Why Do Colleges Still Use Grades?

From as early as kindergarten, students are told that their academic efforts rank somewhere between an A and an F in any given subject. But as new technology in higher education has changed how teaching and learning happen, and as many educators place a heavier emphasis on learning outcomes over GPAs, professors like Trudy A. Milburn wonder why institutions still rely so heavily on the traditional grading system.

Ms. Milburn, an adjunct associate professor in communication studies at the City University of New York’s Baruch College, says she’s much more concerned with what students have learned than with letters. And, to some extent, she feels that grades have become so inflated at many colleges that they have lost their meaning. With more institutions relying on adjunct instruction, she can’t help but wonder whether grade inflation might become even more pronounced since instructors are judged partly on student evaluations.

“No one ever questions it,” she says of the grading system. “You can’t get into college if you don’t have a certain GPA from high school, and you can’t get into grad school if you don’t have a certain GPA from college.”

To her, it would be better for instructors to simply require students to demonstrate a certain level of mastery to pass a course, rather than to do the extra work of assigning grades to the skills students have learned.

Over the last 16 years, Ms. Milburn has worked as a professor at Baruch and at California State University-Channel Islands, and has also held the position of director of campus solutions at Taskstream, a company that helps institutions with the outcomes assessments they provide to accreditors. In her experience at those different institutions, she has often wondered: If grades aren’t a good indicator of student learning, why do we keep using them?

She brought that question to us after we asked readers to tell us what puzzles them about proposed innovations in higher education, and her question got the most votes from readers interested in hearing more.

Several experts who study student assessment agree that no one really likes grading and that, thanks to new efforts in competency-based education, there is increasing interest in alternatives.

The practice of grading student work dates at least to the 19th century, when Harvard University adopted an A-through-E grading scale to compare how well students were doing in courses, says Arthur E. Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

But while grades may have fit well in an industry-focused economy, where processes were key, he argues, the system doesn’t align with the current information economy, where instructors and employers are more interested in what students are learning and what they could do with that knowledge. He argues that as part of improving instruction, colleges should modernize the system of assessment.

Grades Aren’t ‘Meaningless’

Of course, grades have their defenders. Sure, they aren’t perfect indicators of student knowledge, says Valen E. Johnson, professor and head of the department of statistics at Texas A&M University at College Station, but they’re certainly not meaningless.

“I think most faculty regard grades as a nuisance,” he says. But if professors didn’t give them, “students probably wouldn’t work as much and wouldn’t do homework and wouldn’t study for exams,” he argues.

Colleges use grades because they are relatively easy to assign and give a comparison measure for how students in a particular course and institution stack up, but each letter should be taken with a grain of salt, he adds, since assessment is subjective.

In 2003, Mr. Johnson published a book, Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, for which he studied the subjectivity of grading across different fields. He found that courses in the sciences are graded much harder than those in the social sciences, with courses in the humanities graded most leniently.

In making promotion and tenure decisions, many colleges consider student evaluations of professors’ performance. He found that that practice creates an incentive for professors to give students higher grades than they deserve. “If you assign low grades, you’re going to get lower evaluations of teaching, and you’ll have more students coming to office hours complaining about how exams were graded — how the course was being taught — and there is no pressure from the administration to maintain a common standard in grading,” he says.

To Mr. Johnson, grade inflation can’t get much more pronounced than it is now, but he fears that turning to a new system wouldn’t change anything. For employers on the lookout for promising hires, he says, information on a student’s performance in a specific course is much more important than an overall GPA.

Make Grades Invisible

Grades are often used as a “quick and dirty way of summarizing student outcomes for parents, graduate schools, and employers,” says Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards and several other books on restructuring education.

Mr. Kohn argues that grades actually get in the way of student learning. When professors cap the number of top-end grades, he argues, students enter into a fierce competition with one another, and so their interest in learning the actual material wanes.

He’s a radical advocate for abolishing the grading system as a whole, and he thinks institutions like Hampshire College, which doesn’t use grades, are headed in the right direction. Yet, because the vast majority of institutions require professors to issue grades, professors at least have an obligation to make them as invisible as possible until the end of the semester, he says.

He advises professors to give final grades by asking students what grade they think they deserve, and then using that as a starting point for a conversation about what the final grade should be. To him, assessment shouldn’t be a decision made by the professor alone. It should be made in discussion with students so they buy into the measure, he says.

“The terror and horror in which many instructors react to this suggestion proves the point that grades were never really a necessary form of reporting,” he says. “All along they have been about controlling students.”

One way institutions today are changing how they assess student learning is through competency-based education. Under that model, in which courses are often offered online, students are allowed as much or as little time as they need to get through the material. Students move on to the next subject only when the instructor can ascertain that they have mastered particular skills. Assessment is based on a pass/fail model, and students are given detailed narrative evaluations of their individual skill levels in a course.

Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University are two of the best-known colleges to restructure assessment in that way, but Mr. Levine says he believes that other players in higher education will continue to experiment with many variations of competency-based education before one system becomes the new norm.

“This isn’t all going to happen next week,” he says, adding that most institutions still haven’t taken steps to move away from grades. “We’re talking about an evolution over time.”

Mr. Levine is practicing what he preaches. The foundation he leads is starting a competency-based graduate school in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The institution, named the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, will enroll its first students in the summer of 2017.

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