But you didn’t qualify your initial statement to be about “corporate jobs”. There are plenty of jobs out there that are not in the corporate world.
I am not in healthcare, but I think what is important for nurses is passing the exams and being an RN. The employer wants to see that, but I don’t think they have the luxury of caring about grades.
I don’t think grades matter in Graphic Design or Art Direction or Film or other creative industries. It’s your portfolio they want to see.
Not sure it matters in teaching – maybe some teachers here could tell us, but my impression is that the schools around me are desperate to hire teachers that have passed their certification.
IMO, the way to prepare students for college is to prepare them for college.
I’m astonished at the number of college freshmen who have never been away from home before, have never traveled on a train, bus, or airplane without parents, have never done anything independently.
Many “big tech” senior managers I know don’t value classroom knowledge as much as hands-on (“real world”) knowledge. They’ll happily take a kid who knows 3 programming languages and can code up an optimized solution to a problem statement they present during the interview.
They genuinely won’t care that s/he happens to have a B- in their data structures class and a 2.9 gpa overall. But of course, they do an online assessment first to filter down the number of candidates.
Plenty of employers use informal gpa cutoffs for internships. There is no reason for them to to disclose that, but it provides a quick filter for HR to get the resumes down to a manageable level.
There are many colleges where grade inflation is a real thing. Often exams are “curved.” Kids are allowed to retake, and at a local college, one prof is under scrutiny for missing a large number of lectures and giving students As. Fortunately, some students complained.
Basically, kids are getting an extended HS experience while paying a huge fee.
I cannot tell you how many 3.5+ kids I have interviewed that cannot draw an amino acid backbone or read a log-scale bar graph!
Grade elimination is, logically, just the most extreme form of grade inflation (where nearly every student gets an A).
They are different issues, which often have different underlying reasons. If grades are inflating faster than explained by changes in student quality, it often involves pressure from external forces to put fewer kids at a relative disadvantage in future pursuits. Higher average grades help many future pursuits, such as getting in to college, getting in to grad/professional school, getting a scholarship, getting a quality job/internship, etc. Lower average grades can result in frequent complaints and in extreme cases even getting terminated, such as the recent events with the NYU chem professor.
No grades means nobody gets an A, which hurts students in the pursuits above overall (getting in to colleges/grad schools, getting scholarships, getting jobs/internships…), rather than helps – the opposite effect. I am not aware of any college or anyone that is advocating no grades at all. Among the colleges mentioned in the article that have partially eliminated grades, they have largely varying motivations for their decisions, which are largely different than motivations for grade inflation. For example, the tech colleges (Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd) want to give kids a chance to adjust from their varying HS background to the what may be more challenging college level. Reed (grades hidden from students) wants students to focus on learning rather than grade competition and getting highest grades. Brown (any class can be taken pass/fail) may be most similar to grade inflation reasons. I expect Brown wants to give kids a chance to risk taking classes where they may not get an ‘A’, such as taking an elective they find interesting, but is a relatively weak area for them.
I’m doing the same with my two younger kids. It’s not the grades that matter. It’s learning the material. So much about K-12 is about grades - not true mastery of the material, and certainly not about the ability of the student to learn. One of the things I’m happiest about during this process is how my daughters have displayed a great ability to enjoy the work which makes doing it easier, which was not something to took place in classrooms.
As you said, the devil will be in the details. At each institution, Ungrading could be carried out in a fantastic manner, or a slipshod manner. Time will reveal.
While the article was focused institutions eliminating grades for the freshman year, ungrading as a teaching and learning movement does not strictly mean the absence of evaluation or assessment. The NPR article linked in the original post mentions Susan Bloom’s book Ungrading, which has many examples used by instructors who want to return the focus to the learning rather than a letter or number grade. Jesse Stommel, an featured author in Bloom’s Ungrading who currently teaches at the University of Denver, also has a blog that introduces the philosophy and explains some of the challenges faculty are trying to address when using an ungrading strategy. I participated in a faculty learning community (FLC) at my institution on upgrading, and there have been many similar FLCs other places, including the University of Chicago and USC.
In addition to her book, I highly recommend the new 3rd edition of The New Science of Learning by Todd Zakrajsek from UNC Chapel Hill. The book is targeted to students, but it includes helpful information about how bias, both conscious and unconscious, can influence an instructor’s evaluation of a student’s work. Our regional accreditor does not allow faculty to use grades as a metric for assessing student learning given the many factors outside of learning that can influence the grade.
Back in my day at UCLA, when the average UCLA student GPA was <3.0, and you couldn’t drop or change to P/NP after the third week, I had a professor who purposely waited until the fourth week to give us our first graded assignments back. He then used a chunk of his lecture before handing them out to say that he was fighting what he perceived as grade inflation institutionally by reducing his grading curve to start at a straight B and go down from there, so that the highest grade anyone could get in a class was a B. And you literally had no options — you couldn’t drop, you couldn’t appeal. That was life. And way before Rate My Professor or even the internet in general made it easier to get the rep on the professor before you were subjected to their arbitrary justice.
College was different then. I still recall warning my oldest when he went to college that the HS days of being able to bolster your grade with participation points or high scores on the easier non-test or essay assignments were over and he should expect his entire grade to be defined by a few high stakes major tests and written assignments per class… Then he got to college and many classes were literally giving the equivalent of participation grades, LOL.
We’ve told our kids since they were little that we don’t care about their grades. Our eldest started freaking out about A minuses in 5th grade. It took years to convince him that we were fine with whatever grades he gets as long as he is learning, not being a complete slacker, and is a kind and respectful person.
Our refrain: “Grades are often, but not always, a reflection of how much you’ve learned and your mastery of the material”. Also “you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to”.
Eldest is obsessive and has only one A-minus. Fortunately he is okay with getting bad grades on things here and there. He has spent years learning to carefully titrate his efforts because we’ve pushed him to do so. We actively encouraged him to evaluate his priorities and to slack off on things that weren’t important to him. I think he’ll be fine in college because he values learning for learning’s sake, and he expects some lower grades in college. We’ll see.
As life responsibilities increase, you have to drop some balls. You simply can’t do everything, and you have to learn which balls you should drop and which you should keep in the air. Spouse and I (both profs) have seen first-hand what happens when students can’t do this – it’s not pretty. I used to take some of my senior college students aside during spring semester and ask them to please put less time into my class (the A was implied). They were already admitted to med school or whatever, and the senioritis would be healthy for them. Whether they took me up on that offer or not, I hoped that the message got through.
In our experience, grades do not always correlate well with how good a doctor, scientist, or professor is at their job. You’re definitely not going to be happy or working efficiently if you’re burned out, and I’ve seen high rates of burnout in high achievers in these professions.
A dissertation isn’t graded (beyond pass/fail), and that doesn’t make PhD students stop learning. Some research profs get annoyed with their PhD students for getting A’s in their grad classes because it means they’re not spending that time on the important stuff: lab work
I think creative grading models are cool, and I hope that more places give it a shot. My son thought WPI’s model was really neat. It’s meant to encourage risk-taking and exploration. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they they were early adopters of test-optional, and are now test-blind.
We’ve largely got rid of standardized testing for colleges. Standardized testings for professional schools have also come under assault, and their days are probably numbered. Unsurprisingly, we’re now targeting college grades (and K-12 grades will surely be next). In the meantime, AI is making great strides, likely outcompeting humans in many professions in the very near future. Is going to college still a good idea for many students?
Given that AI seems to score in the 90th percentile on many tests ( including LSAT, MCAT and SAT) it is clearly more capable than the vast majority of people.
