Downgrading No-Grade

"An academic bubonic plague," says Acting Dean Harry Yamaguchi of Indiana University's graduate school. New York University Philosophy Professor Robert Gurland is less vehement. "A viable option," he says. To Boston University's Associate Dean Ernest H. Blaustein, "it was a noble experiment that just didn't work." Those three opinions summarize the growing controversy that now marks a once popular academic innovation: the replacement of traditional letter or numerical grades with simple "pass" or "fail" marking systems.

Pass/fail emerged in the late 1960s, washed in by the tide of student protest against "the System." Recalls Northwestern University Graduate School Dean Robert H. Baker: "Students all felt some years ago that it was a degrading experience to be compared with all other human beings in ability, interest and performance."

College newspaper columns of the time were filled with complaints that grading resulted in such academic horrors as "an authoritarian relationship between teacher and student" and "an undesirable reward structure" that "corrupts the educational process."

In their pell-mell and sometimes unseemly rush to ensure harmony on campus, many college administrators agreed to institute some form of pass/fail grading. By 1971 an estimated three-quarters of the nation's colleges and universities were offering alternatives to traditional marking systems. Eager to ride the professional bandwagon, a number of high schools and grade schools were quick to follow the fad.

Today the use of pass/fail grades is fading. Philip Mayerson, dean of N.Y.U.'s College of Arts and Science feels that students are using the system primarily to protect their averages; on campuses where pass/fail grades are optional (usually for one subject a semester), students often reserve them for difficult courses. Some professors are skeptical about the effect of pass/fail on motivation and learning. Says Stanford Philosophy Professor John Mothershead Jr.: "There's a great temptation for a bright student in a pass/fail course not to do any work and get away with it." Associate Registrar Philip Bain at the University of Idaho agrees. "The students say pass/fail reduces their anxiety," he says. "But our studies show it also reduces their motivation, the amount of material learned and their goals."

More Conservative. Many undergraduates are as disenchanted as their professors. At the University of Southern California, for example, only 60% of the undergraduate students take advantage of their option to be marked on a pass/fail basis. "We have students who are more conservative now," explains Boston University's Dean Blaustein. "They have had pass/fail grading in high school and grammar school, and they are tired of it. They want something to help them get to grad school."

Perhaps more than any other factor, it is the fierce competition for graduate school that has led to the move away from pass/fail marking. "If a student is really among the top 15% but does not have the grades to show that he is, you may pass over him," says

Northwestern's Baker. Indiana's Yamaguchi adds that with as many as ten individuals clamoring for every opening in some graduate fields, an applicant whose record cannot be easily assessed is at a distinct disadvantage. "It is more work evaluating a student on a pass/fail system. It takes more time. Often the student gets thrown out of the pile."

Law and medical schools, currently experiencing an unprecedented flood of applications, are particularly opposed to pass/fail. Law school admissions officers, complaining about the lack of information in a pass/fail record, judge applicants largely by their scores on the half-day-long "law board" exam. "Many schools consider college grades a more significant predictor of success in law school than the Law School Admission Test," says Associate Dean Frank Walwer of Columbia University School of Law, which this year has 4,200 applicants for 290 places, "but if you deprive law schools of that needed data, then they have to rely more on that test."

Despite its drawbacks, pass/fail is by no means dead. "It should be used, for example, when a scientist wants to take an art course," says Northwestern's Baker, who thinks a student should be able to broaden his horizons without risking poor grades in subjects in which he has interest but perhaps little aptitude. In New York, City University Professor Philip Baumel goes even farther. "Most students usually opt for pass/fail for the right reasons," he insists. But Baumel, too, has noted a trend away from the new system: "There's a move now to say, 'Let's do it the conventional way.' " Asked to grade the system in its own terms, a growing number of educators and students would now say that in practical terms, pass/fail has failed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.