University of Virginia Library

The Curriculum - Grades

The educational process has come a long
way since student and teacher first took up
their posts at opposite ends of the log. Some
of the travel has been in the right direction,
but as the log expanded, a number of
impediments to educational intercourse have
been added. One of them which is of
especially dubious value is the grade system.

If any educational institution existed in a
vacuum, if it was run by rules designed only
to further its own institutional goals, there
would probably be no grading system. But
colleges, high schools, and even primary
schools have allowed themselves to become, in
part at least, factories designed to process
students for the next step up in the
educational and societal hierarchy. Some form
of "quality control" or at least evaluation was
deemed necessary to determine, not what
benefits the student was deriving from his
present experience, but whether he was
qualified to move on to the next step in the
hierarchy.

Such an arrangement generates its own
rationale. Defenders of the grade system point
out that if it were replaced by something less
definitive businesses would not know whom
to hire, graduate schools would not be certain
that an applicant was a certified "achiever,"
and so forth. Perhaps they are right. But
should that be the function of the University
— to certify achievers for the business world
and the professional schools? Or should the
University be primarily concerned with
motivating its students to seek the knowledge
that it offers and providing an atmosphere
conducive to the pursuit of that knowledge?

If the latter be the case, a grading system is
useful only in so far as it furthers the goal of
motivating students to seek out the knowledge
which the University exists to disseminate.
And that is why the present grading
system at the University is little better than a
farce. For grades, more often than not, serve a
dysfunctional purpose. They are not an
incentive to learn. They often become a goal
in themselves, and learning becomes one of a
variety of means available to attaining good
grades; moreover, learning becomes hardly the
most practical means.

There are two ways to approach a semester
at the University. One can take the courses he
figures will be most beneficial to him at his
stage of intellectual development and worry
about the grades later, hoping that they will
reflect the amount of work he puts into it; or
he can sprinkle his course selection with "gut"
courses where the grading is easy and devote
his effort in the other courses not to learning
but to attaining the highest possible grade for
the least amount of work.

Such things occur regularly around the
Grounds. We recall the teacher of a basic
social science course who gave all A's and B's
to the 60 students who took the course first
semester. The next semester there were 400
applicants for the course. Then there are the
meticulously kept "poodah files" maintained
in various undergraduate quarters and the high
prices that, for example, an Economics I
exam will bring on the exam-time market. Or
"poop central" in the basement of Lloyd's
where those who prefer to do so can find
review notes and synopses for just about all
the books that have ever been required
reading in a University English course. Clearly
the grading system has contributed to a
general perversion of the educational system
in the College.

In response to that, the College's curriculum
evaluation committee has chosen
merely to tinker with the established system.
Students will now be able to opt to take a
total of four semester courses on a pass-fail
basis, providing the courses are not required
for their major subject. Instead of the present
one, two, three, and four point grades, pluses
and minuses will be computed on a third of a
point basis. In other words, instead of B+, B-,
and B all counting three points, B+ will count
three and one-third, B- will count two and
two-thirds, and a B will still be three points.

Both of these measures have sound
concepts behind them. The idea of pass-fail is
a good one, though its limited application will
hinder its ability to work a much-needed
change into the College atmosphere. At its
core, the manner in which grades force
students to retain (only until the examination)
knowledge that doesn't interest them
is repugnant to the philosophy upon which a
curriculum ought to be founded. We feel that
a pass-fail system will free students to pursue
in greater depth those subjects which interest
them; it will, if you accept the premise that
most students here can get interested in an
academic discipline and have the ability to
pursue it, encourage more research, more
learning, and most especially, more thinking.
It is unfortunate, therefore, that the Curriculum
Committee so severely limited the
opportunities to take courses on a pass-fail
basis. One change that might be made even at
this date would be to give each department
the option to designate some of its courses as
pass-fail and set up its own regulations
concerning pass-fail for majors.

The committee's second change in the
grading system, while valid insofar as one
accepts the efficacy of grades, can only be
accepted on that basis. It corrects an obvious
deficiency — the great disparity between, for
example, a B- and a C+, but it fails to come to
grips with the legitimate question of whether
a letter grade can indeed approximate a
student's progress in a course. Anyone with
four year's experience in the College can tell
you that they quite often do not, that in fact
they are often poor indicators. More often
they mirror a student's ability to take tests, to
snow instructors, etc. The proposed reform
will serve only to make that bad indicator
seem more precise. Nonetheless, it is an
improvement, and it's the only improvement
likely to be made in the near future.

For the long run, however, the College
cannot afford to consider its reform responsibility
for the grading system discharged by the
present two proposals; and perhaps this
reform cannot be handled by a committee.
What is needed is fresh thinking, exploring
wholly new concepts in the development of a
liberal arts curriculum. There were no grades
back on the log; it's probable that there was a
great deal more teaching and learning done
there than goes on in Cabell Hall on an
average weekday.