LATELY, students at the University of California in Santa Cruz may have been getting the feeling that they're not in the 1960s anymore. The school, located on Monterrey Bay near prime surfing waters, is not one to follow the crowd. Exhibit One: the school's choice of the banana slug as the school mascot. But the issue riling up most of the school's 11,000 students and some of the faculty, however, concerns Exhibit Two: the school's policy of not giving letter grades.
The policy has been an experiment in alternative education. Begun in the '60s, the policy uses written evaluations to judge students' work instead of letter grades. After 35 years, it is an experiment that may come to an end.
This is unfortunate. The use of evaluations reflects a focus on in-depth, comprehensive learning, because they force students to actually understand course material and be able to demonstrate their grasp of it to their professors. Letter grades, on the other hand, too often allow students to coast through classes by way of late-night cramming sessions and rote memorization. As a result, they may forget what they are actually supposed to be doing in school: thinking.
According to The Washington Post, some students and faculty at UC-Santa Cruz have begun to express concern that the current grading policy has given the school an unmerited reputation as a repository for slackers ("On California campus, an experimental era nears its end," Feb. 28). Instead of letter grades, students are given evaluations, which, ideally, are detailed reports on how well students have absorbed course material and grown as scholars.
Recently, UC-Santa Cruz's faculty senate voted to begin grading students according to the conventional letter grade scale. The process of giving evaluations will not cease, but there is concern that the letter grades will diminish the importance of evaluations, making them secondary to grades. Advocates of letter grades say that graduate schools want letter grades and don't have time to read through the 36 evaluations UC-Santa Cruz graduates present to them. According to the Post, many UC-Santa Cruz students believe that the institution of letter grades will transform the university into just another "educational assembly line," full of overly competitive, grade-grubbing students.
To anyone who has attended a conventional university -- or even high school, for that matter -- these concerns may well seem reasonable. In the competitive land of GPAs and curving, it seems that learning often can take a back seat to grades. Evidence of this phenomenon can be seen at the University.
Students today often work for grades first, knowledge second. The University is no exception, especially when it comes to big lecture courses, which are most susceptible to manifestations of grade-centric behavior. In courses of 80 or more students, especially those without required discussion sections, multiple-choice or short-answer tests are the primary way through which students' grades are calculated.
The result is that many students forsake actually learning the material. They focus instead on remembering only what will get them a reasonable grade in the course. This happens all too often, and is illustrated by the frequency of questions such as "Will this be on the test?" The implication is that if it's not, students won't bother to learn about it.
In large courses, many students often don't show up, and the only time the lecture hall is full is when a test is scheduled. The result of this mentality is that students plow through heaps of information in the few days before the exam. They learn only what the review sheet tells them is important, and don't take the time to decide for themselves. They memorize facts without fully comprehending them, just so that they can fill in the correct bubble on a multiple choice test. Critical thinking dies out and memorization takes its place.
The United States has a society focused on success, and in school grades are the measure of success. The higher a college student's grades are, the better chance he or she has of getting into a good graduate school, and the more likely it is that he or she will secure a good job. A person can then begin earning as much as possible of that other measure of American success: money. In this way, grades are a measure of future success; they are currency, to be used to buy one's way into the land of six-figure incomes.
The UC-Santa Cruz experiment is a noble one. Evaluations in lieu of grades shift students' focus from grades to the actual learning process. Ambitious students still work to get a good evaluation, but the work is different than that done for a grade. To get a good evaluation one must actually absorb and comprehend material, rather than just memorize it, regurgitate it onto a Scantron sheet, and forget it immediately afterwards.
Many students who choose to attend UC-Santa Cruz are likely those who care more about actually learning something than how they look to graduate schools. Valuing substance over appearance was part of the great 1960s' experiment. If the students of UC-Santa Cruz want to carry that concept into the next century, they should at least be allowed to try.
(Laura Sahramaa is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint writer.)
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