At some point in your college career, you've encountered them — the person who, upon learning that you go to Brown, quizzically says, "Isn't that the school without any grades or something?" You gently correct them, laughing at their naivete. But while they may be misinformed, they ought to be right: Having already thrown out the pluses and minuses, the D's and F's, it's time for the University to consider doing away with grades altogether.
It's not surprising that outsiders often find our grading system inscrutable. We have A's, B's, C's and F's, but F's are "No Credit" and don't show up on your transcript. Less than 5 percent of grades each year are C's. The bottom line? The Brown transcript is all but exclusively populated with A's and B's — and, of course, those much-beloved S's. Our school seems to be the university equivalent of Lake Wobegon — a place where everyone is above average.
But as a result, grades are less effective at doing what they are fundamentally supposed to do: provide information about how well students perform in a class. This is a logical result of having so few categories into which a student's performance can fall. Take a student who got a B — you have no way of knowing if they were one of the worst students in the class or if they were one exam question away from an A. At another school, that same person might have a B-, B or B+, allowing you to know much more about how they did.
The latter system allows not only for more fine-grained comparisons across students, but also across the courses on an individual student's transcript. Looking at a typical Brunonian's long list of A's, B's and S's — and the 1.31 percent C's — it's impossible to know in which classes they excelled, did the bare amount of work necessary or did just average. All you know is that in some, they did really well, and in others, they did pretty well. By having such a wide variety of meanings, letter grades end up with almost no meaning at all.
One obvious solution is to bring back pluses and minuses. In fact, such a move was proposed in 2006, in part for the reasons already discussed. Yet ultimately, I believe the successful critics of that proposal were correct in arguing that a more traditional grading system would be undesirable because it would increase student focus on, and competitiveness over, grades. A greater variety of letter grades might provide more information for students, graduate schools and employers but it would be at odds with the University's academic philosophy. Currently, the philosophy promotes the notion that students put time and effort into their classes in pursuit of knowledge, rather than in pursuit of an A.
But if what we hold dear about Brown is its lack of emphasis on grades, then why bother having them at all? If we reject grades as anathema to the spirit of the New Curriculum, let's stand by that belief wholeheartedly. Let's find a more holistic evaluation system — one that encourages cooperation rather than competition. One that aligns professors and students as collaborators rather than pitting them against each other as judge and judged. One that fosters reflection and engagement rather than strategic GPA-gaming.
In fact, we already have such a system — course performance reports. These reports, which can be requested in any class, are a written form that can be attached to a student's transcript on which both students and professors provide a narrative evaluation of the student's progress over the semester. Surely, this process is more suited than letter grades are for a school in which everything from our classes to our concentration must be carefully considered and justified. So rather than relegating course performance reports to the sidelines as a voluntary additional piece of paperwork, let's make them the centerpiece of our evaluation system. Make every class S/NC, and at the end of the semester, in every class, both student and instructor would share comments saying much more about a student's performance than an A or B ever could.
But wait, you say — not all graduate schools and employers are quite this forward-thinking. What will happen when we can no longer impress them with our highly inflated, if technically nonexistent, GPA's? Happily, we can have the best of both worlds. The University could continue awarding letter grades while still requiring a performance report in every class, similar to what's done at Reed College. Yes, we would still be stuck with those vague letters, but along with each one, we'd also have a nuanced evaluation — explaining our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and challenges, what we learned and how we grew — available to support, qualify or expand upon that letter. Making student evaluations fundamentally narrative-centered would engage students even more deeply in the reflection and dialogue that ought to characterize our education, while making our transcripts far less arbitrary and far more meaningful.
Reuben Henriques '12 is pleased with this column but wants to hear your holistic, narrative assessment of it, too. He can be reached at reuben_henriques@brown.edu.
