The Long Unwinding Road
The long and winding road That leads to your door Will never disappear I've seen that road before It always leads me here…
- Lennon/McCartney, 1970
You know these words. This classic Beatles song is about regretting the direction one is going, wondering if there is a different path. And recognizing how difficult it is to walk a different path. Trying to “go gradeless” represents a different path for formal education. We’ve walked the path of A-F grading for so long that it feels inevitable from the perspective of students, parents, employers, and institutions. We try alternatives, but keep winding up where we started. In this post, I explore some of the complexities that need to be unwound in order to make progress with better forms of feedback and assessment.
I am a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education, where we are working towards the launch of a new, 4-year bachelor’s degree program called LEAPS: Learning, Equity, And Problem Solving for the Public Good. (I’ll write more about LEAPS in the future, when more information about the program is ready to share.) In this post I want to focus on what was supposed to be a signature element of this new program: mastery-based feedback and assessment without grades and without a traditional GPA or transcript. LEAPS students would work towards mastery of program-wide learning goals in four areas: Ways of Knowing, Personal Good, Group Good, and Public Good. They would do this through a range of courses assessed using a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) marking system, and through a range of community engagements and internships. Students would defend their progress towards the program-wide learning goals separately from course-based assessments, and the program would produce a personal learning record with a portfolio of evidence demonstrating what students know and are able to do in the world. At least that was the plan.
No spoiler alert is needed when I tell you that we will not be able to launch LEAPS without traditional grades. Grades and grading systems are remarkably resistant to rethinking. Given the vast infrastructure that has been built up around our commonly-accepted approaches to grading, this resistance is ultimately not surprising. Below I recount some of my encounters with both institutional infrastructure (the registrar, the financial aid office) and the users of that infrastructure (students, parents, and colleagues). Before I do so, I want to stress that just about everyone I work with is excited about alternatives to traditional grading approaches, and fully supports the idea of mastery-based assessment. They are extremely supportive of LEAPS and the goals of this new degree. But even so, systemic inertia makes it difficult to give up the current system.
The Registrar
The Office of the Registrar at Michigan is remarkable. It is staffed with forward-thinking folks who recognize that the future of learning means thinking beyond grades, GPAs, and transcripts that are lists of course titles. They have an awe-inspiring range of responsibilities within the university, from scheduling courses to collecting feedback on instructors. And most importantly, they maintain the official records of learning (transcripts) for each student forever. It’s a lot to manage, and they do it extremely well.
In my discussions with Registrar staff about grading, transcripts, and LEAPS, it quickly became clear that a mastery-based transcript poses challenges to the official (and legal) responsibilities of their office. For starters, the requirement to maintain transcripts in perpetuity raises questions about the nature of newer, mastery-based personal learning records, which are usually on cloud-based platforms. Currently, older transcripts are archived using document imaging systems that store images of the transcripts that were formerly archived either on microfiche (!) or on paper. More recent transcripts are fully digital, but the university operates the software locally and stores all files using an elaborate and secure backup system. With new cloud-based systems, where does the transcript live? How is it secured? What if the provider goes out of business or is acquired?
Another issue has to do with the authoritativeness of the transcript. The university currently dictates what is on the transcript, and provides clear instructions to those who request transcripts for how to interpret each element. If a portfolio of work—a common element of mastery-based learning records—is curated by each learner, what does that mean for its authoritativeness? Currently, any request for a transcript generates a standardized response. What if students in our program also want to send a traditional transcript? Is that an option? Do students get to choose which transcript is sent (traditional vs. mastery)?
These were all excellent questions. In discussions between an official from our Registrar’s office and a leading provider of personal learning records, we determined that all of these issues were resolvable. A special instance of the personal learning record software could be created and given to our Registrar to control. In addition, the Registrar recognized that all future software solutions in this space were likely to be cloud-based, and thus problems of longevity and security would need to be resolved whether or not a new form of transcript was adopted. We could work out a system where students created portfolios, program staff verified them, and then they were essentially “locked down” for authoritativeness. This isn’t to say that the problem of cloud-based personal learning records is now “solved” for us, but it seems resolvable.
Financial Aid
My next stop was our Office of Financial Aid, another vitally important part of the university’s infrastructure. As a major public university, Michigan serves students from across the income spectrum. In a nutshell, the Office of Financial Aid works hard to make sure Michigan is affordable for all of its students. Any university in the U.S. relies on a broad variety of funding sources to help students defray the cost of tuition. The U.S. Federal government is a major source of these funds, and an important function of any university’s financial aid office is to ensure compliance with regulations about how federal aid is distributed and administered.
One of these regulations has to do with something called “satisfactory academic progress” (SAP). At Michigan, the SAP policy states that a student must maintain a cumulative GPA of at least a 1.6 at the end of the first year, up to a 2.0 at the time of graduation. In addition, at least 67% of all attempted credit hours must be completed, and the overall degree must be completed in no longer than 150% of the program’s average length. This policy is filed with the U.S. Department of Education, which then holds the university responsible for enforcing it. If the university fails to maintain compliance with this policy (and a range of other related policies), it could lose access to U.S. Federal financial aid for all students. In other words, the stakes are pretty high! In my initial conversations with this office, it was pointed out that a mastery-based program where students received only S/U grades in their courses would not allow for monitoring of GPAs, and thus cause us to be out of compliance.
There were strategies we might consider. For instance, we could assign students grades in courses but then “mask” them, allowing for background tracking of cumulative GPA. Grades would still be available on a transcript that students could use for graduate schools or employment. This is a practice used at several colleges in the U.S., for example at Reed College in Oregon. But it didn’t feel quite right to us. One reason was that LEAPS would be only one program in the wider university employing this approach, so students would know that their friends in other programs were receiving grades and might feel disadvantaged (even if they aren’t; more on this in a moment). We could look into amending the SAP policy, to create a carve out for the mastery-based approach LEAPS wanted to employ. It turns out that each institution negotiates its own policy with the Department of Education, which it is then held to. For instance, at Brown University students can take any or all of their courses with S/U grading. Brown’s SAP policy is thus built around completion of courses, not GPA. But starting the process of changing university-wide policy while trying to get everything else for LEAPS up and running doesn’t feel wise, so we have put this on the back burner for now.
Students and Parents
One of the strongest forces for maintaining the current system of grading and transcripts is of course not the institution itself, but the students in the institution (and their parents). A key aspect of infrastructure is that it both shapes and is shaped by cultural practices. In discussing LEAPS with current students and alumni, we heard many concerns about a program without grades. How would students get into graduate school? How would students receive fellowships or compete for other awards or academic honors? How would they apply to jobs without a GPA? All of these concerns are understandable, but also mostly unfounded.
This may require a longer post to dig into, but there have always been schools that eschew traditional grading, and there have always been ways for colleges, employers, and even awards competitions to recognize academic capability without grades. A recent example is the Mastery Transcript, which even in its first years of use has supported the successful application of hundreds of students to college—including highly selective colleges—without grades. The question of competitive scholarships and awards came up frequently, so to get a better handle on what is really required I spoke with the director of the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships at Michigan. He also found this question interesting, and with some exploration of requirements for different fellowships found that practically none had a required GPA element. Two of the most prestigious, Marshall and Rhodes, do have a minimum GPA, which is inherited from the minimum GPA required for admission to Oxford in the UK, showing how they too are “wound up” in systemic infrastructure. He followed up with them and learned that not only do they regularly receive applications from (and give awards to!) students from colleges with alternative grading systems, but such applicants might actually be advantaged by the richer descriptions of their learning that tend to accompany transcripts without letters grades.
The Faculty
And thus we come to our final barrier for changing traditional grading systems: the faculty itself. University faculties are inherently conservative when it comes to educational practice. They know what they are used to, and are themselves mostly graduates of programs that used standard grading and GPAs. Changing not only feels difficult, but also like valuable information about student “merit” might be lost. I won’t address the concerns about merit here, as the entire Teachers Going Gradeless blog has done an excellent job of unpacking that particular canard. But the concerns about labor are real. Teaching done well is hard work, and only part of the university faculty member’s job. Adding to that, labor is unappealing. Which brings me back to the need for better infrastructure to support better grading practice, to reduce the labor. One positive aspect of college teaching is that how we grade in our classrooms is ultimately up to each instructor. In higher education, instructors often have tremendous latitude in how we conduct our classrooms. But at the end of the semester, the systems to which we must record the end result of learning in our classrooms are much more limited. Other TG2 authors have described the process and challenges of navigating new and better assessment within the existing A-F system, an accommodation that is often needed as we seek to innovate within the strictures of the larger system. And as others have noted, it is OK to experiment with small changes leading towards a larger reimagining of the system.
The Path Forward
So where are we with LEAPS? Our current plans are to launch with a hybrid system of feedback. Most regular courses will still be graded using the A-F system, to ensure compliance with satisfactory academic progress metrics. Some of those courses might employ a mastery approach that gets translated back to a letter grade, but as noted above, that is up to individual instructor’s discretion. Other core LEAPS learning experiences, such as research or practical engagements, will be graded S/U. Students will still be accountable to the larger program-wide learning goals, which will be tracked and defended outside of regular courses. LEAPS students will take learning from all areas of their lives into account in working towards these goals, including community engagements, internships, and extracurricular experiences. And at the end of the process, LEAPS students will have two transcripts: the traditional model and a personal learning record linked to a transcript. Both will be sent to anyone who requests evidence of learning or accomplishment from students in our program. This is only the start of the conversation, not the end. As LEAPS grows and the value of student learning experiences can be demonstrated through our students’ own successes, that will provide further impetus to address the inertia of the current system. But for now, it’s a “both-and” approach that will get us off the ground.
We may desire to move to ungrading or a system of grading that differs significantly from business-as-usual in our institutions. Sometimes the institution isn’t quite ready. The Beatles received spiritual guidance for their journey from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. We might turn instead to Yogi Berra, who famously advised that, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Barry Fishman is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Learning Sciences in the Marsal Family School of Education and the School of Information at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research includes a focus on successful games as models for engaging learning environments, the creation of transformative and sustainable educational innovations using technology, and the design and implementation of new systems for supporting, recording, and reporting learning.