From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
When classes pivoted to remote instruction in 2020, some professors — even some entire colleges — moved to pass/fail grading systems. Sure, it was a short-term crisis response. But allowing pass/fail, even for a little while, demonstrated that the traditional approach to grading isn’t the only option.
Some professors had already decided as much: There’s a small but high-profile “ungrading” movement championed by professors who argue that grades are not only poor measures of learning, but also pull students’ focus from understanding the material to earning points. And there are alternative grading approaches that evaluate student work against a standard, provide feedback, and let students try again if the standard has not been met.
For other professors, grades are a barometer. If many students aren’t performing well — and if there are demographic disparities among them — that is a sign something has gone wrong in how they’re being taught or supported.
Meanwhile, there’s been a wave of worry about grade inflation. And it’s true that grades at many colleges have risen steadily since the 1980s. Grades can rise for many reasons, but the concern is that students and administrators are pushing professors to award higher grades, lowering expectations and losing a main method for differentiating among students.
Grades mean something — articulated by an instructor and interpreted by a student — in the context of a particular course. But that isn’t all they mean. Grades play a gatekeeping role, helping to sort students into colleges, majors, graduate programs, and jobs. They can shape the way students see themselves. Heck, they can get them a discount on their car insurance.
In an attempt to capture the myriad and evolving ways in which grades are perceived, The Chronicle asked a selection of stakeholders, including professors, students, and high-school counselors, to provide a short answer to the same simple question: What does an A mean?
. . . .
As a teacher (of both philosophy and public speaking), my philosophy of grading has always been that a B should be relatively easy to earn, assuming that the student gives an honest effort and does what is expected, and that an A should be hard to get, representing both excellent performance and depth of understanding.
Jim Jump, retired academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va., who writes about admissions issues
You knew what the course was trying to achieve and pursued it sincerely without trying to game the system.
Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the Science family of journals and a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
. . . .
It depends on context and content, but I flash back to the rubric I used when teaching high school so many years ago. For me, an A should reflect five things: evidence of deep understanding, masterful application of the relevant knowledge or skills, attentive participation, creative engagement, and thorough attention to detail. These will apply very differently when it comes to a seminar discussion, an essay, a biology midterm, or a math problem set, of course, but the intuitions should consistently apply.
Rick Hess, senior fellow and director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who has written about grade inflation
Link to the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education
Fuzzy grading that differs from professor to professor and from college to college is one reason that prospective employers sometimes ask prospective employees for their results from standardized testing.
Consulting firms such as Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. and banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ask new college recruits for their [SAT] scores, while other companies request them even for senior sales and management hires, eliciting scores from job candidates in their 40s and 50s.
In eighth grade I had a science teacher many would call “strict but fair.” He also taught us driver’s ed a few years later. Let’s call him Mr. Science-Driver Teacher. Here is the relevant lesson he taught us in driver’s ed:
“Kids, it’s important you study and practice your driving lessons. An A (100%) means you know all of the material. An A- (90%) means there’s 10% of the material you don’t know. An 80% means there’s 20% of the material you don’t know.”
A “C” was obviously bad news. He asked, on the road where we can kill or maim other people and ourselves, were we really comfortable knowing less than 100% of what we needed to know? Of being ignorant of 10 or 20% of the required knowledge?
There are situations where pass/fail make sense: your bridge stays up, or it doesn’t. Your plane stays in the sky, or it doesn’t. But for most academic lessons, a grade helps a student gauge how much they know, or how well they understand the material.
I am wary of professors who insist they never hand out As. Because I (perhaps cynically) suspect they never bothered to discern the difference between A and B-level work. Similar to teachers who “don’t believe in grading.”***
But I’ve always had Mr. Science-Driver Teacher’s breakdown of what grades actually mean in my head when I’m trying to evaluate how well I understand a lesson. An “A” from him meant something. A “B” from a teacher who never gives A’s means nothing. And if you don’t give grades at all then it’s probably a slacker class and therefore irrelevant, like a participation trophy 🙂
***Or maybe they just want to mess with their students’ GPA. Because if you have a highfalutin standard for what constitutes an A, and you’re a teacher why wouldn’t you teach your students how to reach those heights? What exactly are you bringing to the table?