SANTA CRUZ — The first step on the road to obtaining a coveted Bachelor of Science degree can be laden with potholes: supersized classes, difficult material and rigorous grading.
“You’re like a student ID number,” said UC Santa Cruz student Sylvane Vaccarino-Ruiz, recalling his Psych 100 course. “They packed over 100 students into that class, and I just remember feeling: How am I supposed to learn these things? Or have my ideas considered?”
Dubbed “weed-out” or “gatekeeper” classes, they can be dream-crushing for many students — especially those hoping to enter the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. And a growing body of research says the courses can be particularly discriminatory toward historically excluded groups such as Latinos and Black and Indigenous people.
One possible remedy, some educators say, is “ungrading,” a style of teaching and assessment that seeks to evaluate students in other ways besides A-F letter grades — usually just in their freshman year.
“You’re trying to move the focus from a score to the learning,” said Robin Dunkin, who teaches biology and is the assistant faculty director at UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. “For that reason, it’s immensely powerful.”
In recent years, world-class universities from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Johns Hopkins University to Brown University have been experimenting with various ways to reduce the stress of the first year of college and make the grading system fairer for students who didn’t graduate from prestigious high schools.
That experimentation got a big boost last March in a report written by the University of California Office of the President. The report, sent to UC regents, concluded that traditional grading practices “may perpetuate bias and inequities” against economically disadvantaged students and those who are the first in their families to attend college.
UC Santa Cruz serves as a perfect microcosm to explore the pros and cons of ungrading. When the campus opened in the counterculture ’60s, it pioneered written evaluations from teachers in lieu of grades.
The students’ transcripts simply indicated that they had either passed or failed a course.
“It wasn’t just that we didn’t have grades and everybody got a pass or fail. It’s that they got substantive feedback,” recalled Jody Greene, the founding director of the innovations center. Greene and other educators say that kind of assessment is critical to teaching students how to learn, particularly in their first year of college.
Vaccarino-Ruiz ended up taking Professor Barbara Rogoff’s cultural psychology undergraduate course in 2016, which featured mostly narrative evaluations instead of grades. Unlike in other large introductory courses, Vaccarino-Ruiz said, he “felt valued as a young scholar,” an experience that ultimately inspired him to go to graduate school.
Now a doctoral candidate at UCSC, Vaccarino-Ruiz teaches a section of Rogoff’s class and uses narrative evaluations himself.
UCSC began dismantling its original evaluation system in 1997, when students were given the option of receiving letter grades. And three years later, the faculty voted overwhelmingly to make letter grades mandatory for all undergraduates in at least three-quarters of their classes.
Now that the campus is starting preliminary conversations about the return of narrative evaluations for freshmen, the feasibility of the approach remains a concern, especially in the STEM fields.
Glenn Millhauser, the chemistry department chair at UCSC, said the written evaluations were abandoned because they were “becoming a problem both in terms of their enormous staff resources that had to go into that system.” Additionally, he said, professors heard from graduate and medical schools “that they did not like the narrative presentation and that they wanted to see something more succinct — basically a letter grade.”
Dunkin acknowledges that the large size of her introductory biology courses made it extremely hard for her to use written evaluations.
“It became untenable for me to give the kind of narrative evaluation that’s useful to 300 students,” she said. “It’s just not physically possible to do that and also sleep.”
Still, she and other ungrading supporters argue that it’s time to re-evaluate how universities are teaching students. They point to a groundbreaking study released in September that concluded that a grade of C or lower in an introductory STEM class such as chemistry or calculus was more likely to negatively impact female students and those from underrepresented minority groups seeking a science degree, compared with white male students with similar educational backgrounds.
The study, led by Penn State researchers, examined nearly 110,000 student records from six large public universities from 2005 to 2018.
The average white male student who received a C or better grade in a STEM course went to complete his intended major 48% of the time, but for a female student from an underrepresented minority group, the likelihood dropped to 35%, the study said.
“These (STEM) fields are built on exclusion,” said Theresa Hice-Fromille, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UCSC. Rather than emphasizing individual progress, she said, grades often shift the focus to how students are measuring up to each other in class.
Vaccarino-Ruiz agreed, saying that one bad grade can be detrimental to a student’s overall score in the class, fueling the idea that “you need to be perfect to be competitive,” he said.
People of color, first-generation students, women and neurodiverse students are “ill served by competition being the main standard for learning,” Vaccarino-Ruiz said. “I feel like that’s an equity problem.”
At a “Decompress Fest” at UCSC’S Kresge College and at the Science and Engineering Library in advance of finals week in December, STEM students interviewed said there was no doubt “weed-out” culture at the university was alive and well.
Ryan Cheung, a UCSC senior who is studying ecology and evolutionary biology, said he thinks having some form of ungrading for freshmen would make the assessment system fairer and reduce stress and dropout rates.
“A lot of people in their first year fail classes because they don’t know what’s going on,” Cheung said. But he added that the university must make sure that any new methods adopted foster a thorough understanding of course content — and not just make classes easier.
The first year of college, ungrading supporters say, may also be the ideal place to resurrect narrative evaluations instead of grades because freshman grades are often weighed less heavily by graduate and medical schools.
“What’s going to be more important will be how (students) perform in upper-level science courses,” said Geoffrey Young, a senior director at the Association of American Medical Colleges who has served on several medical school admissions committees. What matters “is that someone’s experience in their transcript demonstrates that they have the needed competencies necessary to be a good physician.”
Advocates of ungrading say if it’s done right, it will shift the focus back to learning and away from grades in a way that helps students adjust to the rigor of college regardless of their educational background.
“It’s tremendously powerful for an instructor to stand up on the first day of class and say, ‘I’m interested in your learning. How are you going to meet me in this conversation about learning?’ ” Dunkin said. “That’s very different than standing up and saying, ‘Some amount of you are not going to make it through this class.’ ’’
