The impetus for modifying or eliminating the A-F grading system has come primarily from students. Faculty reaction has been more one of bowing to pressure than that of a carefully considered response. Arguments for and against the traditional grading systems each have merit. It seems illogical, however, to repeat on the graduate level a grading…

A questionnaire on the pass-fail grading system was sent to the 276 deans whose institutions belong to the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States. Of the 230 deans who responded, 214 preferred to evaluate a student for admission to graduate or professional study on the basis of a letter graded transcript, 7 preferred a pass-fail…

Discusses the benefits of a "Pass/Revise" grading system. (DD)

Author suggests that undergraduate colleges and universities should seriously consider the consequences before expanding the use of satisfactory- unsatisfactory grading systems. (Editor)

Cautions are listed following an examination of the difficulties inherent in the teacher's task of student evaluation and distribution of grades on specific testing devices. (JS)

Exploring student test, homework, and other assessment scores is a challenge for most teachers, especially when attempting to identify cross-assessment weaknesses and produce final course grades. During the course, teachers need to identify subject weaknesses in order to help students who are struggling with a particular topic. This identification…

The author examines the reluctance of most American colleges and universities to address grade inflation. In addressing the problem of grade inflation, the author describes two proposals he made to his faculty's Educational Planning Committee. The first, presented in spring 2002, proposed that two new items be added to each course listed on…

Many professors do not give much thought to what students take away from their syllabi. Researchers who have formally pondered the question suggest a number of areas for instructors to consider when drafting a document which is described as a contract drafted with "less attention paid to the language" than any other. In a comparison of syllabi…

Letter grades should be abolished in favor of personalized and detailed evaluations of each student. (CK)

An application of conversational programming is described by means of which an instructor may use the computer for the calculation of course grades for a class of up to 100 students in a course with up to 10 components of varying weights. (Author)

After examining some of the pros and cons of traditional grading, the demands colleges make on grading practices, and the responses of people interested in grading, a number of examples of operating alternative systems are given. The alternatives include a dual (pass/withdraw grading in some courses, traditional grading in others) system, a…

This paper presents a grade 10 mathematics teacher's in-depth description of the process she uses to determine the final grade for the report card within a standards-based context. Her case was part of a three-year comparative study of grading practices of teachers from two Canadian provinces that differ in their level of standardization of…

Students at the University of Edinburgh do almost all their work on computers, but at the end of the semester they are examined by handwritten essays. Intuitively it would be appealing to allow students the choice of handwriting or typing, but this raises a concern that perhaps this might not be "fair"--that the choice a student makes,…