Universities Look To Ditch Grading System In The Name Of Equality

We have officially lowered the bar in society to a dangerous level – higher education will be nothing more than an expensive piece of paper, if Universities manage to implement having no grading system for their students, in the name of equality.

California (of course) is the worst of the bunch and is giving students simple pass or no pass grades instead of having a grading system of A to F – which makes sense, there is a stark difference between a student who passes with an A average and a student that passes with a C average.

But because some students are not able to pass unless the entire school is handicapped, they are doing away with the traditional grading system.

“Inside some University of California academic departments and colleges, an atypical idea is gaining steam: deemphasizing, or even ditching, the A-F grading system and rethinking how to assess student learning,” KQED reported last week.

“Divisions like UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and UC Davis’s Department of Mathematics are deliberating whether to change how they grade students. In some cases, which means awarding students a pass or no-pass grade rather than a letter grade,” the report continued. “Other times, it may mean allowing students to choose which assignments get the most weight in determining their grade.”

Natural News reported:

Academic Senate leaders at UC Irvine, for instance, are presently analyzing long-term options regarding grading, having also met with officials at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where students already do not receive letter grades but rather are judged ‘pass-fail’ for their first semester, in order to learn about that university’s system.

Meanwhile, other UC campus departments are also tinkering with changes in how students are tested and assessed, putting less focus on “high-stakes exams” because some students may not be good test-takers (but then they’re expected to perform in high-stress real-life work situations?) but can supposedly demonstrate a commanding knowledge of the materials in other ways.

Some of the university system’s departments are already using what are known as two-stage exams: Students are required to take a standard individual test before taking another with a group where they are expected to work through problems with other students.

“The changes are especially being considered for first-year students to give them more time to get used to the rigors of college work and learn the material over the course of a semester rather than discourage them early on with low scores on tests and other assignments,” KQED reported.

The associate vice provost of teaching and learning at UC Santa Cruz Jody Green, is a fan of the changes and argued that letter grades (which public schools and colleges have used for more than a century) are not always indicative of whether a student has a commanding grasp of materials.

Green said that grades simply indicate whether a student is prepared for college-level work and a recent memo from the UC Board of Regents said that students from poorly resourced high schools “may perform poorly on initial assignments,” but it raises the question as to how they were accepted at the University in the first place.

“We will be better institutions for this,” Greene, who is also the founding director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning, told the outlet. “The changes that were happening in higher education at a glacial pace were put on a bullet train by COVID, and as painful as the last couple of years have been, we’re now having genuine conversations about how we can better serve the students.”

So, the lowering of standards will continue, “higher education” is already a joke when you consider the radical professors that work in those establishments, and it is about to get worse.