By Matthew Wright (Written in May 2020)

Spring 2020 was a semester I am sure all of us in higher education would prefer to forget.  Like many of us New Yorkers, I got sick – along with my immediate family. We are still wiping down our groceries. I carry Lysol with me when I walk to the mailbox. Three weeks later, I am still exhausted from teaching while sick.  

Now, as the curve flattens out, there are so many different things we need to reevaluate, redefine, and reconstruct.  So let’s start rethinking the one aspect of the college experience that could have one of the biggest impacts: the tradition of grades. 

Let’s unpack what the crap a grade means in a world undergoing the Covid-19 pandemic.  

For starters, I am very excited that we are finally discussing this issue openly.  As chair of my physics department at Adelphi University, I regularly attend physics education conferences, and I have yet to walk into a session about grades.  (Of course it is possible I just missed it.)  Here are few of my observations:

Once grades were posted this semester, there seemed to be a lot of students who achieved straight A’s.  Does this take away from the fact that an individual student received straight A’s?  How will this effect these students in the coming years? And what about the students who didn’t get straight A’s?  Maybe they had a difficult professor who kept the same standards even as students were afraid, sick, etc.  It seems as if the social contract of what a grade means was broken.  

Was an A last semester hard-earned? Handed out to as a reward? A consolation prize? Who knows? And are grades from the pandemic semesters going to get an asterisk*, just like baseball’s notorious, steroid-using home-run hitters? 

The current grading system is highly emotional and has real impact on students’ lives.  Grades are gatekeepers.  Graduate programs and medical schools will have GPA minimums that interested students must achieve in order to make it – if students have a low GPA, no matter how qualified they are, they become instantly disqualified.  One tough semester will derail a lifelong dream.  I can think of several students who suffered severe emotional and financial consequences because a single grade eliminated their scholarship support.  Fair? I suppose so.  But ethical, in the long run? I wonder. 

Students will often shy away from courses where they may not have a guaranteed chance at an A.  Then the coronavirus comes along and shakes everything up.  While many colleges and universities have provided a Pass/Fail (or No Credit) option, how is a medical school going to evaluate a grade from this time in three years, when the pandemic is a memory? As soon as I asked the question about straight A’s, Katherine Gifford, an Adelphi physics major,  fired back at me: 

Do you think people will look at this semester as tainted? …  I am not sure if that’s fair or not …  Because, sure, you could take Incomplete or Pass/Fail, but if you are really, really sick or caring for family, or working because your family needs you to, etc., you might not know about these options, because you frankly don’t have the time.  I also think it will suck for people who really had a crap hand this semester (they were sick/family sick/lost people/moved home to bad situations/food insecure), but still managed to get everything done, their A means more …  Do we just say “life is unfair, get used to it” or do we view it with greater compassion and understanding? …

All great questions that I don’t have the answers to. 

One faculty member brought up another issue. “In the long run (as you and I know) grades don’t mean much. How often do employers ask, “What grade did you get in your Electromagnetic Theory class?”  As a 44-year-old professional, I am never asked what my college GPA was.  However, the additional loans someone might have to take out because they lost a scholarship is real, and they collect interest every year. Is this equitable for our lower-income students?

My daughter in elementary school receives more thoughtful grades than my students in college do.  When I pick up my daughter’s school report card, she is evaluated on what seem like hundreds of different categories.  I know not only how she was doing in math; I know how successful she was in different types of math.  For our college students, we get only a single score for a grade. I would much rather hire a hard-working B student than a lazy B student.  But ultimately they are both B students.  Why don’t we have more information? We need to rewrite the social contract on grades.

While working as a management consultant, I was blessed to be put on an exciting project with some amazing people.  We devised a system of metrics that clients could use to evaluate their effectiveness as a company. The metrics were “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” — a favorite management consultant saying.  As a physicist, I think of it as an orthogonal and complete set.  

That is what we need in higher education:  a system of measurements that allows the student, the university and the community get a deeper understanding of how each student is approaching class work.  

Personally, I have been moving more toward standards-based grading in my classes. But this system also misses some of the pieces a true assessment has.  I think moving away from a single metric for classroom assessment is necessary.

It’s a scary and uncertain time, and change is going to happen across the board in higher education over the next two years.  The COVID-19 pandemic has made sure of that.  So let’s use this as an opportunity to cure the grading system — and start evaluating students’ performance respectfully, honestly and fairly.