Imagining College Without Grades(insidehighered.com)
insidehighered.com
Imagining College Without Grades
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/grades
42 comments
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.
But I may be an exception.
But I may be an exception
You're not the only one, buddy.
You're not the only one, buddy.
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
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
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...
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...
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.
He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.
Pardon me, but I'm in an Algorithms class, and I'm seeing "Greedy Strategy" written all over that.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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. That may sound absurd, but I understand it especially when institutional inertia often spans tens of decades if not over a century or more.
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.
Brown is one of the more famous universities that offers something of the sort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_University
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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
-- Emerson
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.
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.
How has this affected acceptance into residency programs? Do students mostly use recommendations while applying?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> scores are necessary to give an impression of a person's ability
That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.
That's what standardized tests, like bar exams and medical licensing exams, are for.
How do you standardize a test of ability in computing? I'm not talking of computer science, but of plain programmers - how do you test their capability in some type of standardized test? It's very difficult.
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).
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).
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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.
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.