I read with great regret the faculty’s decision last spring to eliminate the option of course performance reports, starting in the 2025–26 academic year.
When I was a student at Brown, I took about two-thirds of my classes Satisfactory/No Credit and received CPRs for approximately three-quarters of all my courses. (You can still get a CPR even if you’re taking a course for a letter grade.) These reports aren’t just a quirky Brown tradition — they are a defining feature of the Open Curriculum, capturing the kind of intellectual curiosity and engagement that letter grades alone might never convey. Eliminating these reports weakens both students’ post-graduate opportunities and the very spirit of a Brown education.
After I graduated Brown, I was accepted into two consecutive graduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania. The first was an MBA at Wharton, where the admissions team had to rely largely on my Brown academic record and Graduate Management Admission Test scores. I worried the abundance of “S” marks and lack of letter grades on my transcript would raise eyebrows in the admissions conference rooms. I wondered, ‘would they throw up their hands, unsure what to make of it all?’
During the application season, I attended an MBA fair hosted in a hotel ballroom packed with admissions officers from top business schools. I asked several of them the same question: “What do you think when you see a Brown transcript full of ‘S’ grades, backed by a couple dozen course performance reports?”
They all said they preferred that framework to a transcript filled with As and Bs, explaining that CPRs gave far more insight into who I was as a student and how I engaged with my coursework. The admission officers appreciated the narrative depth CPRs offered, whispering that, if every college did this, they would not be able to handle the volume of reading.
So CPRs didn’t just set me apart — they set Brown apart. And they continued to do so during my two years at Wharton. Unlike most students there, I asked my professors to write unofficial CPRs for my classes in addition to the standard transcript grade by showing them examples from my undergraduate course. (Wharton used a modified pass/fail system.) Virtually every professor I asked agreed.
A year after graduating from Wharton, I was accepted into a master’s program at Penn’s School of Engineering. Objectively, I had no business applying. I wasn’t an engineer or a computer scientist at Brown. I concentrated in political science, took just one computer science class and dabbled in a few engineering courses designed for non-engineers. I didn’t even have a post-college job that involved spreadsheets, much less scientific or engineering tools.
But just like at Wharton, Penn Engineering looked at my Brown CPRs — along with the informal ones I’d gathered from Wharton — and concluded that I could succeed in a rigorous technical master’s program despite my lack of STEM undergraduate background (Spoiler: they were right.)
When I interviewed high school seniors as part of Brown’s admissions process, I always told them about the S/NC system and the availability of CPRs. Universally, they found both elements appealing. Not just the S/NC flexibility, but the potential for meaningful academic feedback through CPRs.
At Brown, students take classes and learn the same subjects as students at thousands of other universities. But at Brown, we learn something else. We learn how to learn by being given the freedom to decide what to learn. We chart our own academic paths, and we change direction when it makes sense. No other university does a better job teaching that.
CPRs are prima facie evidence of this “something else.” They helped get me into Wharton and my Penn Engineering Master’s program. They show not just what a student learned in a history or chemistry class, but how they engaged, grew, struggled and ultimately came into their own as a scholar.
Eliminating the CPR option chips away at what makes Brown magical. It weakens students’ applications to graduate programs and sends the wrong message about what we value. And while some faculty may worry that writing CPRs is burdensome, most faculty, at their discretion, have in many cases had the option to decline a student’s request if they did not have sufficient information on the student to write a viable report. There’s often no requirement to participate. So what, really, is the objection?
Without CPRs, what does an “A” mean? What does a “B” mean? And, more importantly, what does an “S” mean? CPRs give those single letters context. They tell the story behind them and so much more.
It’s not too late to bring them back.
Dave Morris ’88 can be reached at davemorris.1@gmail.com. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
