A large number of college students, including many at Duke, have no idea what they want to do after they graduate. Some of us (myself included) show up for our freshmen year, eagerly confident to accomplish our goals, but a few years later find ourselves confused, turned around or on a different path entirely.
So, for many of us, the courses we take in our freshman or even sophomore years ultimately make no contribution towards our degrees. We may take introductory classes from various disciplines in an attempt to figure out what majors we want to pursue, or in pursuit of majors we will later drop. We, confused little babies, simply don’t always know what we are doing.
Take me, for example. I arrived on campus determined to earn a degree in economics, silly thing that I was. I immediately set to work on the major requirements, two of which were mid-level calculus courses.
To my chagrin, I discovered that no matter how many hours I spent in the library, I could not do as well as my Advanced Placement Calculus teacher had assured me I would. Calculus was simply not a natural talent. I persisted and accepted the fact that, although my grades weren’t the best, my successfully earned credits would fuel my path to a degree. Yet, ultimately, my difficulties in my math-based classes drove me out of economics and into the humanities (where, by the way, I’m much happier and more successful—more students should consider it).
Many have noted the dangers of weed-out classes and their potential to discourage students from learning and academic exploration.
But I think these issues go even deeper—failure not only discourages students from pursuing future challenges, but it also seriously presents difficulties for them when they actually try to pursue the careers and goals they want to. In addition to providing a deterrent against academic exploration, the GPA system serves to punish students for the rest of their undergraduate careers, into their pursuit of graduate degrees, and even persists through the terrifying experience of looking for a job.
When you fail a course—heck, if you get a C—that literally stays with you for the rest of your career at Duke. Every transcript, every cumulative GPA includes that one evil letter. You literally can never escape from it—no matter how hard you try, that grade prevents you from ever achieving a GPA over a certain level. If you were to receive one F, you would never get a GPA over 3.875—even if you got an A in every single other class you ever took (that’s if you took four classes per semester like a sane person).
Your failure cannot be erased.
Where does this leave us? We have students who don’t experiment or innovate, students who didn’t get it right the first time and suffer for it and students who didn’t get it right but stick with what they’re doing because they’re too scared to try anything else.
It leaves us with students who won’t take Chinese or Arabic, despite their importance in the modern world, with humanities students who don’t venture into an introductory computer science class that they could use later in life and with Pratt-to-Trinity transfers.
What can be done about this? Well, there are some immediate solutions that come to mind. One would be dropping every student’s lowest grade. Another would be to calculate GPA based only on classes used toward majors, minors and certificates. Like Yale Law, we could make all first-year classes pass-fail.
But, of course, all of this leads to questions about the ethical implications of manipulating GPAs. If we artificially increase students’ GPA’s by dropping low grades, will we lose an incentive for students to strive for success in their courses? Would courses be graded differently? And would graduate schools adjust for the new grade inflation?
These questions have one flaw—they continue to place importance on the GPA system as a whole. We have gotten to the point where the GPA is some sort of all-powerful indication of a student’s worth or value. Even if we were to alleviate the penalties of failure, the GPA system would still place an excessive burden on students and continue to provide a major source of unnecessary stress.
This thought process, perhaps, leads to the proposal that we abolish the GPA system. Yes, this seems like a radical claim to make. But there are other schools that have chosen this path. One of our peers, Brown University, has eliminated the calculation of GPAs. In a 2004 statement, they said that the school “promotes the use of criteria for assessment and evaluation that go beyond grades and GPA.” Perhaps we should consider doing the same.
It is critical that the University consider an alternative to the current regime of the GPA. I say this not as a complaint, but out of an evaluation of the negative impact that the GPA system has had on my life, academically and emotionally.
The extreme importance that we currently place on grades is bad for our students’ wellbeing, bad for our community and bad for the production of academic material out of the University. We need to consider alternative ways to evaluate learning instead of processing students through an assembly line. And please, can we get rid of those calculus grades before I graduate?
McKenna Ganz is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.