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If you haven’t seen it, David Eubanks’s piece on the F grade is worth the read. He offers a set of possible meanings for an F grade, each of which is largely separate from the others. I’d even add one: an F can be a signal to a student that whatever they’re doing at the moment isn’t working. The Dunning-Kruger effect is real; sometimes you need that cold-water splash of reality to let you know that a given course or strategy just isn’t the path for you. There may be more reasonable ways to offer that signal, of course, but figuring out that something is a dead end can motivate change.
The piece reminded me of a reflection from a while back on the D grade. I have never understood the D grade, and still don’t. It’s sort of passing, and sort of not. It counts but doesn’t transfer; it counts but often doesn’t allow progression in a sequence; it counts but not if you get too many of them. It’s a sort of consolation prize. If passing means you’re on the bus and failing means you’re off the bus, a D suggests that you’re getting dragged behind the bus. That isn’t a bad description of my experience taking Russian in college.
Eubanks points out, correctly, that an F in a class you took indicates that you didn’t learn the material at a satisfactory level, but you don’t get F’s in the classes you didn’t take. I never took German in college, but that isn’t held against me the same way that a D in Russian was. And probably most of us would want to draw a distinction between an F earned through honest but failed effort and an F earned through cheating.
Paul LeBlanc makes a compelling argument in his recent books that a competency-based approach gets around these issues. Either a student has demonstrated mastery at a sufficient level, or they have not. Each piece is essentially pass-fail. We use pass-fail for some pretty high-stakes assessments already. The NCLEX exam for nurses, for instance, is pass-fail. (Nursing programs are judged in part on their students’ NCLEX pass rate.) Driver’s license tests are pass-fail; there’s no such thing as a driver’s license with honors. The bar exam is pass-fail, but I don’t hear people accusing it of lacking rigor. Acting auditions are pass-fail. Most occupational licenses are pass-fail. As the old joke goes, what do you call the person who graduated last in their class at medical school? Doctor.
A competency-based system retains the F in all but name, but it registers the fail as an absence, rather than a penalty. There, the distinction between performing badly in a class and simply not taking the class evaporates. Either way, you haven’t shown a given ability. The transcript is an account of what you’ve shown you can do.
I had been in administration for maybe 10 minutes the first time I heard the phrase “D/F/W rate.” It’s the percentage of students in a given class or cohort who didn’t achieve a C or better. In a given context, that percentage has an expected range; classes or cohorts that lie far outside that range raise questions. The existence of the D/F/W rate suggests to me that the D is not really passing; if it were, it would be lumped in with A, B and C. But to confuse matters more, many colleges make a distinction between a “success” rate—A through C—and a “completion” rate (A through D). They’re usually a few points apart. So a D counts as completion, but not success, whatever that means. It’s the shrug emoji that counts in a GPA.
As with Eubanks’s piece on F’s, D’s can signify any number of things: a key missing assignment, poor-but-earnest performance (my college Russian experience), inconsistent effort or just falling into a numerical range that isn’t quite passing or failing. The implications of each of those is different, but they’re flattened into a single grade. I can’t help but think that we can do better.
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there an intelligible reading of the D grade? And does a punitive F make more sense than an absence?
