SF Gate Logo Hearst Newspapers Logo

UC Santa Cruz To Start Using Letter Grades

By

2000-02-24 04:00:00 PDT SANTA CRUZ -- In a dramatic step, professors at the University of California at Santa Cruz voted yesterday to require letter grading for the first time in the campus' 35-year history.

"This certainly sounds the death knell of UC Santa Cruz as we know it," said one student observer, Patrick McHugh, 21. "It was an effort to regularize UC Santa Cruz."

The Santa Cruz campus, which opened as an alternative to the more traditional University of California campuses, is one of only a few colleges across the country to use a narrative evaluation system instead of grades. It is the only UC campus not using grades.

The 154-to-77 secret ballot vote by the Academic Senate ended that distinction, capping months of controversy.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

Still, it may not be the end of the battle. It only takes 25 faculty members to call for a new vote of all 588 members of the Academic Senate. Several pledged yesterday to organize the campaign for another vote.

That could take at least two months.

Yesterday's vote was an overwhelming mandate, however, and during a lively meeting filled with emotional pleas, many of the professors who voted for a traditional A- to-F grading system argued it was the right thing to do. With a campus of 11,000 students, they said, class size has grown so much that it is difficult to know students well enough to write good evaluations.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

"UCSC was founded in an era receptive to change, to alternatives, to new ways of thinking. Yet ironically, through the ensuing decades, UCSC has steadfastly adhered to its cherished ideals, articulated by its founding generation," said biology professor Bob Ludwig. "The problem with ideals is that they are fixed, reality keeps changing."

Moreover, he and other professors said that the evaluations -- essentially mini-essays about a student's performance in a class -- make it difficult for students to get into graduate school or secure scholarships, because grades are the "common currency" in most modern universities and not having grades projects an image of low standards to the world.

"It has created a bad image and over a 30-year period we have been unsuccessful in reversing that image," said physics professor George Brown, who heads the campus Committee on Education Policy, which brought the proposal forward yesterday. "I think this will go a long way to doing that."

The traditional grading system will be effective for students entering in the fall of 2001.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

The future of the narrative evaluation system will be debated later as an independent matter. Brown plans to bring legislation forward at the Academic Senate's next meeting on May 31, to reform the narrative evaluation system and make it less unwieldy.

But critics of yesterday's vote believe that having mandatory grades undermines the narrative evaluation system and is a signal that its demise is unavoidable.

Carly Berdischewsky, a 21-year- old senior, supports narratives because she said the system is at the core of a tradition of emphasizing learning over grades. She said grades cannot show a student's full effort.

"Narratives tell us our strengths and weaknesses and they promote active participation in the classroom. Grades don't tell us anything," she said.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

About 150 students attended the Academic Senate meeting. They walked out in protest, expressing outrage that the faculty chose to take the vote by secret ballot.

Yesterday's vote not only implemented a traditional grading system, but it made UC Santa Cruz among the most stringent of the eight undergraduate campuses in one way.

The vote allows for students to take only 25 percent of their classes on a pass/no pass basis, as is allowed at UC San Diego, while the remaining campuses allow students to take up to one-third of classes without a letter grade. The faculty also decided that a "no pass" would be recorded on student's transcript. Currently no record is kept of classes that students fail. It also added pluses and minuses to grades.

Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum said his vote for mandatory grades was prompted by a concern for students who are kept from pursuing opportunities, like the Gates Foundation Scholarships for minorities, that require a grade-point average for consideration.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

Some professors said they already essentially "grade" students by encoding the written evaluations with key words, so they might as well give up the charade.

"It would be hypocritical to vote against grades," said anthropology professor Dan Linger. "I already use code words. B is a 'good,' A is an 'excellent,' and 'satisfactory' is a C."

Politics professor Peter Euben was among those who supported the narrative evaluations. He said the decision for mandatory grades could force him to change how he teaches works such as Plato's "Republic."

"I want my students to understand it in complicated ways," he said. "There is something dramatically inconsistent in what I teach and what I want students to learn and the reduction of that to a grade."

By