How many of you out there have taken a college course in which you have already mastered the content before ever stepping foot inside the classroom? My guess is that most of you have. It's becoming an all too common occurrence that students take classes in which they are already familiar with the material, not because they want to learn, but because they want to get the "A" and boost that ever important GPA. Friends, fellow students, and I myself have taken classes that we already took in high school just because we knew that we could get an A. Practically every person I know took calculus I in high school, despite the fact that they took calculus I in high school; I knew a girl that took general chemistry I in college, the most basic chemistry class offered at most schools. after having been named her high school's most outstanding chemistry student; and I even knew a student that took eight years of French throughout his schooling, spook the language fluently and then signed up for French I in college. Last time I checked, college was supposed to be a place to expand your horizons and expand your knowledge, not repeat your high school education. But there is a force at work driving students away from expanding their knowledge and towards the narrowing their horizons to knowledge and skills that they already have. This force is grades. What should we do to solve this? It's simple. We should do away with grades altogether, or at the very least switch to a pass/fail system. As I said, college should be about expanding your horizons; the grading system we have in place forces students to narrow their horizons because the GPA is such a large part of how our performance is measured. But what performance are we actually measuring? Are we measuring our abilities to succeed in classes we've already taken? What does that prove? The answer is nothing. This system does not encourage students to take classes in areas they've never experienced before; it does not encourage us to take classes that challenge us; it does not encourage us to do anything but fall back on the knowledge we have previously possessed.
If there were no grades, I for one would take new classes in areas that I knew nothing about but wanted to know about, I'd take classes that challenged my mind, and I'd worry less about memorizing mindless dates, facts, and formulas and I'd worry more about truly learning. By removing grades, we remove the pressure to keep a high GPA and we'd allow students a more relaxed learning environment. And once these two conditions have been met, then and only then could the true essence of the collegiate experience take place, learning.
I know what many of you are thinking right now: "Without grades, how are we supposed to measure performance?" There are more than enough answers to that question. There are aptitude tests, performance reviews from teachers evaluating student's effort, and there's the pass/fail system, just to name a few. These three and many others used in some form of combination would provide a more than accurate portrayal of students' ability and effort.
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| I am one of the students that fit the stereotype that Shawn was talking about. Coming into college, I had taken calculus at a community college, written organic chemistry labs for a local college, and had taken enough AP tests to earn myself the distinction of "AP Scholar." Despite this, my first year at college, I took calculus I, chemistry I, and two other entry-level classes. Why did I do this? Because I have hopes of having a high GPA when I graduate from college in hopes of entering graduate school.
This brings about a certain issue. Graduate schools, law schools, medical schools, and employers all look at your performance during your
undergraduate years as a measure of whether they are the person that they want in their institution. Without being able to look at a students performance in terms a single numerical GPA, how could employers and admissions representatives determine if you're the type of student that has mastered the skills needed or if you did barely enough to squeak by?
In the end of your argument you mentioned a couple ways: a pass/fail system, aptitude tests, and teacher evaluations. Anyone with half of a brain though, would realize that these three options would not cut it as an adequate method of evaluation. Once you realize this, you'll probably also realize that there aren't any ways of accurately measuring performance without the current system or one so similar that it wouldn't be worth the time and effort to change the current system.
A pass/fail system would lessen the standards and cause the overall quality of graduates to diminish. Suddenly instead of having students make the effort to get an A (whether simply by taking "easy" classes or by old fashioned hard work), students would only make the effort to earn a "pass." Since passing is somewhere near the existing C level, students that formally mastered the class enough to get an A would earn the same grade as the student who regularly skipped class and only would have earned a C based on looking over last year's exam no undoubtedly earned in a less than credible manner. Does this "pass" show medical students who should be the future doctors of America? Not in my opinion.
Aptitude tests would have the same result of reduced learning, though not quite in the same way. Think back to high school for a moment and taking advanced placement classes. These classes weren't about teaching students the true nature of the subject; they were about teaching students the
material that would be present on the advanced placement exams. If collegiate aptitude tests were put into effect, college courses as a whole would stop teaching students material and would instead focus on how to write the perfect essay telling a grader who is potentially from the other side of the country about some minute fact that really have little significance to the field that you want to go into.
As much as I hate to say it, teacher evaluations wouldn't work either Shawn. How many times have you had a teacher who has had a favorite student who you swear is held to a lower standard than you just because they're "teachers pet"? Would you like putting your chances of getting into graduate school or getting that great Wall Street job into these very teachers? It's impossible to have your performance based completely on someone's opinion. Even if it were possible, what would graduate schools see on a transcript? "Good job Betty," "Great improvement Jeff," "You need to work more on your presentation skills Jane"? What do these trivial comments tell them about the student who is applying to begin work on a PhD?
Nothing.
If you want to put your future in the hands of bias teachers, standardized aptitude tests, and "passes," you may go right ahead. I, on the other hand, will accept my letter grades and will be happy to fill in a 3.3 on that graduate school application.
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Grades
