Alisha Gilbert grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and remembers moving to Milwaukee around the seventh grade.
It was a culture shock to move across the country and to move in with her grandmother.
But when she got to high school, it got even more stark: Competition was fierce.
"In my high school, the B was actually a C and then the A was a B," she explains. "I would have to try two times harder than other people."
When it came time to choose a college, Gilbert ended up at a school that doesn't have any letter grades. She explains what it looks like now to check her grades online.
“First I have to go to the student portal," she says. "Then after that I’m able to see my progress. I’m able to see 'satisfactory, unsatisfactory or incomplete.'”
Gilbert is a junior now studying music therapy at Alverno College on Milwaukee's south side. She is one of around 530 undergraduate students at the college who don't receive any type of letter grades.
Since 1973, the private, Catholic women's school has instead assessed students on what it calls the eight core abilities — things like “analysis, communication, developing a global perspective and effective citizenship.”
That model originated from a question.
“Are people ready for the world? That is the promise of a college or a university," says Alverno Dean of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Désirée Pointer-Mace.
“We shouldn't be separate from the world. We should be readying people for real work in authentic settings," she adds. "So that means that if you have an assessment model that does not mirror that, you're actually not preparing them well.”
Experts differ on whether letter grades matter. But feedback always does
While Alverno has been assessing based on abilities for decades, larger schools like MIT and the University of Michigan are doing away with letter grades for freshmen.
The goal is to help ease the transition to college and allow students to take classes that interest them without them worrying about their GPAs.
But it hasn’t been a smooth rollout. Michigan stopped issuing some letter grades, and then reinstated them at the end of September. Campus leadership said that the media coverage and questions raised about the pilot program made it unlikely to succeed.
People like Linda Nilson aren’t surprised by the starts and stops. She’s a professor emerita and founder of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University.
“I don't have a lot of faith that this is going to work out well. Oh yeah, it'll reduce student stress, but it'll reduce student motivation," she says.
Nilson and other critics also raise concerns about how students from grade-less programs can compete with others to get into master's programs. Alverno accounts for this by assigning grade point equivalents at the end of a course that are not by default visible to students.
For example, a “satisfactory” score is automatically equivalent to a "B" or a 3.0 or higher.
When asked about Alverno’s model, Nilson's whole demeanor changes.
“I think Alverno does college right, much more right than other colleges do," she said. "You get the small classes, you get the abundant feedback. And the spirit of the place is so positive for students, for student development.”
Nilson says that a program that scraps letter grades has to pair it with extensive feedback to be successful.
She argues that’s nearly impossible to do at a place like Michigan, where the freshmen class this year was more than 8,600 students.
But others in higher education argue that all colleges should move toward grade-less student assessment.
Susan Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She advocates for colleges moving away from letter grades altogether. Part of it is an issue of workforce preparedness.
"When people go out into the world after college or after school, they are not just asked to regurgitate information or to perform certain tasks, but they're asked to be in relation to others and to be creative and to be independent learners and to be moral beings," she says.
But Blum adds that all students deserve a more personalized approach.
"There are lots of ways to measure success. What I like so much about Alverno's system is that they give room for describing that so that there could be somebody from different kinds of backgrounds who have different kinds of growth and possibly, by the end of a semester, different kinds of remaining challenges," she says.
"That's kind of beautiful and very useful. Much more useful than finding out that somebody got a B+," Blum says.
How 'perfectionist' students navigate schools that don't give letter grades
Gilbert, the junior at Alverno studying music therapy, said her transition to college felt much smoother with Alverno's abilities model.
"It was an easy transition. It definitely took that stress and that pressure off of me," she remembers. " I don't have to worry about trying to get a specific letter ranking. I have to worry about just trying my best and making sure that I improve every time that I try to do something."
But changes in how grading works can also be a bumpy transition for the students themselves.
Alverno alum Holly McCoy-Perez earned her bachelor’s degree in 2010 and her master’s in education in 2015. She explains that the change to how she was assessed led to a sort of identity crisis.
“I'm a naturally competitive human being. I definitely wanted the ‘A.' I was a straight-A student my senior year of high school," she says. "Making the transition into Alverno initially felt very confusing for me, because I was so excited about the ability-based curriculum, but I was initially a little bit confused on what that meant."
But with time, the pressure eased.
“It all started to make so much more sense that I was never in competition with others, but my biggest competition was being the best version of myself," she says.
McCoy-Perez says the assessment model has only gotten more useful in the years since she graduated – especially to students who lost years of personalized feedback from teachers due to the COVID pandemic
Don’t believe it? Ask her daughter Natasha, who just started her senior year at Alverno.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
_
