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Getting rid of grades?
At a workshop at the annual conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, administrators and faculty ruminated over the possibility of university life without the pesky problem of having to assign grades for academic work. As Inside Higher Ed reports, the conference attendees, frustrated by the sea of "meaningless" 3.5 grade-point averages, instead advocated the increased use of portfolios, "narrative evaluations," and other measures of achievement to supplant letter grades--which, they fear, squelch intellectual curiosity.
The AAC&U members did get one thing right: The pervasive grade inflation in America's institutions of higher learning have rendered GPAs and letter grades increasingly useless in determining whether or not a student has actually learned anything. But their proposed solution misses the mark entirely. "Narrative grading" and portfolios as a substitute for letter grades risk making student evaluation even more subjective and true performance even more difficult to ascertain.
In virtually all instances, such tools are no replacement for clear, well-defined grades. Noninflated grades give an honest assessment of a student's progress, and reward those who have done exemplary work. Instead of abandoning A-F grades, colleges need to restore their meaning by limiting As and Bs and issuing strict guidelines on what constitutes poor or strong academic performance. Only then will there be a reliable way to measure student learning. ACTA will detail how to do this in a forthcoming trustee guide on the topic entitled Measuring Up: The Problem of Grade Inflation.
Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on January 26, 2009 at January 26, 2009 05:47 PM
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