'Ungrading': Universities Eliminate Grades in Favor of Equity

In the ongoing pursuit by the Social Justice™ left of elusive and fictitious “equity,” universities across the United States are increasingly dropping grades altogether in favor of equity.

Via NPR (emphasis added):

Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.

“I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I’m in.” The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, “is not the coursework. It’s learning how to be an adult.”

That took a toll on her grades. “I didn’t do well,” said Malak, who powered through and is now in her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. “It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times.”

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.

The obvious question is: if they weren’t adequately prepared for college-level work, what are they doing in university in the first place? Isn’t that the entire point of the vetting process of applicants, to determine their suitability as college students?

Predicting all of the effects this trend of jettisoning any objective performance standards is going to have on society is difficult, but one obvious such impact will be the erosion of public trust in professions that were previously highly respected.

In the context of pilot training (not an academic discipline, strictly speaking, but clearly related to the “ungrading” phenomenon), airlines are an example: in its investigation of a plane crash piloted by an incompetent diversity hire, for instance, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that “systemic deficiencies in the aviation industry’s selection and performance measurement practices also contributed to this incident.”

In light of this and similar events in recent history, the effect will be that when you get on an airplane, as Tucker Carlson has noted, the logical question moving forward: is this pilot with my life in his hands here because of his skills or his immutable identity?”

The same dilemma will befall the medical industry (is my doctor here because of woke university “ungrading”?), the legal profession, and other industries with life-altering consequences for the people who rely on them for their health and freedom.