I really relate to your post. Grades always seem to be like something hovering over you at all times and rather than being motivated to learn, we are motivated to get good grades. This is how we have students who have 4.0 GPAs but do not understand the basics of their field.

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I definitely agree a lot with your post! Like you, when I did poorly on an exam, I was motivate to do better because I was scared of failure, not because I wanted to learn. I agree with Sneha in that classes should have some sort of project at the end in which students can apply the material they’ve learned. In the classes where we’ve had projects instead of exams, I’ve had a much better experience.

I really appreciated this line in your post: “…students are intrinsically trained to view education in a means-ends relationship.” This is both very true and very upsetting. We should value school as a way to receive an education and learn about various topics, but instead we see it only as a path to get to the career we want and don’t fully appreciate what we are experiencing during school.

I really appreciated this line in your post: “…students are intrinsically trained to view education in a means-ends relationship.” This is both very true and very upsetting. We should value school as a way to receive an education and learn about various topics, but instead we see it only as a path to get to the career we want and don’t fully appreciate what we are experiencing during school.

Great idea of the final grads. In my opinion, the final grads will not only rely on the professor and educator comments. All the classmates also have the opportunities to give any feedback and scores. But it is a little bit complex running in real.

Great post! I have recently written about this myself, comparing and contrasting the US and UK (my own) systems. This problem is largely avoided in the UK because there are no electives. My undergraduate degree was in zoology, so I didn’t even take classes in other fields of biology (botany, biochemistry, etc.). I would’ve killed to take some classes outside of my field, perhaps classics or art history, but it wasn’t an option. So the UK system is too specialized. The US system in contrast errs in the other direction: too diffuse. Undergraduates have to take so many classes outside of their field that 1) an extra year is required in both undergraduate and masters degrees compared with the UK to catch up, and 2) some undergraduates do not have time for an independent research project, arguably the most important component of a science education.
I think the solution is a halfway house. Undergrads should be free (and encouraged) to explore classes outside of their discipline, but they should only be able to take them as pass/fail perhaps, or just as an audit.

Your beginning statement about never reading the missions statement of your university made me think–neither have I and I don’t know anyone who has. But I also feel that I am a great fit at my university and share not only the universities values but my department and my individual professors values as well. When I have talked about students who have transferred schools because they weren’t a good fit, I don’t know if them reading the statement before they accepted or even before they applied would have made a difference. Unless you visit a school and talk to the professors, faculty, and students, the actual differences among schools isn’t always obvious. Even the missions statements we read in class often referenced the same things. Although I do think missions statements are important, I wonder who exactly this statement is written for.

Tough questions! No easy answers I fear.
I shall address just the one: How to get rid of grades?
We can only do this if we have all potential employers on board. As long as hiring processes still use grades/qualifications to rank applications, we don’t stand a hope in hell of changing anything. My radical solution would be to put grades in the same category as Age, Sex, Religion, etc. and make it illegal to discriminate against. Ideally it wouldn’t even be visible on the resume or job application. Similar to what they are doing with names (no names on CVs) to remove any implicit bias.
Unlikely to happen, but it would work!

Thanks for reading. I agree. Whenever you run into the student with 8 first-author papers including one in Nature paper and you’re sitting on two low rent pubs, it is hard to take yourself seriously. Especially when you hear statistics about how each R1 TT job gets 300 applications and only a tiny fraction of PhDs ever get a job in academia at any level. Why even bother?

I heard one piece of advice that may counter this. I’ve gotten it from several people that I trust. They claim that when trying to finish a PhD, one quality is invaluable. It isn’t raw intelligence, or even hard work, but rather, persistence.

GPA always matters a lot when the students apply for a job or try to get in graduate school. I have some thoughts about this. One student with 3.9 but no research experience VS. another with 2.9 and abundant research experience from several projects. If I am a member of the application committee, I might choose the 2.9 GPA one since I believe he/she would make a great researcher.

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