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“dynamic systems approach, [which] starts by assuming individuals vary, and seeks to identify stable patterns within that variability”. This, of course, requires rather different training and analytical tools.

In order to rise to this challenge, Rose believes that universities need to stop offering “a batch process” and cater far more flexibly to what real individual students (rather than idealised average students)

Institutions should switch their focus from “grades” to “competency”, partly determined by employers and professional associations, so that students acquire the job-related skills they require and employers become stakeholders in the university system.

Parks, the university’s registrar, says this allowed the university to “deepen and expand” the experiences on the transcripts, capture more data and clean up a lot of the data that existed in the system.

“Fewer and fewer places are requesting the academic transcript, they’re really only used for graduate school,” Parks says. “So our thought process was, let’s make a transcript more meaningful.”

One of the things Elon noticed was that its African American male students didn’t become as engaged in the five co-curricular experiences Elon tracks (which are leadership, service, internships, global engagement and undergraduate research) until their third year at Elon, compared to their white peers who got involved in similar activities sooner.

high achievers are just as likely to do it as others.

A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.

The solution, he said, hinged on work faculty members did to “deconstruct” traditional courses. They mapped the learning outcomes from those three-credit offerings to competencies in the new online programs.

tudents who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework. 

One, students, teachers, parents, and administrators expect me to, and when I don’t I am labeled an “easy” teacher, viewed as less serious or rigorous than my colleagues. Parents may rage about the veritable avalanche of homework that threatens to suffocate their children, but in my experience, parents also view that avalanche as a badge of honor, evidence of academic rigor.

I tried to picture a school year in which I shoehorn all of this work in to class time. I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.

1800 AD. Then came William Farish

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Grades didn't give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.

Grading of any sort is a relatively modern innovation. Yale may have been the first university in the United States to issue grades, with students in 1785 receiving the Latin equivalents of best, worse, and worst. Prior to that time, U.S. colleges employed the Oxford and Cambridge model, in which students attended regular lectures and engaged in a weekly colloquy with their proctor, in writing and in person.

It's no coincidence that a single system was in place by the early 20th century. Schools at the time were bursting at the seams, given the sudden increases in immigration and the rise of compulsory attendance laws.

This policy provides first-year students with the opportunity to learn about the standards for academic achievement at Wellesley and to assess the quality of their work in relation to these standards. It further enables them to use their first semester to focus on intellectual engagement and inspiration and to learn how to grow as a learner in college.

Sound liberating? That’s the idea. “When grades become the object of learning rather than learning itself, students are engaged in a form of goal displacement,” Professor of Sociology Lee Cuba t

the more time students spend thinking about getting an A, the less time they’re spending thinking about what they’re really learning.

The authors attribute today’s inflation to the consumerization of higher education.

And indeed, some universities have explicitly lifted their grading curves (sometimes retroactively) to make graduates more competitive in the job market, leading to a sort of grade inflation arms race.