Letter grades may be on the way out for some University of California departments and colleges, reports Michael Burke on EdSource.

UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and UC Davis’s Department of Mathematics are considering replacing A, B, C and D grades with pass/no-pass grades, he writes. Another option is to let students “choose which assignments get the most weight in determining their grade.”

Departments at other UC campuses are also experimenting with making changes to how they test students, putting less emphasis on high-stakes exams because some students aren’t good test takers but can demonstrate their understanding of the material in other ways.

UC adopted test-free admissions — no SAT or ACT scores — in November, extending its pandemic waivers indefinitely. Applicants’ high school grades count, but there’s no way to assess the level of grade inflation.

Faculty want to give first-year students time to adjust to college-level work, writes Burke.

A recent UC Board of Regents memo noted that a student from an under-resourced high school “may perform poorly on initial assignments.” As they learn the material over the course of the term, the student may ultimately ace the final exam yet still end up with a below average grade because of those early assignments.

UC-Irvine is looking at MIT’s “ramp-up grading” for first-year students, which lets students who don’t pass a course remove it from their transcript.

At UC Davis, math professors are considering “contract grading,” reports Burke. For example, a student could choose to have the final calculus grade determined primarily by exams or by problem sets and class participation.

A biology class at Davis “uses two-stage exams,” Burke writes. “After taking a traditional test, students work together in groups to solve questions that are the same or similar to the exam questions.”

Not all students demonstrate their knowledge the same way, said Rachel Kennison, executive director of UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation & Learning in the Sciences.

Other options for assessing students include allowing them to use their notes on tests or assigning projects instead of exams. Oftentimes, Kennison said, classes that rely too heavily on final exams are measuring students’ ability to memorize things and “spit it back out” under pressure, something she said doesn’t necessarily measure a student’s mastery of the material.

. . . (Students) “need multiple modes of learning and multiple modes of being assessed,” Kennison said. “Ideally you are giving . . . lots of different opportunities for them to assess their own learning right in low stakes ways. You still can have a final exam, but it doesn’t necessarily have to have that high stakes, high pressure.”

They’re going to assess their own learning? (I remember a Psych 1 professor at Stanford, many years ago, who told students to grade themselves. There were a lot of A’s.)

UC probably can get away with pass/no credit for first-year students, but the university system can’t abandon traditional measures of academic competence entirely without degrading the value of a UC degree. Most employers will be reluctant to hire someone who can’t work under pressure.