Herman Lelieveldt

Hiding the grades

So why does Reed College in principle not report grades but just record them? In order to find this out I invited two of my political science colleagues from Reed to come visit UCR as well as visited the college myself so I could talk to professors and students as well as attend some classes.

Reed College is one of the smaller US liberal arts colleges, with just 1400 students, and a program that has many similarities with the Dutch liberal arts offerings. Students start out really broad with a 101 humanities seminar of a year and subsequently take a wide variety of courses in science, social science and arts and humanities. They then choose a major in a specific discipline where they complete a set number of courses and cap this with a thesis that they write in their final year (note that US colleges in general have four year bachelor programs, instead of the three we find in the Netherlands). Classes are small with an average of 15 students per course and most of these courses follow the conference model: no formal lectures, but a more or less structured interaction between students and the professor.

This how Reed outlines it’s ‘hiding the grades’- policy on its website:

“Students are encouraged to focus on learning, not on grades. Students are evaluated rigorously, and semester grades are filed with the registrar, but by tradition, students do not receive standard grade reports. Papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed.”

The quotation makes abundantly clear that  Reed deliberately tries to stay away from the grading craze that may threaten day-to-day learning at the college. When taking courses at Reed, the default position is that  you are doing fine, and as long as that is the case you will not hear how fine exactly. Only in case your work gets below a C, Reed will inform you directly about your unsatisfactory performance. This then acts as a safety valve and avoids students will in fact start missing credit because they did poorly on their courses.

Now from the teacher perspective the not-reporting-the-grades is liberating, in the sense that feedback can now fully focus on the substantive part of the story. As one of the professors told me: “Not reporting grades completely changes the conversation with your students. When you have to attach grades to a paper, you always feel that at least part of your comments are needed just to justify the grade you plan to give. Not having to do so, gives you the space to just focus on comments that help improve future work. And when students come visiting me – and they do so all the time – they are there to talk about their work, not to negotiate about grades”.

One of the positive side-effects of this, is that it also motivates the A+ students to take that extra step. If properly done instructors will use their feedback to push these students even more for their next assignment. So the not handing out of grades stimulates everyone to do better, not just the ones who have not yet handed in excellent work.

The  students I spoke to shared similar observations when it comes to the way they talk about the feedback they get on their work. “Because the work that we get back does not have grade on it, you don’t get into the comparing the grades anxiety that you would otherwise have. Instead, what we do talk about is the type of substantive feedback we got on our assignments.” From the student side of the story, the absence of grades reduces the competitiveness and fosters a more collaborative attitude where sharing knowledge and supporting each other is the norm.

This is helped by the fact that Reed does not award distinctions like ‘cum laude’ or puts students on a ‘Deans list’ or appoints a Valedictorian. Reed takes pride in not ranking its students like that. As they put it in their course catalog: “The college does not wish to divide students by labels of achievement”.

Tied into this is Reed’s sensible approach to classifying students as excellent. While the private liberal arts colleges have been at the forefront of grade inflation, Reed has stayed away from this trend and seen an increase in mean GPA of only 0.2 over the last three decades. The mean GPA of its graduating students is just 3.20 (somewhere in between what Reed calls a B-B+).   Put differently: while the most common grade at Harvard now issued is an A , in its whole 100 year history Reed only counts 11 students who in fact completed the program with a perfect 4.00 GPA.

Now, with a view to getting accepted at prestigious master programs a low GPA may be undesirable, but this is where institutional reputation comes in. Students can rely upon Reed’s reputation to still end up in the most sought-after graduate programs and more specifically those awarding PhD’s. The only problem students sometimes have is getting accepted for medical schools which may be inflexible in the minimum GPAs they demand from applicants.

For those students who really can’t resist wanting to  know their grade, Reed provides the option to ask for them, either directly from the instructor or indirectly via the academic advisor. However, these requests are not easily honored. Students will be asked why exactly they would like to know their grade: in the Reed system no news is in effect good news, so why bother wanting to know how well you are doing exactly? Many students thus will in fact see their grade list only upon graduation day when receiving their diploma.

Professors admit that it is especially beginning students who become very anxious about their performance at the college. The effect of this is that some of these students will ask their professors repeatedly for advice on how to do better or additional explanations on the feedback they received. But sooner or later for most students this anxiety seems to wane and they start appreciating the benefits of the system.

I want to emphasize that this grading policy is just one element of a by now deeply rooted culture at Reed on what constitutes an optimal learning environment. The most important thing in this culture is the emphasis Reed puts on teaching as the core business of faculty and the idea that students come to Reed to learn, rather than earn a diploma.

Classroom culture reflects a joint quest for understanding the material, with students directly confronting each other on differing interpretations and the professor standing by as a highly knowledgeable moderator. For most of the time in the classes that I attended students were the ones who propelled the conversation, with the professor having some kind of a general idea on which concepts and debates would have to be covered during that session. And with a posted tuition fee of 65.000 US dollars a year, you can imagine that students will be prepared for such a session and won’t hesitate to stalk their professor for feedback when needed.

Prioritizing teaching is also reinforced through Reed’s hiring and promotion culture. Scientists who apply for a job at Reed know that this is not a research university. Consequently they are also not evaluated primarily on the basis of their research, but their teaching, with research and administrative service coming in only after that. It also means that faculty is expected to be present every day on campus during the semester as well as hold regular office hours and be as much available to students as is needed.

Summers are different. Reed operates a 9 month contract system (being paid out over 12 months), so it is really up to the faculty what they want to do then. Faculty can apply for funding to do research over the summer, often with students as paid research assistants, or they can just decide to do something else. More importantly however is its sabbatical system where professors get a full year sabbatical after seven years of teaching (or half a year after 7 semesters).  Be it as it may, it is certainly true that starting a career at a teaching college will make it difficult to get back to a position at a research university. These are simply different types of careers.

Given the fact that it has taken Reed hundred years to build and sustain this highly particular teaching culture, it should not surprise us that some of the things they do might in fact keep them from doing better. In the words of one of Reed’s professor: “politically we are liberal, but pedagogically we are conservative”.

Reed still sticks to a conventional organization of its disciplines into departments and this may inhibit a more interdisciplinary take at problems. Professors enjoy an large amount of autonomy and can basically teach anything they want. Students from their side can get so excited by the teaching style of this one professor that they graduate in professors, rather than in the discipline. Courses are systematically evaluated, but the outcomes of these evaluations are only known to the instructor and not shared with the head of department or the  students. Instructors are not required to write a course reflection in which they  comment upon these evaluations and provide suggestions on how to improve their course offerings. The only instance when others get to see these is when a faculty member is up for promotion: it is then that the evaluating committee looks at the course evaluations alongside the comments they get from fellow department members and students.

All in all then there may be somewhat less room for a more structured conversation about what a program should consist of and what types of teaching would be most conducive to that. Novel approaches such as problem-based learning, co-teaching of courses or student driven seminars seem to be absent in the Reed approach.

For many of us this in fact seems to reflect the ideal of complete academic freedom where professors can basically do what they want as long as they behave decently. But it remains important to be aware of the possible downsides of high levels of professional autonomy: does the conference system make sure all students are equally challenged?  Is there a risk that the lack of transparency on grading creates a certain level of subjectivity in assessing students? Is there a sufficiently shared understanding amongst colleagues about what constitutes ‘excellent’ work.

These are the types of questions we should ask about any program, but they may be more pressing in the context of a college that traditionally has been governed very much from the bottom-up. And as political scientists know, these types of governance tend to make it difficult to get things changed.

All this being said, Reed’s approach to grading and learning in general gives us enough stuff to think about  when it comes to the future of liberal arts teaching in the Netherlands and honours programs in particular, something I will do in my final blog post.

But before that I will move northwards to Evergreen State College, a place that in many aspects is even more different. Founded in the 1970’s Evergreen State decided to do away with grading completely and instead provide lengthy qualitative assessments. And contrary to most places in the academic world here is a college where the traditional disciplines have been abolished and courses are organized thematically, with all of them being taught by at least two professors with different disciplinary backgrounds.

This is part two of a series of blogs on the teaching philosophy of two pacific Northwest liberal arts colleges that Herman Lelieveldt visited as part of a Roosevelt Short Stay Fellowship.

The  first blog which introduces this series can be found here

Herman Lelieveldt teaches political science at University College Roosevelt, the liberal arts and  sciences college of Utrecht University in Middelburg.