A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in the Washington Post about Harvard University and the number of A’s faculty issue. Last year, 2/3 of the grades issued by faculty members were A’s, and 1/6 were B- or lower. As a business model, universities have a strong incentive not to fail students who will ultimately become discouraged, drop out, and stop paying tuition, and a conflicting incentive not to hurt their brand by handing out degrees that don’t reflect the gravitas they intend to project. As much as faculty may recoil at the idea of a university as a business, it still needs to keep its lights on. In an era of diminishing support for higher education, tuition is an increasingly important source of funding.
For a Harvard graduate, graduating at the top of their class conveys a level of exceptionalism. In a likely attempt to preserve that image, university faculty attempted to vote to cap A’s at 1/3. Students revolted. In seeming support of the grade cap, the Washington Post reported:
The result is a collapse in the informational value of grades, especially at the high end. “As GPAs accumulate against the wall of 4.0,” a Harvard faculty committee report noted earlier this year, “the small numerical differences that remain are less reflective of genuine variation in academic performance than random noise in the grading process.”
I would argue that letter grades convey little information, no matter what they are.
As a former full-time professor who once awarded grades and a current full-time business owner who aims to hire people with degrees, I think it’s a silly discussion because a student’s grades in school tell me very little about the skills that actually help my business. I own a medical technology start-up, and I generally look for candidates and business partners with some understanding of how the heart and lungs work, the types of treatment a patient with cardiorespiratory disease or cancer might receive, and a general knowledge of human health. I can look at a transcript and see that a graduate knows that air goes in and then out. Still, I don’t know whether a graduate can talk to my customers or users, help design a platform to translate an idea into a product, or analyze a complex set of information. Can they work in a team with people they may not know? Can they use basic business tools? The best way (and, frankly, most efficient) to find talented people is still to look at work experience or through word of mouth from a colleague. That disadvantages new graduates.
Universities and businesses are not aligned in their understanding of what an “A” means. I used AI to generate this image. I wrote all of the words. I’m a better writer than I am an artist.
The “flipped classroom,” where students learn fact-based information on their own and work on applied problems in class, was a new concept when I began teaching. It’s now the standard in healthcare education and some basic science programs. At the time I decided to structure my courses this way, several of my colleagues discouraged me. I heard, “You will never get tenure,” and “the college will think you’re just being lazy and not lecturing.” Little did they know that the amount of work it takes to prepare this learning model is far greater than that of traditional lecturing.
I had a strong rationale. More than knowing that air goes in and air goes out, I wanted my students to be able to articulate that they could work as a team with people they didn’t know, could search the current literature for cutting edge information about a disease they were interesting in, could prepare compelling oral and written presentations aimed at professionals or patients, and could answer applied questions that were on par with those asked of people in medical school. They could use platforms relevant to future employers. Importantly, I wanted them to be able to articulate that they could do these things. When a student has to come to class prepared to engage because their peers expect it, it’s hard to sleep in the back.
In the first few years, when my university had a grade cap of 1/3 A’s, I took flak for giving ~40% A’s. My argument was that if a student could demonstrate they could do all those things, why would I not give them an A? Besides, when faced with a future employer, it would be their word that ultimately proved whether they could do something in practice. Not mine.
When I ran my laboratory, I rarely looked at grades. I asked students what they were able to do and what they wanted to learn. Even if I knew a student likely had a skill, many struggled to tell me with confidence that they could perform it. We had a list of people in the lab and basic lab activities, ranging from pre-treating syringes to prevent clots, to analyzing complex datasets. When a student felt confident, they could do it on their own, they would put a gold star under their name and next to the activity. That was an important distinction. It removed the focus from me telling them they were good at something. It meant they felt confident in tackling a task without supervision. Who wants to explain that they fumbled a $5,000 experiment because a supervisor told them they were ready but they really weren’t? Ultimately, they would be more confident telling someone that they were good at something in the future. The stickers may have looked juvenile, but they helped students build confidence that they were gaining both knowledge and practical skills.
Medical schools have also moved away from letter grading, with 80% now using some form of pass/fail grading instead of A-F because it increases student well-being and shifts the focus to developing skills they will use in the service of patients rather than competing with each other. It’s a fantastic move.
So, this may sound radical, but I propose we do away with grades altogether. Except as a gatekeeper for higher learning, they convey very little meaning about what a student can actually do. A student who is less strong in one area may bring exceptional value in another. University programs should develop competency lists and report whether a student can perform the competency. Some may be discipline-specific, while others may be broadly valuable. Not only does this empower students to talk with future employers about what they are good at, but it also improves graduates’ hiring potential. It allows businesses to identify people who have subsets of competencies that best fit their needs.
Or, more simply, hanging on to an antiquated system of evaluating students because it’s the way we’ve always done it is so cringe.
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