I read a
blogpost by a high school English teacher on this novel idea of not assigning
grades to student writing throughout the semester. It’s a novel idea, but I
don’t think it’s one that can actually translate to the college level, mostly
because of time.
The high schools have 18 week
semesters with class 5 days a week (most of them, anyways), making for roughly
85 days of class (depending on the holidays). The colleges, typically, have
sixteen week semesters with class occurring 2 or 3 times a week, making for
between 30-43 days of class, again depending on holidays.
With so
much extra time, it’s easy to see how this teacher could afford to spend many
days in conference with students about their writing, but colleges expect
students to shoulder the majority of work outside the classroom.
So I’m not
sure I could justify attempting a gradeless system such as is described, but I
am intrigued.