I used to teach at both an elite private high school and at an elite college. I am by nature an easy grader, but even I chafed under the pressure to inflate grades, which came not only from parents, but also from the administrations. (Elite private high schools use their records on elite college placements to attract families who will pay the high tuitions and maybe also donate, and colleges’ US News rankings improve directly with students’ average GPAs.)
I love your idea of pass-fail grades, but there is an even simpler fix: blind grading. My son went to Oxford, where all student work is graded anonymously by other professors in each department. So professors aren’t tempted to give out inflated grades in order to boost their evaluations (or just because they like and sympathize with their students and want to cut them a break), and parents and students aren’t able to beg for leniency (or to call in favors). Oxford, to its credit, expects professors to maintain traditional percentages of students who receive a first (about 10 percent), an upper-second, etc. I think this is a good system that removes a number of perverse incentives that have led to grade inflation.
I've taught public middle school, elite high school and at Boston University, Same experience. The Oxford system is very interesting and a big step in the right direction. The only problem I see that remains, which Yascha discussed, is that students who take harder courses, or take them earlier, end up with a worse GPA even though they learn more. Is there any fix for that?
In the high school where I taught, we had two teachers of AP US History. One was a truly outstanding teacher who was also a tough grader. The other was an ok teacher who was an easy grader. As you can imagine, many of the students (and their parents) jockeyed to be placed in the easy-grader’s class.
Our school was small enough that the college guidance counselor wrote personal recommendations for each student, whom she knew well. She always mentioned in her letters whether a student had had the easy or the tough grader—and she made a point of noting when the student and/or the family had pushed to take the easy way out.
Obviously this is not a scalable solution, but when possible I think it’s helpful to provide a bit of explanation for grades that are lower because the student took on an extra challenge.
🤣 No worries! I think blind grading would be a great solution but is sadly even less likely to be adopted than curves or other measures. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
Of course we agree this is a real problem. perhaps it needs a real solution. Here’s a thought, based on an old management saying that engineers often quote: You cannot improve what you do not measure. Tesla measures the holy crap out of his rockets, and Boeing (not managed by engineers) doesn’t.
We know quite well how to measure, it’s spelled SAT or GRE. So here’s the proposal.
1. Abolish grades.
2. Set up a bureau of education standards (BES)
3. BES commissions private standardized tests in all important fields, and tests at least a random sample from each university (students tested are paid well for their time taking the test).
This forces universities to teach to protect their reputations. If they won’t cooperate, it will be assumed they don’t believe their students learned much.
But here’s the magical part. Employers, who actually do care about what students have learned, will be more likely to hire students who voluntarily take BES’s standardized tests and score well. In this way students volunteer to be graded accurately, or if they don’t (or hide their test scores) they are implicitly admitting they didn’t learn much.
This would only need to be done for a limited number of key subjects in each field. Students who scored well in these, could be counted on to have learned a good deal in the untested courses.
This abolishes compulsory grades but gives everyone about the same incentive to reveal how much is learned or taught, by volunteering to be graded.
This would also drive down the cost of education dramatically. Instead of private scam colleges, we would get efficient learning centers that helped students learn on their own.
Now let's figure out how to build a Persuasion Community to stop identity politics. Yes we can!
Standardized tests are important (I did really, really well on standardized tests). However, they don't measure (nor do they try) 'stick-to-it-tive-ness'. Grades are (were) better for that. Stated in different terms, 'hard work' should be rewarded, not just intelligence.
I would think that standardized tests for more advanced subjects would require studying and doing the coursework - e.g you can't ace a differential equations standardized test based on what you picked up during high school math class as you might be able to with SAT math.
Beyond simple ODEs and maybe intro PDEs it would be very difficult to have a standardized test that didn’t trivialize the subject to a narrow set of concepts or make it insanely difficult and broad. I think this is the case in most academic subject areas.
Courses can be designed to be very specific to a type of problem and teach unique skills and approaches. Having a national standardized test would flatten this important academic diversity.
It would take a lot of work but I do think it's possible to have standardized assessments for any mathematical topic. https://mathacademy.com/ is pretty awesome and has a way of assessing knowledge / developing curriculum for pretty advanced stuff.
All the courses there are very basic IMO. It basically covers the first two years for an average student at a good university math program.
It is the next level courses that I have yet to see good broad-based exams for. A class like Applied Mathematics would be very difficult to make an exam for. It would often be too broad or narrow.
The Math subject GRE is essentially a big calculus exam with some bits and pieces of basic analysis / proofs.
> It is the next level courses that I have yet to see good broad-based exams for. A class like Applied Mathematics would be very difficult to make an exam for. It would often be too broad or narrow.
That's what I meant by it would take a lot of work - but I guess I haven't seen examples to know whether they are any good. I think math academy at least shows a standard way to assess topics beyond SAT / GRE level math.
I work in robotics and can imagine plenty of questions and problems that would sanity check understanding of many topics in applied math - but maybe these topics (e.g computational linear algebra, non-linear least squares, optimization) are pretty basic to you? But I'm often surprised when graduates from good universities fail to have an understanding of what I would assume to be "fundamentals" of a field. Sure, you would still want to talk to them, and wouldn't really know until you worked with them, but it would be a very helpful filter, and could open up the application process to a wider range of applicants instead of filtering to grads of elite universities who, like I mentioned, still often don't seemed to have absorbed some of the fundamentals.
Thanks for all the comments. I would just like to add that this is actually the same system as the SAT and GRE, except that Employers are taking the place of colleges and universities.
Some require the test some don't. And the BES tests don't cover everything and the GRE exams don't cover everything and they don't force a standard curriculum. My proposal is just the same.
Note that it says:
===>"This would only need to be done for a limited number of key subjects in each field. Students who scored well in these, could be counted on to have learned a good deal in the untested courses."
I've heard a number of leading investment banks are now relying on their own aptitude testing rather than college GPA or where applicants went to college.
The biggest issue with this is that you would create a national curriculum for every discipline. This is both good and bad. It is good for weeding out low performers and less than stellar curriculums, but it would force students to an average view of their discipline.
This is fine when learning core concepts like calculus, programing fundamentals, basic academic writing, and survey courses. When you get to higher levels, students need a lot more flexibility to study what is important to them and their academic and professional goals. This is critical for high achievers.
It would be difficult to make the tests, so they would only cover some essential areas. For some aspects of the arts no standard test would be possible. Because of this, just like GRE do not force a standardization of course, BES tests would not. They just inject a lot more honesty into the whole system. Don't think in terms of absolutes. Think, could this improve a dreadful situation.
Once it only covers essential areas it becomes an issue. You have institutions teaching to the test. If it is not on the test, it becomes no longer important. This is in part why many high schools' curriculums have narrowed in so many places with standardized tests.
I am not against standardized testing, but I think its potential is over-hyped when it comes to evaluating much beyond core knowledge and basic ability.
We should keep in mind that a fair number of the GRE subject matter exams have been retired in recent years as they were not seen as useful or necessary for graduate admissions. The LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and GRE area all much more robust, but they tend to be focused on basic skills and very narrowly defined core knowledge.
A fascinating article. As someone who was fortunate enough to get into Oxford as a first-generation student in the eighties, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the American college system.
"For example, it is surely helpful to any college which fails to raise up to the same standard of performance categories of admitted students with lower average SAT scores—whether they be recruited athletes, the children of rich donors, or members of certain demographic groups—to obscure this fact by awarding virtually all students high grades."
Legacy in the US is surely one of the most pernicious aspects of the system. I find it incomprehensible that colleges talk about diversity and meritocracy when so many of their admissions are based on affluence and intergenerational social capital. I'm amazed that this mediocrity bias doesn't impact their own rankings on the global stage. Similarly, I've seen promising athletes chased by coaches from multiple prestigious schools - in one case volunteering to fill in their application for them provided they appended their signature at the bottom. Meantime academics are incentivized to publish rather than teach, the antithesis of tutorial systems at universities like Oxford - there is little more thrilling for an undergraduate than sparring with someone for an hour who has written half of your reading list.
Perhaps we need a different way of measuring colleges as well as students.
Here’s one more (waggish) suggestion: I used to know the head of pediatric residents at Georgetown. Every year, all the doctors evaluated that year’s residents on a scale from 1 to 10. One doctor always gave every resident a 9. So the head asked him to put in decimals to distinguish each resident, e.g. 9.4, 9.6, etc. He duly complied, and she just lopped off the ones digit and used the decimal as his rating.
One thing I found helpful in engineering school was trying to get internships - each company does their own assessment and expects you to know some fundamentals - if you didn't take responsibility for learning some of the most important concepts - or even learned them and didn't make the effort to remember them, you would have a harder time getting an internship. This lit a fire under my ass and I started taking learning much more seriously. I'm not certain, but I sense non-STEM fields do not have these kinds of tests for jobs though, maybe they should?
I was interviewed once for an adjunct faculty position a decade or so into the rampancy of grade inflation and was asked by the no-nonsense dean what I proposed to do about the problem. I told him it is a problem for the administration, not the teacher. At the end of the semester, I can rate my students from 1 to 20. It is the institution that ultimately decides whether it wants No. 10 to receive the "gentleman's C" of the 1950s or the A of the 1970s, and whether No. 18 is a B+ or a D-. Don't put it on me whether to get myself terminated for failing to understand the culture.
There are a few problems with this essay. (1) Yascha seems only concerned about "elite" schools, as he points out. Most American students go to public schools and public universities. Do they not merit attention? This idea that we talk about educational reform "from the top down" is pretty maddening and renders most arguments of this kind vacuous. (2) Because Yascha's experience is focused on Harvard, where the streets are paved with greenbacks, he ignores that fact that in many public universities budgets have been cut so drastically that some departments now owe their very existence to being able to attract lots of students. Hard grading will drive students away. Especially in the humanities and the social sciences (even in Harvey Mansfield's courses) students want an interesting and somewhat challenging experience that will open them to new viewpoints. Departments and professors try to provide those experiences and keep students in their classrooms. If they don't, the departments will die, we'll end up with public universities shorn of the humanities, arts, and social sciences altogether (there are a number of recent, high profile examples). That would be much worse than giving out too many A's. (3) What Yascha fails to grasp (along with most nostalgists for the good old days of objectively "tough" grading) is that the nature of knowledge has changed. A friend of mine did a graduate degree at Princeton back in the "good old days." For his English seminar he was required to memorize the titles of 25 books in Latin that John Milton read in writing Paradise Lost. If he missed too many, he got a bad grade. If he nailed them all, he got an A. At my university one distinguished professor (now retired) was legendary for asking students the color of the robes of the people in Thomas More's Utopia. I know another guy who was asked on an oral exam to name all of Verdi's operas in chronological order. That was how people were "trained" in those good old days of high standards and challenging courses, and how grading used to work. However, knowledge pursuit has changed dramatically since those days. This means that the images most revisionist writers about education work with are irrelevant.
None of this is to suggest that Yascha's idea isn't a decent one. I'm sure it will work great at a few very expensive schools with small classes. But it is to suggest that Yascha should get out more.
Andrew Wurzer asks below, "Does Hampshire College still do its weird "no grades, merely evaluations" approach?" Their website says:
Authentic Assessment
We don’t think grades are an accurate or effective measurement. Instead, your performance is assessed with constructive, written feedback from faculty members, and based on reviews of your projects, your engagement in classes and community, your writings, your art, and more.
Other progressive colleges have a similar approach. Yale Divinity School also evaluated like this when I was a student there. An obvious problem is that, especially at large institutions, writing narrative evaluations would be time-consuming. And graduate schools might rather have students' evaluations boiled down to three numbers.
Probably true, but the universities would be admitting that their marks for the last few decades were bullshit, and everyone involved would be forced to confront the problem instead of pretending that it doesn't exist.
Grade inflation is just one symptom among many of what ails American education. When universities fail anchoring technical learning in solid human values in the name of DEI, there is only one direction things would go: shit rolls downhill (excuse my language)
Not surprising, a thought-provoking work. When I was at Stanford, I was so excited about the range of classes, I, too, as a freshman,took a couple that were “above my pay grade”…(should have taken logic first!!!)…upperclass courses in philosophy….didn’t do that well but still fascinated with the subject. I didn’t make the Dean’s List! LOL. But, in spite of that, I’ve been pretty successful….I totally relate to supporting students who want to push their boundaries intellectually.
I'm not convinced that this pass/fail system Yascha Mounk proposes improves much on the inflated grade debacle. A tenant in my house from Madagascar recently took a chemistry class that was not required for her degree. She's an international student focused on a business degree from the community college. Maybe her mom, a teacher in Madagascar, encouraged her to take chemistry so she could actually see if her daughter was putting in the effort which I have to say was pretty ingenious if that's what happened. It blew her mind how hard the course was and that you had to keep up versus cramming at the end. This could encourage kids to take more challenging courses in all departments if the class actually had a challenge rating and then a grade of some kind. Everyone could see that an A in basketweaving was not possible. On the flip side an A in physics held hope because a weighted formula could be used to incorporate rigor and achievement. One could argue that not all brains are cut out for chemistry and physics and the people who succeed in those courses who are gifted in that way are not really putting in effort. Students take electives which are fluff because there's no way to encourage them otherwise. However, if basketweaving had a weighted factor as a "piece of cake" then who would be encouraged to take it since it would be reflected in the weighted grade. I graduated from college in 1979. I went to a private liberal arts school near home for two years and transferred to a residential college for a 5 year degree where I came in as a junior. I loved learning and put in the work. I've often thought that we have too many C- students heading to college. Perhaps they should prove their academic prowess at a community college, also grade inflating, with instead the same weighted formula - rigor and achievement in that an easy course never leads to an A because it has a rigor rating that caps achievement at a B at best. Food for thought. By the way, Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA does not have grades, so maybe dig into the pros and cons there. The pass/fail proposal seems to have holes in it, imo.
You've convinced me, I like the idea of just going pass/fail which will motivate industry to find other ways of assessing / validating what people have learned.
I would be really interested in your thoughts about what to do in the wake of chat bots that can perform most kinds of internship-skill level writing and reading comprehension automatically. I bet many students are using these. How might industry and academia assess fresh grads after going through school in this environment? Is the new skill to think higher level and leverage chatbots to produce good work? Is that possible if you never "did it from scratch"?
I used to teach at both an elite private high school and at an elite college. I am by nature an easy grader, but even I chafed under the pressure to inflate grades, which came not only from parents, but also from the administrations. (Elite private high schools use their records on elite college placements to attract families who will pay the high tuitions and maybe also donate, and colleges’ US News rankings improve directly with students’ average GPAs.)
I love your idea of pass-fail grades, but there is an even simpler fix: blind grading. My son went to Oxford, where all student work is graded anonymously by other professors in each department. So professors aren’t tempted to give out inflated grades in order to boost their evaluations (or just because they like and sympathize with their students and want to cut them a break), and parents and students aren’t able to beg for leniency (or to call in favors). Oxford, to its credit, expects professors to maintain traditional percentages of students who receive a first (about 10 percent), an upper-second, etc. I think this is a good system that removes a number of perverse incentives that have led to grade inflation.
I've taught public middle school, elite high school and at Boston University, Same experience. The Oxford system is very interesting and a big step in the right direction. The only problem I see that remains, which Yascha discussed, is that students who take harder courses, or take them earlier, end up with a worse GPA even though they learn more. Is there any fix for that?
In the high school where I taught, we had two teachers of AP US History. One was a truly outstanding teacher who was also a tough grader. The other was an ok teacher who was an easy grader. As you can imagine, many of the students (and their parents) jockeyed to be placed in the easy-grader’s class.
Our school was small enough that the college guidance counselor wrote personal recommendations for each student, whom she knew well. She always mentioned in her letters whether a student had had the easy or the tough grader—and she made a point of noting when the student and/or the family had pushed to take the easy way out.
Obviously this is not a scalable solution, but when possible I think it’s helpful to provide a bit of explanation for grades that are lower because the student took on an extra challenge.
Oops—I finally read the footnotes and see that you have already suggested blind grading! I have earned a B- in reading comprehension!
🤣 No worries! I think blind grading would be a great solution but is sadly even less likely to be adopted than curves or other measures. Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
An Immodest Proposal
Of course we agree this is a real problem. perhaps it needs a real solution. Here’s a thought, based on an old management saying that engineers often quote: You cannot improve what you do not measure. Tesla measures the holy crap out of his rockets, and Boeing (not managed by engineers) doesn’t.
We know quite well how to measure, it’s spelled SAT or GRE. So here’s the proposal.
1. Abolish grades.
2. Set up a bureau of education standards (BES)
3. BES commissions private standardized tests in all important fields, and tests at least a random sample from each university (students tested are paid well for their time taking the test).
This forces universities to teach to protect their reputations. If they won’t cooperate, it will be assumed they don’t believe their students learned much.
But here’s the magical part. Employers, who actually do care about what students have learned, will be more likely to hire students who voluntarily take BES’s standardized tests and score well. In this way students volunteer to be graded accurately, or if they don’t (or hide their test scores) they are implicitly admitting they didn’t learn much.
This would only need to be done for a limited number of key subjects in each field. Students who scored well in these, could be counted on to have learned a good deal in the untested courses.
This abolishes compulsory grades but gives everyone about the same incentive to reveal how much is learned or taught, by volunteering to be graded.
This would also drive down the cost of education dramatically. Instead of private scam colleges, we would get efficient learning centers that helped students learn on their own.
Now let's figure out how to build a Persuasion Community to stop identity politics. Yes we can!
Standardized tests are important (I did really, really well on standardized tests). However, they don't measure (nor do they try) 'stick-to-it-tive-ness'. Grades are (were) better for that. Stated in different terms, 'hard work' should be rewarded, not just intelligence.
I would think that standardized tests for more advanced subjects would require studying and doing the coursework - e.g you can't ace a differential equations standardized test based on what you picked up during high school math class as you might be able to with SAT math.
Beyond simple ODEs and maybe intro PDEs it would be very difficult to have a standardized test that didn’t trivialize the subject to a narrow set of concepts or make it insanely difficult and broad. I think this is the case in most academic subject areas.
Courses can be designed to be very specific to a type of problem and teach unique skills and approaches. Having a national standardized test would flatten this important academic diversity.
It would take a lot of work but I do think it's possible to have standardized assessments for any mathematical topic. https://mathacademy.com/ is pretty awesome and has a way of assessing knowledge / developing curriculum for pretty advanced stuff.
All the courses there are very basic IMO. It basically covers the first two years for an average student at a good university math program.
It is the next level courses that I have yet to see good broad-based exams for. A class like Applied Mathematics would be very difficult to make an exam for. It would often be too broad or narrow.
The Math subject GRE is essentially a big calculus exam with some bits and pieces of basic analysis / proofs.
> It is the next level courses that I have yet to see good broad-based exams for. A class like Applied Mathematics would be very difficult to make an exam for. It would often be too broad or narrow.
That's what I meant by it would take a lot of work - but I guess I haven't seen examples to know whether they are any good. I think math academy at least shows a standard way to assess topics beyond SAT / GRE level math.
I work in robotics and can imagine plenty of questions and problems that would sanity check understanding of many topics in applied math - but maybe these topics (e.g computational linear algebra, non-linear least squares, optimization) are pretty basic to you? But I'm often surprised when graduates from good universities fail to have an understanding of what I would assume to be "fundamentals" of a field. Sure, you would still want to talk to them, and wouldn't really know until you worked with them, but it would be a very helpful filter, and could open up the application process to a wider range of applicants instead of filtering to grads of elite universities who, like I mentioned, still often don't seemed to have absorbed some of the fundamentals.
Thanks for all the comments. I would just like to add that this is actually the same system as the SAT and GRE, except that Employers are taking the place of colleges and universities.
Some require the test some don't. And the BES tests don't cover everything and the GRE exams don't cover everything and they don't force a standard curriculum. My proposal is just the same.
Note that it says:
===>"This would only need to be done for a limited number of key subjects in each field. Students who scored well in these, could be counted on to have learned a good deal in the untested courses."
I've heard a number of leading investment banks are now relying on their own aptitude testing rather than college GPA or where applicants went to college.
Thanks so much for a data-driven response! Very interesting.
The biggest issue with this is that you would create a national curriculum for every discipline. This is both good and bad. It is good for weeding out low performers and less than stellar curriculums, but it would force students to an average view of their discipline.
This is fine when learning core concepts like calculus, programing fundamentals, basic academic writing, and survey courses. When you get to higher levels, students need a lot more flexibility to study what is important to them and their academic and professional goals. This is critical for high achievers.
It would be difficult to make the tests, so they would only cover some essential areas. For some aspects of the arts no standard test would be possible. Because of this, just like GRE do not force a standardization of course, BES tests would not. They just inject a lot more honesty into the whole system. Don't think in terms of absolutes. Think, could this improve a dreadful situation.
Once it only covers essential areas it becomes an issue. You have institutions teaching to the test. If it is not on the test, it becomes no longer important. This is in part why many high schools' curriculums have narrowed in so many places with standardized tests.
I am not against standardized testing, but I think its potential is over-hyped when it comes to evaluating much beyond core knowledge and basic ability.
We should keep in mind that a fair number of the GRE subject matter exams have been retired in recent years as they were not seen as useful or necessary for graduate admissions. The LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and GRE area all much more robust, but they tend to be focused on basic skills and very narrowly defined core knowledge.
A fascinating article. As someone who was fortunate enough to get into Oxford as a first-generation student in the eighties, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the American college system.
"For example, it is surely helpful to any college which fails to raise up to the same standard of performance categories of admitted students with lower average SAT scores—whether they be recruited athletes, the children of rich donors, or members of certain demographic groups—to obscure this fact by awarding virtually all students high grades."
Legacy in the US is surely one of the most pernicious aspects of the system. I find it incomprehensible that colleges talk about diversity and meritocracy when so many of their admissions are based on affluence and intergenerational social capital. I'm amazed that this mediocrity bias doesn't impact their own rankings on the global stage. Similarly, I've seen promising athletes chased by coaches from multiple prestigious schools - in one case volunteering to fill in their application for them provided they appended their signature at the bottom. Meantime academics are incentivized to publish rather than teach, the antithesis of tutorial systems at universities like Oxford - there is little more thrilling for an undergraduate than sparring with someone for an hour who has written half of your reading list.
Perhaps we need a different way of measuring colleges as well as students.
Yes, the influence of the US World and News ranking, in particular, is a huge problem in a number of ways.
Here’s one more (waggish) suggestion: I used to know the head of pediatric residents at Georgetown. Every year, all the doctors evaluated that year’s residents on a scale from 1 to 10. One doctor always gave every resident a 9. So the head asked him to put in decimals to distinguish each resident, e.g. 9.4, 9.6, etc. He duly complied, and she just lopped off the ones digit and used the decimal as his rating.
🤣
One thing I found helpful in engineering school was trying to get internships - each company does their own assessment and expects you to know some fundamentals - if you didn't take responsibility for learning some of the most important concepts - or even learned them and didn't make the effort to remember them, you would have a harder time getting an internship. This lit a fire under my ass and I started taking learning much more seriously. I'm not certain, but I sense non-STEM fields do not have these kinds of tests for jobs though, maybe they should?
I was interviewed once for an adjunct faculty position a decade or so into the rampancy of grade inflation and was asked by the no-nonsense dean what I proposed to do about the problem. I told him it is a problem for the administration, not the teacher. At the end of the semester, I can rate my students from 1 to 20. It is the institution that ultimately decides whether it wants No. 10 to receive the "gentleman's C" of the 1950s or the A of the 1970s, and whether No. 18 is a B+ or a D-. Don't put it on me whether to get myself terminated for failing to understand the culture.
There are a few problems with this essay. (1) Yascha seems only concerned about "elite" schools, as he points out. Most American students go to public schools and public universities. Do they not merit attention? This idea that we talk about educational reform "from the top down" is pretty maddening and renders most arguments of this kind vacuous. (2) Because Yascha's experience is focused on Harvard, where the streets are paved with greenbacks, he ignores that fact that in many public universities budgets have been cut so drastically that some departments now owe their very existence to being able to attract lots of students. Hard grading will drive students away. Especially in the humanities and the social sciences (even in Harvey Mansfield's courses) students want an interesting and somewhat challenging experience that will open them to new viewpoints. Departments and professors try to provide those experiences and keep students in their classrooms. If they don't, the departments will die, we'll end up with public universities shorn of the humanities, arts, and social sciences altogether (there are a number of recent, high profile examples). That would be much worse than giving out too many A's. (3) What Yascha fails to grasp (along with most nostalgists for the good old days of objectively "tough" grading) is that the nature of knowledge has changed. A friend of mine did a graduate degree at Princeton back in the "good old days." For his English seminar he was required to memorize the titles of 25 books in Latin that John Milton read in writing Paradise Lost. If he missed too many, he got a bad grade. If he nailed them all, he got an A. At my university one distinguished professor (now retired) was legendary for asking students the color of the robes of the people in Thomas More's Utopia. I know another guy who was asked on an oral exam to name all of Verdi's operas in chronological order. That was how people were "trained" in those good old days of high standards and challenging courses, and how grading used to work. However, knowledge pursuit has changed dramatically since those days. This means that the images most revisionist writers about education work with are irrelevant.
None of this is to suggest that Yascha's idea isn't a decent one. I'm sure it will work great at a few very expensive schools with small classes. But it is to suggest that Yascha should get out more.
Andrew Wurzer asks below, "Does Hampshire College still do its weird "no grades, merely evaluations" approach?" Their website says:
Authentic Assessment
We don’t think grades are an accurate or effective measurement. Instead, your performance is assessed with constructive, written feedback from faculty members, and based on reviews of your projects, your engagement in classes and community, your writings, your art, and more.
Other progressive colleges have a similar approach. Yale Divinity School also evaluated like this when I was a student there. An obvious problem is that, especially at large institutions, writing narrative evaluations would be time-consuming. And graduate schools might rather have students' evaluations boiled down to three numbers.
Switching to a pass-fail system won't work in the current environment. All of the students will 'pass'.
Probably true, but the universities would be admitting that their marks for the last few decades were bullshit, and everyone involved would be forced to confront the problem instead of pretending that it doesn't exist.
Grade inflation is just one symptom among many of what ails American education. When universities fail anchoring technical learning in solid human values in the name of DEI, there is only one direction things would go: shit rolls downhill (excuse my language)
Not surprising, a thought-provoking work. When I was at Stanford, I was so excited about the range of classes, I, too, as a freshman,took a couple that were “above my pay grade”…(should have taken logic first!!!)…upperclass courses in philosophy….didn’t do that well but still fascinated with the subject. I didn’t make the Dean’s List! LOL. But, in spite of that, I’ve been pretty successful….I totally relate to supporting students who want to push their boundaries intellectually.
I'm not convinced that this pass/fail system Yascha Mounk proposes improves much on the inflated grade debacle. A tenant in my house from Madagascar recently took a chemistry class that was not required for her degree. She's an international student focused on a business degree from the community college. Maybe her mom, a teacher in Madagascar, encouraged her to take chemistry so she could actually see if her daughter was putting in the effort which I have to say was pretty ingenious if that's what happened. It blew her mind how hard the course was and that you had to keep up versus cramming at the end. This could encourage kids to take more challenging courses in all departments if the class actually had a challenge rating and then a grade of some kind. Everyone could see that an A in basketweaving was not possible. On the flip side an A in physics held hope because a weighted formula could be used to incorporate rigor and achievement. One could argue that not all brains are cut out for chemistry and physics and the people who succeed in those courses who are gifted in that way are not really putting in effort. Students take electives which are fluff because there's no way to encourage them otherwise. However, if basketweaving had a weighted factor as a "piece of cake" then who would be encouraged to take it since it would be reflected in the weighted grade. I graduated from college in 1979. I went to a private liberal arts school near home for two years and transferred to a residential college for a 5 year degree where I came in as a junior. I loved learning and put in the work. I've often thought that we have too many C- students heading to college. Perhaps they should prove their academic prowess at a community college, also grade inflating, with instead the same weighted formula - rigor and achievement in that an easy course never leads to an A because it has a rigor rating that caps achievement at a B at best. Food for thought. By the way, Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA does not have grades, so maybe dig into the pros and cons there. The pass/fail proposal seems to have holes in it, imo.
Does Hampshire College still do its weird "no grades, merely evaluations" approach?
You've convinced me, I like the idea of just going pass/fail which will motivate industry to find other ways of assessing / validating what people have learned.
I would be really interested in your thoughts about what to do in the wake of chat bots that can perform most kinds of internship-skill level writing and reading comprehension automatically. I bet many students are using these. How might industry and academia assess fresh grads after going through school in this environment? Is the new skill to think higher level and leverage chatbots to produce good work? Is that possible if you never "did it from scratch"?