Teaching: New Views on Grades

Schools use the word grade in two quite different senses: as a chronological measurement of class levels and as a mark of student performance. By coincidence, there is now a small but growing trend to drop grades—in both senses. One out of four large-sized school-districts combines first, second and third grades into a single primary unit. Children learn at their own fast or slow pace without competing to hurdle the artificial barrier of promotion, and the only mark they get is the deliberately vague judgment of “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.”

Detroit public schools next term will try a new kind of ungradedness. Kindergarten and first grade will be combined, and a bit later the second grade will be added to the mix. Most children will remain in the big non-grade for three years before entering conventional third grade, but the new flexibility will allow some pupils to finish in two years while requiring others to take four.

High schools, while not tempted to eliminate grades as year levels, are under pressure to eliminate grades as marks. New York’s influential and reform-minded Public Education Association argues that in some cases marks spur bright, college-bound students to take easy courses just to inflate their academic record.

Colleges are also getting leary of grades-are-everything competition. The first major school to act is California Institute of Technology, which last week eliminated “freshman grades. Caltech’s ferociously smart freshmen will still take exams and do graded homework assignments, but at the end of the freshman year students will simply pass or fail. With grades “unattainable,” Faculty Chairman Ernest H. Swift hopes that freshmen “will find it easier to concentrate on the content of their course. This, in turn, may enable them to make more sensible choices as to the investment of their time and energy.”