Harvard Law Moving to Yale-Like Honors / Pass Grading System:
According to the e-mail that I had forwarded to me (and whose authenticity I have no reason to question), Harvard would technically have four grades -- Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. My guess, though, is that Low Pass and Fail would be extremely rare, and 98%+ of all grades would be Honors or Pass, as they are at Yale. The shift then is basically from at least five commonly used grades (A, A-, B+, B, and B-, unless I'm mistaken) to two.
Stanford apparently adopted a similar proposal a few months ago.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The Psychology of Grading:
- Harvard and Stanford's Adoption of the Yale Law School Grading System:
- Thoughts on the New Grading and Honors Policies at Harvard and Stanford:
- Harvard Law Moving to Yale-Like Honors / Pass Grading System:
What ever happened to the concept of merit? Is equality of results the only goal??
Just because individual classes will be "Pass" and "Higher Pass", it does not mean that the grade distribution will solely be "4.0" vs "3.0" for graduation GPA.
Most people will have a combination of "Pass" and "High Pass" in their transcript, thus allowing you to calculate class standing for the majority inside the center of mass. It is only at the extreme top and bottom that you can't differentiate. But perhaps that's the purpose. Afterall, we don't want to hurt the self-esteem of those on the bottom :)
While I wonder about the wisdom of this move, I also wonder what the problem with online testing would be. (After all, testing's already something-like-online, since everything is submitted electronically these days.)
I think we call those "diplomas".
Hiring or begging smarter folks than yourself to take the online test, perhaps? There is no verification of the actual test taker, I presume.
Last stop: one grade. Pass. No one will ever fail, they just won't complete the course.
Not quite. The problem is that there will be a ton of people who will be able to get "H's" in basically every class. Let's say 25% of the people in each class get an H. At Columbia, 9% of the people in each class got A's, and about 17% got A-'s. That means that an H would really mean that a student got either an A or an A-. At Columbia, there was a small number of students who got A's (not A-'s) in basically every class. Those students got the best clerkships. But there was a somewhat larger number of people who got A's or A-'s in basically every class. Those people presumably did OK in the clerkship department, but not as well as the other group. Under Harvard's plan, it will be impossible to tell the two groups apart.
Volokh is right that there are theoretically "low pass" and "fail" grades at Yale, but they don't really exist in practice. From Brian Leiter, when he was a visiting prof there:
I teach at a medical school and would prefer to switch to a percent grading system (with weighting for the credit hours of each course). Identifying excellent students from barely passing students would be easy.
that was a great Leitner quote.
But this can't be right:Harvard already takes plenty of mediocre students via Affirmative Action and for similar reasons. There are lots of applicants with very high SAT scores, and 4.25 GPA's who are bypassed. Other lucky schools, including stanford, get those straight A+ students.
The next tier of schools, especially Chicago, should benefit so long as they maintain their grading systems, as some employers (like Prof. Volokh) will still prefer to see grades.