College students at Keene State College can tell you all about the pressure grades put on their lives. You need to maintain a certain GPA in order to complete college, enter graduate school, keep a scholarship, and to get a decent job.
It is obvious that a high GPA is important for a lot of things, so it is understandable that students face a lot of pressure to get good grades. But what if traditional grading was eliminated and a pass/fail system was implemented instead?
Any college student can tell you that studying for classes can be stressful. But if classes were graded on a pass/fail system, a lot of that stress would disappear.
Students would no longer need to worry about the possibility of getting a grade that could negatively affect their GPA. Students could instead focus on enjoying classes and worry less about studying.
If courses were pass/fail, it would encourage students to take more difficult classes. Students who are worried about their grades might avoid harder classes simply because they do not want to risk deflating their GPA.
In a pass/fail system, students would feel welcome to take courses they are interested in, even if they are unsure of their ability to excel in the class.
Pass/fail would be especially useful for subjective courses like English or politics; different professors have different opinions, and students have different writing styles.
As such, it is almost impossible to write a perfect opinion-based paper, like one you might write in an English or politics class. Having the option of either passing or failing a student accounts for these differences in teaching and learning.
While there are many benefits of pass/fail grading, there is one thing that letter grading has going for it. One of the best things about our current grading system is that it allows comparison of students.
With a letter grading system, employers and graduate schools have an easy way of comparing the academic achievements of multiple applicants. If a pass/fail system was implemented, then how would students be evaluated?
In a pass/fail system, instructor recommendations and standardized tests could be used to replace grades as a method of evaluation.
These are already needed for admission to graduate school, so why not use them more rigorously in the process of evaluation? Instructor recommendations and standardized tests would also ultimately serve as incentives to do good work.
While students would not need to stress about grades, they would still have an incentive to do good work if they wanted to do well on standardized tests or get good teacher recommendations.
Filip Duz can be contacted at
fduz@ksc.mailcruiser.com