University of Virginia Library

More Than Speculation

Amidst all of the controversy over
curriculum reform, grades and the evils
inherent in them, and the lack of something
that should be integral in the educational
process, one professor in the College has
decided to experiment and find out for
himself what teaching and learning can be all
about in an atmosphere devoid of grades and
tests.

The instructor is Assistant Professor
Charles Longino and the course is Sociology
102, race relations. What Mr. Longino has
done, very simply, is to eliminate the
incentive supposedly provided by grade
competition by grading solely on the basis of
each student's cumulative average or average
for the past two semesters, whichever is
higher. A student with an average over 3.5
gets an "A;" an average from 2.5 to 3.5 gets a
"B," and so on. The only students this tends
to hurt are those with low averages who must
make up points. Admittedly, such a student
would be better off auditing the course. There
are no tests and no final exam. Students are
responsible for several papers written about
the reading material and for one research
project done individually or with other class
members.

Perhaps more important is the course
content itself. The reading gets away from
sociological tomes and encompasses such
vibrant works as Stokely Carmichael's Black
Power and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Classroom time is devoted to discussion rather
than lectures, with tapes of speeches by black
leaders comprising the only prewritten
material.

Such an experiment would probably never
have been attempted if it were not the
atmosphere of curricular discontent currently
rampant in the College. Its results ought to be
noteworthy in several respects. First, it might
give an indication of how students at this
University will perform under a non-grading
system such as a pass-fail. Second, it might
indicate how well students can structure their
own courses and how much they can learn if
they are not spoon-fed by a lecturer. In fact,
it is slightly amazing that a College which
prides itself on the search for knowledge by
empirical study has not fostered such an
experiment before, relying instead on relatively
uninformed speculation.