IHE: W. Oregon does away with "D" and "F" grades

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: Western Oregon University Adopts New Grading System

Lower Deck:

D and F grades will be replaced with "no credit" and will not affect students' GPAs. University leaders say it will raise retention rates; critics say it may lower academic rigor and lead to grade inflation.

Faculty and administrators at Western Oregon University are aiming to increase student retention rates and foster academic equity by changing the university's grading system.

[...] its grading scale will no longer include D's and F's. It will instead use "no credit," or NC, for students who fail courses. The new mark will not affect students' grade point averages, but they will not receive credit and will have to retake the course to meet their degree requirements.

[marshwiggle]

IHE: Western Oregon University Adopts New Grading System

Lower Deck:

D and F grades will be replaced with "no credit" and will not affect students' GPAs. University leaders say it will raise retention rates; critics say it may lower academic rigor and lead to grade inflation.

Faculty and administrators at Western Oregon University are aiming to increase student retention rates and foster academic equity by changing the university's grading system.

[...] its grading scale will no longer include D's and F's. It will instead use "no credit," or NC, for students who fail courses. The new mark will not affect students' grade point averages, but they will not receive credit and will have to retake the course to meet their degree requirements.

From the article:

Coll responds to such critiques by explaining that although a no-credit mark will not alter the student's GPA, their transcript will clearly show that they did not pass the course. Employers will also be able to see whether the student opted to retake the course and achieve a higher grade or substitute it with a different option—both of which indicate academic resilience in different ways.

What's not clear is if it will indicate the number of times a student retakes a course.(Or whether there will even be a limit on that.) If it means a student can just retake indefinitely, that will be miserable for faculty.

[downer]

At my community college, if a student ends up with a 55% grade, I might be tempted to give them a bit of a break and let them submit some work late or waive a late penalty so they could get a D grade.

If I were at W Oregon, I'd no longer do that. But maybe I'd start doing the same for students who got 65%.

[Langue_doc]

So no more bumping up to D, which is a passing grade, as opposed to F, a failing grade.

In related news, grades hinder learning, according to some professors. See the article in the Chronicle. The professor cited in this article resorts to ungrading:

So Blum has stopped grading. She has joined the ranks of college professors and schoolteachers experimenting with "ungrading," a set of practices meant to redirect time and attention to more important things. Like most professors, Blum can't discard grades completely — she still has to hand them in at the end of the term. But that leaves the rest of the semester to help students question the premise of those grades and encourage them to focus instead on their learning.

[dismalist]

Incentives, incentives:

--It suckers weak students into taking courses over and over, paying tuition, until they graduate. This is the avowed aim of the plan.

--But an informed prospective employer can look for all those NC's, making the degree so gained worthless.

--Uninformed employers will be suckered. They will inform themselves.

--The C is the new D. More grade compression makes GPA mean less. No reason to knock oneself out to get a good GPA.

In tendency, it makes the degree closer to uniformity for all, thereby devaluing it. This is not restricted to W Oregon.

Better get a Masters! Or nothing. :-)

[Ruralguy]

Really what it will says is that the only way for an employer to ascertain skill level for a prospective employee is to independently test those skills themselves or through a trusted third party. I know many engineering employers who made prospective employees test circuits, debug code, etc.. They knew that just saying you had courses or worked for so and so was nowhere near as good of a predictor of success. I just don't think many employers will really care about degrees any more. it might take some time, but probably not as long as some may have thought a few years back.

[marshwiggle]

Really what it will says is that the only way for an employer to ascertain skill level for a prospective employee is to independently test those skills themselves or through a trusted third party. I know many engineering employers who made prospective employees test circuits, debug code, etc.. They knew that just saying you had courses or worked for so and so was nowhere near as good of a predictor of success. I just don't think many employers will really care about degrees any more. it might take some time, but probably not as long as some may have thought a few years back.

Carried to its logical conclusion, this will mean the rise of an industry of independent skill-testers, unconnected to educational institutions. As those develop, "ungrading" could indeed become viable, since universities won't be counted on for assessing abilities. (Of course, at that point attending university to acquire those skills won't be required either.)

[mythbuster]

We have implemented something like this for the first year students. The real driver behind our move was the GPA requirements of many scholarship programs, including the major state funded program paid for by our state lottery.

 Students who get a few Ds and Fs in early courses (such as Science or Engineering) can lose their scholarships entirely even when they switch to programs where they do succeed. So they are impacted for the entire rest of their college career, or may even have to drop out because the have lost their funding to pay for college.

However, our policy only applies to intro level courses, and there is a limit of how many course can be designated NC. They do show up on the transcript, as would a withdrawal.

[dismalist]

The real driver behind our move was the GPA requirements of many scholarship programs, including the major state funded program paid for by our state lottery.

That makes sense.

All of this is individually rational and collectively suicidal.

[RatGuy]

We have implemented something like this for the first year students. The real driver behind our move was the GPA requirements of many scholarship programs, including the major state funded program paid for by our state lottery.

 Students who get a few Ds and Fs in early courses (such as Science or Engineering) can lose their scholarships entirely even when they switch to programs where they do succeed. So they are impacted for the entire rest of their college career, or may even have to drop out because the have lost their funding to pay for college.

However, our policy only applies to intro level courses, and there is a limit of how many course can be designated NC. They do show up on the transcript, as would a withdrawal.

This is true for our place as well -- anything below a C- in introductory courses (especially intro English and math) is designated No Credit. Doesn't negatively affect GPA, but students are required to retake. There's a 3-attempt limit. It's designed to limit attrition at the first-year level, especially among non-declareds.

[marshwiggle]

We have implemented something like this for the first year students. The real driver behind our move was the GPA requirements of many scholarship programs, including the major state funded program paid for by our state lottery.

Students who get a few Ds and Fs in early courses (such as Science or Engineering) can lose their scholarships entirely even when they switch to programs where they do succeed.

How does this work with scholarships for specific programs (or are those not a thing)?

[Wahoo Redux]

In related news, grades hinder learning, according to some professors. See the article in the Chronicle.

But let's take a moment and ask. Why grade? To give students feedback, a professor might say. To measure learning. To motivate.

Here's the problem: Decades of research undercuts these assumptions.

Take the issue of feedback. It comes in two main forms: evaluative feedback, like letter grades, and descriptive feedback, like the comments a professor might leave on a paper. In either case, feedback is meant to help students improve. Does it?

A set of influential studies of schoolchildren conducted in the 1980s by Ruth Butler, a professor of education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, suggests that the two types of feedback affect students in very different ways.

In one study, Butler and a colleague tested the effect of three forms of feedback on students' subsequent performance and motivation: a grade, comments (noting an aspect of the task performed competently and one that could be improved), and nothing. Students who received either grades or comments performed better on a later quantitative task than the students who did not get any feedback.

But only those who received comments did better on a subsequent qualitative task, which required creativity or problem-solving. The findings also indicated that comments supported intrinsic motivation, while grades weakened it.

The implication? Grades, the researchers wrote, "may encourage an emphasis on quantitative aspects of learning, depress creativity, foster fear of failure, and undermine interest."

But what happens when professors give a grade and write comments, too? That combination must be better, right? Butler addressed that question in a second study, where one group of students got a grade, one got comments, and one got both. The effects of a grade and comment together, she found, were similar to those of a grade alone. Instructors, in other words, can't shield students from the effects of grades by including comments.

I used to tell my students this, more or less, on the first day of class when I was teaching.  I still gave them grades but I would tell them to focus on the task at hand and the grade would come.

[marshwiggle]

In related news, grades hinder learning, according to some professors. See the article in the Chronicle.

The implication? Grades, the researchers wrote, "may encourage an emphasis on quantitative aspects of learning, depress creativity, foster fear of failure, and undermine interest."

But what happens when professors give a grade and write comments, too? That combination must be better, right? Butler addressed that question in a second study, where one group of students got a grade, one got comments, and one got both. The effects of a grade and comment together, she found, were similar to those of a grade alone. Instructors, in other words, can't shield students from the effects of grades by including comments.

I have no problem philosophically moving to a system of mastery rather than grades, but I don't think our whole culture is ready for the upheaval that would be caused by removing time limits on courses and programs, so every student stays at it until they have succeeded.

[marshwiggle]

I have no problem philosophically moving to a system of mastery rather than grades, but I don't think our whole culture is ready for the upheaval that would be caused by removing time limits on courses and programs, so every student stays at it until they have succeeded.

Sorry for the double post, but it occurred to me that going for mastery would make everything like thesis supervision, where students submit work for feedback, re-submit with corrections, and so on until the supervisor is satisfied. Who's prepared to do that for every student and every submission?

[Ruralguy]

I do know one instructor who does that for some, but not all of her STEM related courses. We have grades here, so they definitely get grades, but the grade is keyed in to specific mastery. That is, they can't shoot for a difficult calculus infused physics problem until they have mastered lower end straightforward algebraic problems, and thus can't get an A at all, no shot, unless they mastered ALL of the B,C,D level stuff. I like it in that leniency and such tend not creep in. You know it at a certain level or you don't. Where it can be bad is if you make the levels too simple, and everyone gets an A in a week. But I have never see this instructor do that.