I floundered through college. I hated my major. My elective was literature and I knew more about it than my lecturer did. That did not help and took a toll on my grades. It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting.
It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times but my father would not agree – and he was paying the tuition Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students.
Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for first year students who, like me, are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and needed more time to master it.
But the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.
“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser for educational equity and academic success at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene.
And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.” The pandemic era’s wide-scale disruption makes it a good time to consider changing long-held educational practices, said Robert Talbert, a math professor at a State University in Michigan.
In addition to the efforts at UCSC, a growing number of faculty and some academic departments at universities and colleges nationwide are experimenting with alternative kinds of assessments.
Susan Blum is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and the editor of a book on the subject: Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Several colleges and universities already practice unconventional forms of grading.
At Reed College in Oregon, students aren’t shown their grades so that they can “focus on learning, not on grades,” the college says. The prestigious MIT has what it calls “ramp-up grading” for first-year students.
In their first semester, they get only a “pass,” without a letter; if they don’t pass, no grade is recorded at all. In their second semesters, they get letter grades, but grades of D and F are not recorded on their transcripts.
“Starting any university is challenging to get acclimated academically to a new environment and it’s a big change for most students because for many of them it’s their first time away from home or at a new school,” said Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education.
“There’s a desire to have that acclimation to the entire environment happen in a less abrupt way, where people have more of an opportunity to get calibrated.” This is especially true at USP where students from all over the Pacific are studying.
Many proponents of un-grading say it addresses the unfairness of a system in which some students are better ready for college than others or are first generation and feel extra stress to perform well as a result of it.
UCSC’s Greene said students who come from lower-income families are the most vulnerable to anxiety from grades. “Let’s say they get a slightly failing grade on the first quiz. They are not likely to go and seek help. They’re likely to try and disappear.”
UCSC, which was opened as an experimental progressive campus previously let students choose whether or not to get letter grades. As the public university grew, it made grades mandatory in 2000. But some of its faculty have continued to promote un-grading.
Instead of grades, for instance, psychology professor Barbara Rogoff’s students get evaluations that assess their work as, among other things, “impressive,” “extremely well developed” or “uneven.”
Only at the end of the quarter does she assign required letter grades. As for the students, they learn better if they’re not focused on grades, she said. Grades make students concerned about how they look rather than dealing with the material.
“When you see a grade on an assignment or report card, it does not convey a lot of information about what a student actually has learned. The grade itself has turned into the target. Learning is just a vehicle by which to earn a grade.”
I believe in Fiji there is a very inflexible and structured method of education where the emphasis is on getting better grades rather than acquiring knowledge. Is that what real education is all about?
I don’t think so. It is quite contrary to what Jiddu Krishmanmurti has written on The Function of Education, one of the essays in his collection, Think On These Things which was originally presented in the form of talks to students, teachers and parents in India, but its keen penetration and lucid simplicity is deeply meaningful to thoughtful people everywhere, and in every walk of life – even politics i.e. if the politician can understand it.
Let us hope the new Minister for Education is progressive in his vision for education and is receptive to the implementation of heutagogy. Education should not be just about dribbling drops of knowledge that students collect and then spit out in their tests.
It should be more like gathering kindling, letting students play with matches, encouraging them to take risks and hoping that for some the materials burst into flames and become lifelong interests.
This won’t happen to every student in every class as teachers tend to discourage unconventional thinking. But if it happens, it makes a college education worthwhile. My Hindi professor was like that. He did not tell us what to think.
He showed us how to think and I am forever grateful to him for that. I did the same when I taught. And my students remember that fondly and that is the best reward.
• ARVIND MANI is a former teacher who is passionate about quality education. He lived in the US for 35 years and was actively involved in training youths to improve their speaking skills. The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper. He can be reached at theinspiredteacher9@gmail. com
