dehumanizing legacy of the industrial revolution.
It has nothing to do with teaching people how to think but was purposed to
shoehorn people into "productive" career paths. "Liberal arts" education today
is structurally flawed in such a way that people only receive incoherent bits
of information without ever learning to think cohesively.

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.

~~~
endtime
I agree that grading has nothing to do with teaching people how to think, but
that doesn't mean it's not useful. As a student, I would hate not to get
feedback on my performance. Also, I've definitely gone over and above on
assignments when extra credit was possible, and that has often forced me to
learn more than I would have if things were, say, pass/fail. Sure, I could
have had the discipline to go above and beyond anyway, but honestly, having an
artificial motivator is nice sometimes.

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).

~~~
oldgregg
Yes, feedback is hugely essential. It's more of a question whether feedback
should come as an impersonal mark on a paper that provides minimal direction,
or if it should come from a person who knows your unique strengths/weaknesses
and can direct you in a way that will help you thrive.

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.

------
michael_dorfman
Why "imagine" college without grades, when there are plenty of (healthy, well-
functioning, accredited) colleges without grades out there, with decades of
experience?

~~~
robg
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.

~~~
wheels
Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the
sort.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University>

~~~
GavinB
Brown does offer grades -- A, B, C and No Credit. No Credit in a course does
not appear on the transcript as a fail, it simply disappears. If you didn't
get credit in the course, you didn't get credit, no penalty for trying
something and bailing.

[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.

------
rp
Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or
fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal"
your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where
students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.

~~~
akd
I always thought it was Harvard which was consistently rated #2 after Yale.

~~~
rp
You are right; I had it reversed. I will add that Harvard Law is switching to
a pass/fail system in 2009.

~~~
jfarmer
And Stanford Law switched this year. They have a no-pass/pass/high-pass
system.

------
baddox
I'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.

------
dill_day
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure
interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his
pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a
system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an
ungracious work to put on a professor.

\-- Emerson

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niels_olson
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.

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.

~~~
chris11
How has this affected acceptance into residency programs? Do students mostly
use recommendations while applying?

------
blasdel
I went to The Evergreen State College, which is the only public gradeless
school I know of. Instead of grades, everyone writes narrative evaluations of
themselves and their cohorts. Nearly everyone takes one fulltime multi-
disciplinary course at a time.

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.

------
jff
So 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.

------
nickmolnar
As a related question:

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?

------
helveticaman
My experience is that your parents and teachers _won't allow you_ not to care
about your grades. I'm in an elite school right now and am trying to ignore
grades. However, I'm finding the powers that be are really trying to stop me
from learning for its own sake.

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mattchew
I'd love to see grading and ranking and sorting separated from teaching and
learning. IMO grading (as opposed to guidance and correction) is destructive
to real learning.

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.

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yummyfajitas
In other news, people standing on their toes makes measuring height
meaningless. Therefore, we should stop measuring height.

~~~
paulgb
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Problem: measurements are noisy, biased, and sometimes vague.

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.

~~~
paulgb
I thought that standardization would be the solution, too, until I realized
that that would just make it worse. There are whole industries around getting
people higher marks on standardized tests like SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.

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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
For a sufficiently well designed test, the easiest route to higher marks would
be actually understanding the material. The SAT sucks, and is easy to prep
for. The only way to prep for the "standard" (1) calculus exam given at most
universities is to actually get a basic understanding of the material.

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.

~~~
paulgb
Ok, I agree on that point. As long as the institutions are honest (or
dishonest institutions are punished), a test that forces students to stand on
their heels is a good solution.

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markessien
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.

~~~
oldgregg
But the real problem here is that we treat everyone the same. Who wants a C-
doctor vs. an A+ doctor?! If you really cared about the unique differences in
people then one person would take 2 years, and another person would take 6--
but when they finished they would be competent. Unfortunately, treating people
like machines by grading them is really just a form of _moralism_ that tries
to categorize and rank people. We love to justify our existence by comparing
ourselves to others, and "objective standards" provides nice self-validation.

~~~
markessien
If a guy took 6 years to learn how to program and another guy took 6 months,
the 6 month guy will be more productive when we decide we are going to use a
brand new language. People ARE machines - but a lot less reliable and much
softer. It's not moralism to want to categorize people, it's efficiency. The
process of categorization is weak, but it's better than none at all.

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.

------
access_denied
When I was a kid-nerd, adults would ask me what I would like to do when grown-
up. You know, in the manner they do this to be polite. And I figured, when I
respond "I want to go to university and study!" they would smile and be happy.
So there I had my slogan. Thing was: I also meant it. I imagined a place where
I could work on projects of my own choosing as opposed to the stuff the
teacher would come up with. That's what I thought means "to study". You are
completely free, choose your subject and fight to master it and achieve great
things that are a blessing for humanity. Oh, well.

