In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, countless colleges and universities shifted from to A-F grades to a pass/fail system. As officials at Wellesley College explained, the general aim in doing so is to "support one another without being required to make judgments."
Many K-12 school districts have done the same. From Palo Alto, Calif., to Wake County, N.C., local officials have concluded that now is not the time for grades. As teachers in Wisconsin's Madison Metropolitan School District declared, "We cannot grade with equity when students' experiences learning at home will be so varied." And it's not yet clear that most schools that have made this switch will fully return to letter grades in the fall.
But not everyone is happy with this outcome.
Some parents and activists are anxious that, without grades, students won't receive adequate feedback on their work. Others worry that altering or eliminating the traditional grading scale will undermine student motivation and reward slacking off. As one Oregon parent pointedly asked in one of many online petitions pushing for the reinstatement of letter grades, "How do I explain to my child that has great grades that she should keep working hard when anything that is D- and above will still 'pass'? This is ridiculous." A similar but separate concern, expressed by ambitious students and their parents, is that without letter grades students will be at a disadvantage when competing for scholarships, college admission and merit aid.
The logistical calamities presented by the coronavirus have suddenly, and forcefully, surfaced an underlying problem frequently ignored before the crisis: A-F grades serve several different purposes, and those purposes are too often in conflict with one another. Americans may come to recognize by the end of this schooling crisis that we would all be better off without letter grades.
The original aim of grading, which can be traced back several centuries to English universities like Oxford and Cambridge, was to motivate students. As educators found, students tended to work harder if there was a brass ring for them to reach. This fact became more important in the latter half of the 19th century, as an increasing number of states made schooling compulsory.
With a new influx of reluctant pupils, many K-12 teachers were faced with a challenge even greater than keeping the average students focused: maintaining the attention of students who didn't want to be there at all. Grades, then, also became a mechanism for coercion — rewards, but also punishments, with bad grades meant to serve as a socializing source of shame.
Grades as we know them now have yet another origin, too, rooted in efforts to communicate with students and their families. Feedback, as any educator knows, is essential to learning. But as class sizes grew larger in the 19th century, American teachers were increasingly pressed for time. Looking for a shortcut, many schools developed new systems for providing feedback to students. The boldest of these physically rearranged students in the classroom — hence the phrase "head of the class." What endured, however, was the "report card," which used pre-identified codes — like numbers or letter grades — to streamline the process of evaluation.