Supporters say ‘ungrading’ could result in less stress and a more level playing field for students from less rigorous high schools
SANTA CRUZ — The first step on the road to obtaining a coveted Bachelor of Science degree can be laden with potholes: supersized classes, difficult material and rigorous grading.
“You’re trying to move the focus from a score to the learning,” said Robin Dunkin, who teaches biology and is the assistant faculty director at UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. “For that reason, it’s immensely powerful.” Annabel Morrison, a biology pre-med major, studies in the Science and Engineering Library at University of California Santa Cruz Monday, Dec. 5, 2022, in Santa Cruz, Calif. Prior to the year 2000, UCSC did not offer letter grades. Now the university is re-evaluating. Preoccupation with getting good grades can create high stress and anxiety – and reduce learning, advocates say.
Vaccarino-Ruiz ended up taking Professor Barbara Rogoff’s cultural psychology undergraduate course in 2016, which featured mostly narrative evaluations instead of grades. Unlike in other large introductory courses, Vaccarino-Ruiz said, he “felt valued as a young scholar,” an experience that ultimately inspired him to go to graduate school.
Glenn Millhauser, the chemistry department chair at UCSC, said the written evaluations were abandoned because they were “becoming a problem both in terms of their enormous staff resources that had to go into that system.” Additionally, he said, professors heard from graduate and medical schools “that they did not like the narrative presentation and that they wanted to see something more succinct — basically a letter grade.
The study, led by Penn State researchers, examined nearly 110,000 student records from six large public universities from 2005 to 2018.
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