A college that has never had grades recounts some history of Hampshire College, which was founded on the premise of experimentation and encouraging students to define their own path. At one point in Hampshire’s history, students, faculty, and administrators experimented with adding “distinction” to the pass/fail designation for the three assessments required for their students to graduate (one for each “division”). Digging into the motivation behind this debate, it seems motivated in large part by seeming sensible to the “outside” world, a feeling that the author challenges:
The feeling that we need to assess students in ways that seem intelligible to people “outside” – outside of our classrooms, our colleges, our pedagogical desires – seems omnipresent and vexing. How do we explain our grading and structural innovations when we live and work in social contexts deeply invested in requiring us to maintain rankings and hierarchies? What do we do about equity and the question of how “the world” might see graduates who cannot list GPAs and “cum laude” distinctions on their resumés? How do we disentangle the dichotomies that keep us stuck, where, for example, a place like Hampshire is “an experiment” and other schools are not experimental?