In my post on feedback, I mentioned that there's a complicated conversation around grades at Olin. We talk a lot about intrinsic motivation and so want to minimize focus on single number or letter, and as a community we tend to favor detailed feedback over just giving a grade. But in almost all classes, professors do still have to give out grades at the end.
One of the most common complaints is about clarity in grades. A few professors give out syllabi with specific weights attached to various types of assignments such that you can calculate your grade at pretty much any point. Even when the syllabus specifies such a thing, it's not always the case that the number you calculate corresponds in a normal way to your grade. If a professor gives quizzes expecting students who understand the key points of the material to get 7 or 8 out of 10 (and I've NINJAed an Olin class in which this was the case), then a 70 quiz average isn't a C-. But more commonly, this kind of weighting isn't specified in enough detail to really be useful for knowing your grade. If a project-based class says that the first project is worth 65% of the grade and the second project is worth 35%, that doesn't tell you anything about how the individual design reviews or deliverables contribute. So a lot of people come out with only a rough idea of what their grades will be. Design classes -- UOCD in particular -- are especially notorious for this.
There's pressure at Olin to not care about grades because of the focus we put on learning by doing and on intrinsic motivation. But this pressure is strange in that people tend to feel like they're in a small group that cares about grades or needs to care (for something like large corporate internships or going to grad school), when in fact I'm quite sure that this group isn't small. It might technically be a minority, but if it is, it's a sizable one. Grades are, ideally, accessible documentation of a student's knowledge or capabilities in the areas the student has studied. It makes sense that someone external to the college would use grades or GPA as some part of evaluating a student. Lots of Oliners have future plans that will involve that type of external evaluation, so a lot of care to some extent about our grades.
Internally, there's agreement that numerical or letter grades alone aren't useful feedback for students and that they're a very coarse tool for conveying student learning, coarser than lots of professors and students here would like. So we give more detailed forms of feedback throughout courses (sometimes with numerical grades of some kind, sometimes not) and hope that's enough to give students a sense of how they're doing and whether they're progressing at the pace expected. If the feedback does a good job of representing those things, then a grade shouldn't be a surprise at the end.
But this intermediate feedback has to do more than one job. It is often meant to help a student move forward. Feedback from a design review is not simply about assessment; it's also about future direction of the project. "You've done a lot of work thinking about option A, but I think you should pivot to option B that you briefly mentioned because (reasons here)" is good design review feedback, but it's not really assessment feedback. Then there is feedback that is both useful for assessment and for moving forward; for example, "You're not considering this key aspect that we discussed in class." A team in this situation might get a low numerical grade for that design review, but if they begin addressing that aspect well, their next design review might be much stronger, and it seems like heeding feedback and making improvement should be rewarded. For one of the classes I NINJAed this semester, the teaching team sat down together at the end of the semester, and we went through our impressions of the students, their work, and their improvement. Improvement factored into final grades.
Recently, some students who strongly believe that grades don't align with Olin's values or their values have chosen to write reflections on their courses when the semester ends as opposed to looking at their grades. They don't apply to jobs that require entering a GPA. Other students may simply not care about their grades as long as they're engaged in their classes and projects, and they prioritize the classes and projects they enjoy most as much as possible.
But some students -- lots of students -- have goals which do not allow this level of not caring about the final number or letter. Because of the culture around intrinsic motivation, though, it's often discouraged for students to ask about grades. In classes where the system for determining grades is not really set until the end of the semester, it's a difficult question for professors to answer. Professors often say, "You're doing fine," but that's a frustrating answer for students to get; that can mean any number of things. The next question (in many ways the more useful one) is "How can I do better?" In classes that are already giving a lot of process-related feedback, this might not be too hard for a student and professor to work out. In a class where the feedback is a bit more traditional (say, pointing out where a student went wrong on a particular problem or what was missing from a detailed drawing), figuring out what steps a student can take to improve can be a lot more tricky. If the student is doing "fine" enough, then this question may end up unanswered because other things are more important and take more time.
The problem is really a clash between what Olin values and the system within which we're operating. This is something that's been a conversation at Olin since the beginning, and I don't think it's going away soon because I don't see a good answer. People have proposed more complicated/detailed grading or final feedback systems, but that takes a lot of time, and everyone has a significant load already. I think the best step would be to decrease the stigma around caring about grades and to help students find a healthy place where they can care about grades but also be more focused on learning and the things that excite them.
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