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Steve Clark wrote:
My first year teaching was in a private school where the
only grades we gave was PASS or FAIL. Amazingly, most
students did very well when we took the grade pressure off
of them. ....
Tim O'Donnell wrote:
I often have thought that pass/fail is the way to go. I do
think students would then focus better on learning. I
have often thought about a check list. A student does
receive credit until all topic are checked. A lot of students
(some who want to be engineers) avoid my class because
it might hurt their GPA. It seems that the GPA is
increasing in importance. How important is a GPA? I
don't think things will change much and I will continue
to try to convince student the importance of the class is
not the grade, but the knowledge - wish me luck.
1) I agree that grades aren't that important.
Tell your students that after they've been out of school
for about 10 days, nobody will ever care what their GPA
was; they'll be judged on their real-world performance,
which depends on what they have actually _learned_ (and
depends not at all on GPA).
2) When teachers tell this to students, the story would
be more credible if the schools would back it up, for
instance by pass/fail grading as Steve mentioned.
There is a small trade school in Pasadena that has used an
interesting pass/fail regime for several decades. It seems
to work. Details include (approximately):
-- First-term and second-term students are automatically
graded pass/fail, no matter what the course.
-- Thereafter students can choose one elective each term
to be graded pass/fail. This elective must not be one
of the courses required for the student's major.
-- Students can sign up for a bunch of electives, and they
don't need to decide until "drop day" (late in the term)
which one to designate as pass/fail and which one(s) to
drop.
For full details, see
http://pr.caltech.edu/catalog/01_02/geninfo/grades.html
Consequences include:
*) Freshmen tend to be hyper-competitive when they arrive.
They are accustomed to being at the top of every class in
high school, and suddenly 90% of them find themselves outside
of the top 10% for the first time. It takes them a few months
to get over it.
*) Grades are still as meaningful as they ever were (whatever
that means :-) because the courses required for the major are
still graded.
*) OTOH there is virtually no penalty for taking non-required
courses.
==========================
Action item: Don't just harangue students about the
unimportance of grades. Take it up with the school
administration. Get 'em to institute a sensible
pass/fail policy.