ABSTRACT
Imagining higher education without grades of any kind may sound like an exercise in fantasy, but, in fact, grades did not always exist. This chapter reviews what grades have come to signify and the behaviors they have generated among the several parties concerned: employers, institutions, faculty, and students. If faculty were evaluating student performance explicitly on the basis of outcomes achievement, the grading scale would have to map grades onto outcomes. In the current grading system, instructors are expected to give partial credit for almost anything correct a student submits, including largely wrong or vague responses. Aside from the fact that traditional grades tell us little about student competencies-a matter of much concern to employers—they bog down faculty with unnecessarily time-consuming and unpleasant work burdens. Given the social and political context in which higher education operates today, it would seem that the current grading system serves students quite well.
