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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.

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.

To put this point positively, cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”  The same is true in “democratic classes where [students’] opinions are respected and welcomed.”[7]  

Cheating is particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial inducements for good report cards[10] -- in other words, if students are not merely rewarded for academic success, but are also rewarded for being rewarded.

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.

Summaries and Reflections

Visual Representations of Information S

When you use formative assessments, you must keep track of the data that you collect.