Alternatives to the GPA

Mark Oppenheimer writes,

If grade inflation is bad, fighting it is worse. Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?

I think that the best approach is to unbundle teaching from assessment. An enterpreneurial idea would be to start a national collegiate assessment service. This company would administer at least three types of examinations.

1. Exams for generic courses, such as calculus or freshman economics or freshman psychology. These exams would work like AP exams.

2. Assessments for more specific courses, such as the economics of sports, or 20th-century Japanese poetry. For these, the professor will provide a syllabus that includes a set of objectives for the students. The company will design and implement an assessment geared toward the syllabus. (At Swarthmore College, the honors exams used to work that way, with professors from other institutions writing and administering exams.)

3. Assessments of general areas of competence. Examples might be: the ability to read an essay and summarize its key points; the ability to read how a study was conducted and assess the weaknesses of the methods used; the ability to trace the historical roots of a contemporary political or economic phenomenon.

If this sort of enterprise could get off the ground, I think it holds the potential for radical change in the academy. My hope is that many students might decide that the best way to do well on third-party assessments is to take more control over their own learning.

32 thoughts on “Alternatives to the GPA

  1. I’ve always felt that one of the potential benefits of LinkedIn is that it could allow your profile to serve as a decentralized credential that could follow you around while you learned stuff on the web. It’s a long ways from that currently, but I think that might be the closest thing we have to what you’re talking about, albeit geared for adults and not students.

  2. A good idea that would probably never happen due to the fact that it could serve to undermine the status of powerful, elite institutions and maybe even universities generally. The tests might start out as a cure for grade inflation, but quickly it would become clear that there was no good reason to not to grant credits to students who aced the exams without taking any courses at all. That would be a great thing, but I’d expect universities to fight it tooth and nail.

  3. Does grade inflation indicate that the signaling-mechanism of higher education is breaking down? Sort of like a cartel agreement where each institution has the incentive to defect from doing the hard work of grading papers and tests, weeding out bad students, etc. and just sit back and collect the tuition checks in exchange for pieces of paper called “diplomas?”

    I say go the other way, then, and create something like a Navy Seal training program for higher education: an ultra-rigorous academic program that is more trial than learning experience. A place where the signaling mechanism still shines bright and true. A place where half the students admitted can’t hack it and have to transfer to a lowly Ivy League school. No legacy admissions, no athletic scholarships, no special favors granted to faculty brats, no consideration of high school grades. The only admission criteria will be an exam that is shorter but more rigorous than the GRE. The motto will be something like “Failure is the most likely outcome” in Latin.

  4. Is the goal competency or ranking? Competency is compatible with a world of straight As. Ranking is compatible with intelligence tests foregoing education entirely.

      • Sure. If education REALLY worked, you could educate anyone. It’s funny people don’t even let this be a speed bump in their thinking about education. But education is really mostly signaling. What we do teach people is really just to see how good their ability to learn signal is. The thought process could be, “well, we could educate everyone to A level, but it would just take too long.” Well, then you didn’t really need them to learn it.

  5. “unbundle teaching from assessment,” also known as The Holy Grail. It’s hard for me to imagine this not fixing everything, which is why, as Slocum says, they’ll never let us do it.

  6. The real problem, as Slocum gets at, are interests aligned against exactly that ideal- and it isn’t just academia. It isn’t like these independent assessments don’t already exist, but their results don’t confer the credentials, nor does employment law allow potential employers to use them as they wish.

    It will be a long battle.

  7. It already happens in the domains where people care the most about measuring competency. Licensed professions all have their own testing regimens, and for that matter, college admissions rely on a variety of third-party tests as well.

    Interestingly, grades have largely been dropped by all post-academic forms of learning that are floating around nowadays. If you learn something at a club, or if you learn something at a MOOC, or if you learn something in a corporate training scenario, it’s very unlikely that there will be a grade floating around. Certainly not a grade that will be permantly recorded.

    Like the peer-review process, academic grades seem to be untouchable within the usual academic culture, but equally well ignored by the rest of modern society.

    There are many correlaries to all this. Here’s one: if you want to subsidize the education of today’s youth, would you want to spend your resources putting them into traditional universities?

    • As someone who participates in them, I believe this also happens in software engineering interviews. You’re usually asked to produce some amount of code at a whiteboard, regardless of your education or job history (though those are still signals).

      You also see a lot of independent schools/bootcamps teaching coding skills. They’re creating an alternative credential/signal, and also, I think, taking advantage of the fact that employers can and will test your coding skill – so if you develop some coding skill, you can actually get a job.

  8. With third-party assessment, the vast majority of on-campus classes would be utterly useless, you’d pretty much be replacing the current college system

  9. I think all of the comments add up to the fact that the credentialing mechanism in higher education is slowly being chipped away in piecemeal fashion by a lot of different organizations in a decentralized way.

    So we’ll never have a new replacement for college, but perhaps an alternate replacement network that collectively provides the same function, albeit in a more haphazard (but much less expensive) way.

    If this alternate system were ever to take hold, I imagine it’ll progress incrementally, but if its network effects reached a tipping point we might see a large sea change take place in short notice and might render the bottom 80% of 4 year institutions practically worthless and maybe even in need of bailouts.

    • You wont,replace high school because you need a local place for your zero marginal product teenagers to go. You won’t replace college because kids then move out and have to achieve their intellectual and positional competitive potential.

      But we can squeeze college. Two years at community college (or testing out entirely) on the front end. Work experience and subject tests on the back end.

      • Just by standardizing the subject matter and testing of the middle 80% of students for the first 2 years of college-equivalent could open it to competition and disrupt college.

        I had a ton of AP credits but only one course counted, Calculous. And shouldn’t have used it because my college Calculous was a prerequisite and so much more rigorous than the high school and AP test that skipping the 101 class almost screwed me. So, we need standardization and a level playing field anyway.

      • I didn’t even think about this until now. Our high school valedictorian took no AP courses. She was clever if she (her parents) did that knowing that all AP courses did for you was to hurt your GPA.

  10. ” Assessments of general areas of competence”. Etc.

    Great idea.

    This sounds, and would operate, a lot like “licensing”. But, you know, libertarians are dead against that.

    • You know the difference, right? As in, you get that those two things are nearly opposites in practice, don’t you?

          • Why are you disappointed? Did I ever give the impression that I do anything other than overturn silly comments with common sense?

            Government schools are basically the same as licensing. So, no, it is not contradictory to provide alternatives to both along the dimensions that make them similar and undesirable.

  11. “Why are you disappointed?”

    Well, because you come out with a condescending non-answer that had nothing to do with “common sense” and when challenged for the goods you didn’t deliver.

    And now, I’m even more disappointed. You now seem to say that licensing and government schools are basically the same. Initially you stated, “the two are opposite in practice” (without specifying what the other thing was as opposed to licensing, which I guess is really just common sense in action). But, the proposal was not to eliminate “government schools”. The proposal was to eliminate grading (and perhaps coursework) in favor of competency testing the standards for which are more consistent and centralised (i.e., the other “thing”). Licensing, de facto or de jure, is a form of this type of competency testing or, if you will, “assessment”. You may argue that it is not necessary, that is is not strict or meaningful enough, or that we should have *better licensing* that focuses exclusively on competency and not market protection. I’m totally for someone being able to skip law school and take a comprehensive bar exam and get a license. That is, in Kling’s parlance, unbundle teaching and assessment. Same for many other professions. The initial point was that, due to grade inflation, etc., this type of interim assessment has become meaningless.

    Now, I suppose you are going to tell me that there is a “market” for diplomas, a “market” for grades, or a market for school “assessments” but there is not a market for a license which, more than any of those other things is a closer proxy for “competence”. Or, tell me that we don’t need schools and we don’t need any assessments at all because the market will take care of all that.

    • You said it is like licenses that libertarians don’t like. Well, no, it is exactly not like licenses in exactly the way libertarians don’t like licences.

      We are against licensing for the same reasons we would be for not having to pass a bar exam. Or, rather, we’d be for having to pass whatever bar-type exam a market would allow.

      Having nurses do most of the doctoring and having legal assistants do most of the law and dental assistants do all the dentistry is what we have already and what libertarians tend to want, we just don’t like how the the government license monopolies work.

      Subject matter tests would be widely varied, unlike most government licenses. They tend to be less restrictive. Since their earning power is not based on restriction of supply, they would likely be less expensive. Most of the licenses probably started out this way before being co-opted by the,state who then implemented the aspects of them that make them unappealing to libertarians. That is one reason I don’t think we’ll ever get what we want.

      • Last I checked, nurses had licenses and so did legal assistants and dental assistants. I’ve never met a dental assistant that did “all the dental work”, but perhaps they can do root canals and implants now.

        I know quite a bit more about the legal practice but never had an assistant that did “most of the law”. I guess I just lacked common sense. Or perhaps “most of” is merely a reflection of how little you know.

        My sense is that you need to hone your arguments. That last comment had nothing to do with your earlier comments, so you are a bit over the map here. For starts, I would suggest you (and other “libertarians” if you speak for them) decide whether you are against licensing or whether you are in favor of reformed licensing. There’s a big difference. That’s just “common sense”.

        • I’d like to see a tally of the hours of the people aggregating to the legal profession. I suspect it’s about like anything else- many laborers per manager.

          Not sure what nurses or dental assistants having licenses has to do with the argument.

          Then just answer the question, how exactly are licenses like testing alternatives to GPA?

        • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_of_law#Unauthorized_practice_of_law
          The American Bar Association proposed model rules regarding the unauthorized practice of law, which Judge Richard Posner characterized as an attempt to perpetuate a monopoly to the disadvantage of consumers.[11] The judge observed that the legal profession is “a cartel of providers of services relating to society’s laws” which cartel’s focus is to restrict entry. “Modern economists call it ‘rent seeking’, but throughout recorded history, skilled crafts and professions have tried to raise their members’ incomes by using the power of the state to limit entry.”[11]

      • Nah, I need to amuse myself and others occasionally.

        For example, I am amused that billboards read “Skip the,drama get your GED!”

        Their sales pitch is,”hey, we all,know high school sucks, right?”

        These are quasi-licenses due to government involvement. Going marginally in the other direction is not support for government licences.

        But hey, if you weren’t amused today, just know I was.

Comments are closed.