Collegiate Times

The Association of American Colleges and Universities, which represents more than 1,150 accredited colleges and universities, including Virginia Tech, held its annual meeting on Jan. 21 to discuss the use of grades in higher education.

The hypothetical new system discussed, which would replace traditional grades, would require teachers to report on their students' progress through narrative evaluations that would encompass all aspects of the students' work and development throughout the semester.

The transition away from grades would not be a new one, as there are already schools that rely on narrative evaluations as a means of reporting on a students' progress.

New Hampshire College in Massachusetts is a small liberal arts school that has a student body of around 1,400 students. The school has been using narrative evaluations as a method to evaluate students since the university's inception in 1970.

Roberta Stuart, the director of central record at New Hampshire College, said evaluations "replace grades entirely; the faculty feels strongly that evaluations are more informative than grades."

These narratives reports are designed to encompass the entire body of the students' work and "give the outside world an idea of what the work of the student is like," Stuart said.

The faculty of New College of Florida, a liberal arts college with a student body half the size of New Hampshire College, feels very strongly about their student evaluation system's ability to determine an individual's progress.

New College assigns its students traditional assignments such as tests or quizzes, but these do not receive a letter grade. Instead, all the assignments add up to an individual merit of evaluation about the student's progress in the course. Suzanne L. Janney, special assistant to the president, said, "The evaluations give students a lot of insight into their own performance."

"The students know where their areas of strength and weaknesses are," Janney said. Evaluations aren't "something you'd get from traditional grades."

The evaluation system at both New College and New Hampshire College may benefit from the relatively small size of their student bodies. Stuart added that any individual student, by the time they leave the school, could have a transcript that is easily over 20 pages. At New College, the majority of classes have only 10 to 19 students, whereas Virginia Tech regularly has classes composed of 100 or more students.

The lack of traditional grades may be a cause for concern for students who are on scholarships that require a student maintain a specific GPA. However, Stuart insisted, "There are a very few scholarships for which students are not eligible." By working closely with scholarship committees, New Hampshire College is able to ensure that very few students are rejected for the absence of a GPA.

According to Tara Young of the Department of Education, as long as a student meets the satisfactory standard of progress that is set by the school they attend -- whether it involves assigning grades or not -- they are still eligible to receive federal financial aid.

Mike Ellerbrock, professor of agricultural and applied economics at Virginia Tech, questions what grades are in fact capable of telling us about students' progress.

"They are an approximate measure at best," Ellerbrock said.

He also noted that for a system like the one in place at New College to work at Tech, would depend on "how much energy a professor is willing to put into exercises of grading and getting to know his or her students."

Richard Oderwald, the associate dean for the college of natural resources, likes the idea behind being able to individually evaluate a student in that manner, but said that it is "difficult just assigning grades (to that many people)."

"Some of the classes are 600 students. It would be difficult to know students well enough to do that; consistency would be a problem from year to year, or class to class," Oderwald said.

Craig Brians, an associate professor of political science at Tech, went a step further than his colleagues.

"I don't see this (evaluations) realistically working out for any class (at Tech)," he said.

Brians also questioned whether the teachers at Tech with larger class sizes would be up to the task of writing an evaluation for every student.

"If you are teaching 150 to 200 students a year, can you really write a three-page description on each student?" Brians said. "If a student wants to know in my class beyond grades, they can come and chat with me any time."