High schools with no grades

I heard from a friend working in our school system that my daughter’s school district will be discontinuing grade system from next year. That’s a major transition as she will start 9th grade next year. I’m assuming that they will be moving to learning by mastery system. I can appreciate the intrinsic motivation to learn that comes with it I’m wondering though how colleges evaluate students without grades, and how well that works. Anyone been through college admissions process without traditional grades from high school?

I have no experience but predict that folks cheering this change will be dumbstruck to find out that standardized testing will become the only measuring stick available for schools. They will moan “why do these tests matter so much!”.

The new Mastery scheme does include a transcript adcoms can evaluate. It’s a different way of assessing learning than traditional grades.

Seems like if there are no grades/GPA or translations to grades/GPA, assessing reach/match/likely/safety of college admissions (or scholarships) will be much more difficult when it comes time to make a college application list.

There are already alternative schools that don’t offer letter grades. This new scheme requires letting go of the idea only grades can assess or be assessed. It’s more difficult, yes. But do-able.

In some respects, it’s not that different than reading LoRs, looking for strengths and patterns.

They have a goal of standardizing in ways that let adcoms read through the new “transcript” format in just a few minutes (they say, two. Imo, that’s unrealistic.)

I’m sure that, if it becomes popular, adcoms will react. They’ll adapt. If kids try to understand the qualitative wants of colleges, they’d be able to self match. The bigger challenge may be getting kids and families to adjust, not colleges.

The state of Maine passed legislation for this system to be implemented in all public high schools. Our district worked several years on it. It was supposed to start up this year, and so many schools protested that the state backed down and is not requiring it.

If the student is aiming for moderately selective colleges that use primarily stats-based admission (rather than subjective admissions reading), how would the student assess reach/match/likely/safety?

My D went to an alternative school program that had write-ups instead of grades. The students had no issues getting into any type of college from small LACs to huge publics.

Cream rises to the top, regardless of whether the transcripts have grades or another method of assessment.

Thank you, everyone!

The ones who are familiar with this type of evaluation, can you please provide an example of what the transcript actually conveys?

If you google, there are examples. It needs some wrapping your head around it.

I think there are other issues high schools could tackle. This doesn’t solve those problems.

My school does standards based mastery for some classes, if that’s what you’re referring to. Each standard gets a grade out of 4, and the average of the standards is taken and converted to a letter grade. That’s what’s put on the transcripts, but in my school at least they don’t convert it to percentages

My high school didn’t have grades. We got lengthy written teacher evaluations instead.

At college time, our college counselor (we had one dedicated to that) made sure colleges we applied to understood our system, if they didn’t know it already. Our class did fine with college acceptances - Ivies, good state schools, top LACs - no type of school seemed to have a problem with it.

A few years after I graduated they decided to start assigning grades and added an IB program.

Another, considerably (more decades than I’d care to count) out of date, anecdote: My HS had a “mastery” grading system, where virtually everyone “passed” every class.

Despite that, the HS had excellent college results. Many IVY and T20s out of an otherwise ordinary (except for the hippy dippy mastery system) non-selective public HS. What mattered was: a) your standardized test scores; b) how challenging the classes you took were compared to others; c) ECs; d) recommendations.

Overall, not that different from any other HS.

Ordinary public high schools don’t have many Ivy and T20 acceptances. Any high school that has many Ivy and T20 acceptances skews very high on the SES scale or is a magnet school.

This was at one time a sample transcript from the mastery consortium: https://mastery.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Transcript-example_v4.png. Many of these categories resemble personality traits more than academic mastery.

Some of the things listed are academic-related things, but more general things, rather than mastery of specific subjects (e.g. “does the student know precalculus and is s/he ready for calculus?”, “what skill level of which foreign language has the student attained?”, “does the student have a high school level understanding of US history?”).

I only heard of this type of assessments from exclusive and expensive private high schools, where they don’t give you grades but teachers give students detailed evaluations. It seems to me that this system adds more politics to college admission process. For example, the school sort of hints to the student and his parents that they think the student should apply to so and so colleges. But it seems like the school provides excellent education.

Perhaps because of the way the students learn at this high school, I heard from one parent that many of their students’ dream college is Brown rather than HYPSM.