Growth Mindset and the Power of P/NP

For the growth mindset post this semester, I want to write about something that happened last Spring, when OU allowed students to choose P/NP grading.

I thought that was GREAT, and I participated very actively in a movement at Twitter with the hashtag #PassFailNation to promote the adoption of P/NP grading at schools everywhere. Some schools even got rid of letter grading completely (a list of those schools if you are curious), although most schools took the route OU did: teachers recorded letter grades as usual, and then students had the option to transfer that to a P/NP option.

As a teacher, I can definitely see the value of having a threshold that constitutes passing a class for credit. There are some specific things that you must do and/or specific things that you must learn. You do/learn those things, and then you have passed the class, and that shows up on your transcript. That makes perfect sense, and it's easy to explain. If OU wanted me to create a single paragraph description of what it means to "pass" this class, I could do that, and that paragraph could even be included as part of the transcript. That paragraph would not show everything that a student did/learned in the class, but it would explain what they did in order to pass the class. Which is useful to know!

But A-B-C-D is just ridiculous. That doesn't tell anybody anything specific about what a student did; you cannot really conclude anything for certain based on looking at those letters on a transcript. It's just an arbitrary rating (usually based on averaging test scores, ugh) that then allows the university to rank students against each other. It's meaningless, and yet it dominates most students' lives and occupies a huge part of their intellectual attention and emotional energy throughout all the years of school. (And it's no fun for teachers either.)

Grades are all about rating and ranking and avoiding mistakes at all costs; that, in short, is why grades are not a good way to promote growth and real learning. P/NP works better: it allows the university to carry out the bureaucratic business of awarding credit for courses without getting in the way of growth and learning the way that grades do.

So, OU has not announced whether it will offer the P/NP option again this semester, but I hope that they will. Even better: I wish they would adopt P/NP grading for all Gen. Ed. classes all the time. People seem to think grades are necessary in major classes to rate/rank students in a major (I disagree... but hey, I just teach Gen. Ed.; that's all I have to worry about). Anyway, I was really glad about the P/NP option last Spring, and now I can hope for it to happen again.

Here's a graphic I made for a presentation on P/NP grading that I did at a (virtual) conference this summer; I say: take the red pill! alternate grading all the time... not just during the pandemic.

And if OU does adopt a P/NP policy for this Fall, I will gladly update this post with that information! Fingers crossed......

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