What I Didn't Learn at the Evergreen State College
It was a LOT
***This piece originally ran at Persuasion, but a lot of you don’t subscribe to Persuasion (even though you should!), so I wanted to run it here.
Recently, Persuasion Overlord Yascha Mounk (not his actual title, I don’t think) wrote a piece called Abolish Grades: A Modest Proposal. In it, he describes how grade inflation at U.S. Colleges has turned them into the real-life versions of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. In Mounk’s telling, universities are beholden to students who are basically customers, and the schools would no sooner offend students with bad grades than Cinnabon would send out a promo saying “Hey Fatty: Enter code ‘LARDASS’ to get a dollar off your next heart-attack-inducing crime against food.”
Mounk’s proposed solution is radical: He says that universities should abolish grades. His solution is also — I’m 99 percent sure — tongue-in-cheek; Mounk’s reference to Jonathan Swift’s famous satire A Modest Proposal tips his hand. In reality, Mounk is saying that if we won’t make grades meaningful, then we might as well scrap them altogether. This would allow colleges to stop pretending that grades are markers of excellence and admit that an “A” in most courses means about as much as five-star Amazon product review from The Dumbest Person Alive.
As it happens, I’ve lived the hypothetical experience that Mounk imagines. For the first two quarters of my freshman year, I attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where most classes are pass/fail. It was a formative experience; I learned a lot. Not about the subjects I was studying, mind you — I learned less about, say, economics than I would have learned if someone had yelled “supply and demand!” at me while passing in a supersonic jet. But I learned that without grades, college is a joke that pushes the concept of wasting your time to bold new horizons.
If you’re not familiar with Evergreen, it was founded in 1967 to explore alternative education, though some would argue that it explores alternatives to education. It is admirably free of thick-necked frat guys drunk on Natty Light but somewhat overrun with dreadlocked white kids drunk on the writing of Noam Chomsky. Its claim to fame is that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is an alum, and personally, I think that’s a great feather to have in your cap. Let Penn tout its ties to Benjamin Franklin and UVA talk up Thomas Jefferson; Evergreen can claim the guy whose work led to lines like “trying is the first step towards failure” and “don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”, which I consider invaluable additions to our national dialogue.
I came to Evergreen in 1998 because it was geographically and culturally as far away from my small town in Virginia as I could get. I considered the lack of grades to be a feature, not a bug; I wanted to see if a school could function without the stress and grade grubbing that were ubiquitous in high school. Evergreen would tell me whether removing that pressure turns students into the best version of themselves or into the laziest version.
Many freshman courses at Evergreen are structured in big, 16-credit “programs” that combine several subjects. To my memory, mine combined art, history, political science, literature, psychology, archaeology, gender studies, law, design, economics, archery, earth science, animal husbandry, and a bit of Taekwondo. A typical week involved reading a book and then producing art and papers based on that book. At least, that’s nominally what a week involved — the week actually involved finding the one person on campus who had read the book, getting info from them, and then one-sixteenth-assing your way through the assignments. At least, this was my habit and the habit of everyone I knew.
On Monday mornings, we would share artwork that we were supposed to have made over the weekend. Of course, the art was actually thrown together that morning as we frantically shoved breakfast in our mouths — I remember the dining hall on Monday mornings basically being an art studio with a waffle station. When we presented our tossed-off masterpieces to the class, the farce was in full swing; we would bullshit instead of just saying “this white space represents the fact that I didn’t have time to draw anything else, and the tan blotch is oatmeal that I spilled.” But there was no punishment for shoddy work, because there were no grades.
Seminars were equally insipid; they were thirty-person discussions of a book that none of the thirty people had read. I wish one time I had said something like “It’s weird that at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Pa Joad turns out to be a werewolf” — I’m pretty sure the room would have gone with it. In hindsight, these discussions were valuable education, because bullshiting your way through a meeting when you haven’t done the work is a valuable life skill. Even so, a seminar on Of Mice and Men that turns into a discussion of Stuart Little because the word “mice” threw us off is probably not what higher education is meant to be.
My roommate basically did everything he could to fail our program. He didn’t say a single word in a seminar all quarter, partly because we dared him: Once he had already gone several weeks without talking, we challenged him to keep it up for the full term. And he did, and I had to give him my N64 copy of Tetris Attack as a prize. This turned out to be a pure test of Evergreen’s written evaluation system — would our professor note that my roommate had Harpo Marx’d his way through an entire quarter? She did not; my roommate’s evaluation said he “had some good comments in seminars,” and he passed.
I’m sure it’s possible to fail a class at Evergreen. But I didn’t witness it; everyone in my program passed, and I didn’t hear of anyone in any other program failing. It wasn’t so much pass/fail as it was pass/catch-a-really-bad-case-of-mono-and-drop-out, because I did hear of that happening, twice. In short: College without grades did turn out to be a joke. I quickly transferred to a regular college with regular grades, and though my new school had plenty of tossed-off projects and Olympic-level bullshitting during seminars, it wasn’t nearly as bad.
So, my experience does not recommend the burn-it-all-down option in Mounk’s hypothetical. Which means that there’s only one viable option left: Make grades meaningful. It would be nice, after all, if employers knew which students succeeded beyond expectations and which succeeded at fogging up a mirror for eight semesters. It is a problem that grades at top universities are like reviews of movies with “important” themes, which is to say: Every review is positive because the person doing the evaluating doesn’t want to cause problems for themselves. Mounk outlined the institutional barriers to more meaningful grades in his article, and I don’t think the switch would be easy. But based on my experience, the alternative seems unworkable.
I had much the opposite experience with no grades in college. I started at UC Santa Cruz in 1997, and we were the last class for which grades were optional. I had attended an academic high school with a lot of ambitious students who were prone to be very competitive about grades, so this greatly appealed to me.
Once at UCSC, I found the narrative evaluations to be better than grades - instead of a single letter, the evaluation would explain exactly how you performed in the class. This made my transcript long, but also much more accurate. Most narratives could also easily be translated into grades (if your work was described as "excellent" that was the equivalent of an A). I did well at UCSC, graduating with honors, and then got into a master's program where I graduated with a 4.0.
Now, I'm not sure if my experience was typical, but it is possible to combine academic rigor with a lack of letter grades. After all, most performance reviews in the professional world are narrative-based and don't necessarily involve grades.
It’s interesting: I went to the University of Chicago at roughly the same time, in the mid 1990’s. The U of C had an opposite ethos at the time, students tending to be odd but maniacally obsessed with dour academic rigor.
I lived in a dorm for transfer students for much of the time, and it seemed like every year there were a few Evergreen students who transferred to the U of C in what I can only think was a wild pendulum lurch in the opposite direction.