Studying in the US: Grading Grades

Posted by thanhlt

February 26, 2010

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

This
week in our Foreign Student Series the subject is grades.

Most American colleges and universities use
the grading system of A, B, C, D and F. An A is worth four points, a B three
points, a C two points and a D one point. Getting a grade like a B-plus or a
C-minus adds or subtracts a few tenths of a point. An F is a failing grade
worth zero toward a student’s grade point average.

Students at Evergreen State College in Washington state

A small number of colleges — perhaps about
twenty nationally — reject the traditional grading system. The Evergreen State
College, for example, was established in nineteen sixty-seven and has never
used letter or number grades. Evergreen State
is a public four-year college in the northwestern city of Olympia,
Washington. It has more than four thousand students, including twenty-six
international students currently.

Evergreen State is organized into programs
taught by teams of professors. Each program brings together different subjects
and extends in length over two or three quarters. Students are required to do a
major research project at the end of each program.

The professors write detailed
evaluations of the students. These are combined with evaluations written by the
students themselves. Students also meet with their professors to discuss their
work.

The
director of admissions, Doug Scrima, says employers and graduate
schools like these evaluations, called narratives. He says they show more about
the quality of students’ work than traditional grades do.

Most
teachers would probably agree that traditional grades are sometimes unfair. But
professors at big schools say there is not enough time to write evaluations for
each student in large classes. Some classes have hundreds of students.

Alverno
College in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, is a small women’s school that does not use grades. Kathleen O’Brien
is the chief academic officer. She says letter grades do not effectively document
learning or provide good direction to students. She says even at big schools
there are classes small enough to give evaluations. But she says the American
university system is not organized to accept this kind of change.

We will talk more about
grades next week. But first, let us know how you feel about grades. You can
submit comments on this story and find earlier reports in our Foreign Student
Series at voaspecialenglish.com.

And
that’s the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach.
I’m Steve Ember.