A college that has never had grades
History and reflections on attending Hampshire College
This week, we bring you a guest post by R. Plante (she/her), who is a professor at a comprehensive college in the Northeast United States where she teaches sociology. She has a long history of asking (too) many questions, wondering, “what have I not thought to ask about…?,” and discussing latent consequences. She has been exploring pedagogy since teaching her first class, which she did without any training, as a college senior. You can connect with her via her Substack:
.Going to a College That Didn’t Have Grades
When I was 17, I was admitted early decision to Hampshire College, a small “alternative” college with no grades, no defined majors, and no prescribed general education requirements. Students were expected to create their own paths from start to finish. While I had actually done some independent studies – as far back as seventh grade – I was also nervous about my ability to self-motivate, follow through, and complete projects. It felt like Admissions had more faith in me than I did in myself. I flirted with fascinations with the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of law, public health, and gender studies, ending up focusing on the latter two subjects.
That was over 35 years ago. I graduated in 3.5 years, after finding several internships, starting several campus newsletters and peer education groups, and teaching two classes, among other things. I then went straight to a PhD program; my worst case scenarios of failure did not come to pass.
Since then, I’ve worked at traditionally structured institutions, posting letter grades, advising about degree requirements, and bristling against institutional constraints. While reading discussions about grading, I often wonder why we don’t turn to alternative colleges for insights. We sometimes mention that grades are a new-ish conceit, but there are 40+ institutions in the United States without grades; some of these have never had grades, and have innovative structures we can learn from.
The Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts has been home to two attempts to innovate grading. In 1896, Mount Holyoke College in Hadley developed the “traditional” system of grading still used in most of higher education. Nearly 65 years later, Mount Holyoke, along with Smith College, UMass-Amherst, and Amherst College, began envisioning a new institution, one without grades, defined majors, or general education requirements: Hampshire College. The New York Times, assessing Hampshire at the end of its initial semester, in winter 1971, noted that “colleges are largely locked into traditional programs—by professors with tenure, costly buildings and laboratories, rigid academic departments and courses, grading systems, and a whole range of vested interests, not the least of which is a conservative body of alumni and donors.”1
“One way around these obstacles is to build a college from scratch,” the Times observed.
Bingo. So… what happens when “no grades” are foundational to the architecture of a college, embedded in that college’s raison d’etre from the start? What might we learn from institutions without traditional grades? What happens when other institutional structures and systems have also been rethought? Some insights from Hampshire’s early years may be helpful.
No grades, no majors, no general education requirements, and no prescribed paths
Hampshire College was founded with experimentation at its heart. The college was built on the apparently radical idea that “a student is a person, not simply a classroom fixture”.
A book about Hampshire, The Making of a College2 described its flexible, individualized curriculum as an attempt to “dethrone” the course or the class as “the unit of knowledge.” This was intended to disrupt the idea that compulsory courses or “required [course] sequences” actually captured the way students learned. A New York Times article summarized the fundamental philosophy: “…It is more important [for a student] to know how to solve an intellectual problem than to acquire many small facts.”3
Analysis of student newspaper archives reveals the tip of the iceberg of just how unusual the college was. The April 1971 Climax described a top administrator’s aim to charge students fees based on their family incomes; higher-earning families would be charged higher fees. The newspaper also included a review of Paolo Friere’s newly published Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an announcement that it was time for the student community to evaluate the college’s administrators.
Students did take classes, but the curriculum did not have required course sequences. Learning was meant to be broad and interdisciplinary in a student’s first few semesters, during what was called “Division I.” Students progressed through three “divisions” in order to graduate. Division I was meant to introduce them to the liberal arts, revealing aims, modes of inquiry, and methods of interdisciplinary fields across four schools within the college (humanities and arts, social science, natural science and math, language and communication). Division II, the “concentration,” was designed by the student and was meant to demonstrate focused interdisciplinary study and experiences showing that a “high level of expertise” had been achieved. Division III was student-designed advanced independent work pursued at least half-time across at least one year. It included the requirement to share that work with communities and to study or teach an integrative seminar encompassing several fields of related knowledge.4
The aim of the divisional system was to show progressive intellectual depth and ability in modes of inquiry and in the production of knowledge.
Each division included an “exam,” though they were not meant to be traditional assessments of accumulated facts designated by professors as “important.” Each of the four schools had an exam system – more on this later. Division II and III endeavors also had exams. Division I exams were student-designed and could be a performance, lab work/project, a formal analytical paper, a film – something relevant to each of the four schools. Division II exams involved a student-chosen faculty committee’s review of the student’s experiential and classroom work and assessed whether the student was ready for the focused, high-level work of Division III. Student-chosen faculty committees reviewed Division III independent projects or demonstrations. Students could graduate only when they had achieved a pass on all exams, four Division I, one Division II, and one Division III. Students were expected to take the initiative for designing and executing exam ideas and Division II and III projects.
Tension between “the experiment” that was Hampshire and the world in which it has attempted to thrive has, unsurprisingly, existed since 1970. Hampshire never had credit hours, grades, or specifically prescribed requirements but had to develop some mechanisms for students to demonstrate their ability to, for example, “solve an intellectual problem.” One mechanism was via the end of semester evaluation: Students wrote self-evaluations of their course and experiential work and asked professors to provide evaluations of them. These evaluations, plus other documentary, reflective, and explanatory materials, became the student’s official transcript.
Hampshire remained linked to the four nearby schools who had contributed to its founding – Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, UMass, and Smith – via the Five-College Consortium they had formed. Among other things, this enabled students to take classes at any of the institutions. Non-Hampshire students were initially given the same end of semester written evaluations that Hampshire students received in lieu of grades. But in 1974, the college’s president explained to the community that the college might need to “taint idealism with a little reality” and supply grades to non-Hampshirites.5
Hampshire students pointed out that they had to be given grades when they studied off-campus, so non-Hampshire students should be required to only get evaluations when studying at Hampshire. One professor stated, “I don’t believe in the grade proposal for the same reason I don’t believe in the evaluation system: it doesn’t work.”
The professor may have been thinking of a contentious Hampshire practice that had been eliminated by the time the president was discussing “tainting idealism with reality.” The college had initially required divisional exams to get “pass, fail, or distinction” designations from students’ faculty committees. In 1972-73, seven graduates received the “distinction” designation on their Division III projects/exams. Six of them petitioned to drop the word and remove it from their degrees, but one graduate favored it, so the college retained it.
Climax, Hampshire’s first student newspaper, reported on a 1973 shared governance meeting focused on doing away with the designations. Several remarkable things happened in this meeting, held just three years after the college had opened. Both students and faculty were engaged in the Academic Council – it was intentionally designed that way – with some students presenting anti-“distinction” arguments and some faculty supporting the merits of these judgments. Students were concerned that their peers, “who now work for the development of their intellects, might then work for the degree ‘with distinction’ creating competition and antagonism.” One slippery slope sentiment: if degrees “with distinction” continued to be granted, why not just have grades? What was to stop the college from selling out “to the outside world’s need for a comparison and ranking of students”?6
Note that the reference to “degrees with distinction” was linked to the fact that Division III “exams,” which could be designated as pass, fail, or with distinction, were the final piece of a student’s self-designed path. So a Division III exam “with distinction” was as good as saying the student’s bachelor’s degree carried the designation.
Some students argued: Given the college’s emphasis on students designing their own programs and developing at their own pace, there should be no way to compare students with each other and decide that some Division III projects (exams) were “distinctive.”
But one student – later one of my Five-College professors – noted that “the outside world” didn’t know about Hampshire and why it never assigned grades. She observed that BIPOC students would be discriminated against in that “outside world,” and could especially benefit from a degree “with distinction.”
One professor – later a co-chair of my “Division II” – observed that he could “clearly distinguish between acceptable students and outstanding students.” He felt a “professional and moral obligation” to do this for the student and “the public.” It seems that a college with no grades – that has never had any grades – will not avoid the seductive pull of but we need to assess students in ways that seem intelligible to people outside this experimental, alternative college.
The Academic Council did end up voting to do away with “distinction” on degrees.
But by 1980, change was afoot once more, this time in the Division I system.7 The School of Social Science faculty passed a policy to allow students to complete any two social science courses instead of completing a skill demonstration, project, paper, or experiential item for Division I. Other faculty argued that allowing this was “a threat to the experiment [that is Hampshire].” One said, “Once this place has a hardening of the arteries, it has no reason to exist.” In other words, once the college began to resemble every other college…why persist?
Nonetheless, other schools in the college later allowed what we called the two-course option. The 54-year-old college has undergone a handful of changes, most recently a curricular innovation of learning collaboratives, where campus communities work together on focused “wicked problems.” The foundational and fundamental aspects of Hampshire’s founding remain though. Students are people, not merely classroom fixtures. Students take charge of their educations from their first week on campus, designing, refining, and shaping their paths. There are no grades for these students, no rankings of projects or experiences, no required coursework or sequences.
Take What You Need and Leave the Rest
Several insights emerge from this brief foray into some aspects of one experimental college’s attempts to experiment with higher education.
The feeling that we need to assess students in ways that seem intelligible to people “outside” – outside of our classrooms, our colleges, our pedagogical desires – seems omnipresent and vexing. How do we explain our grading and structural innovations when we live and work in social contexts deeply invested in requiring us to maintain rankings and hierarchies? What do we do about equity and the question of how “the world” might see graduates who cannot list GPAs and “cum laude” distinctions on their resumés? How do we disentangle the dichotomies that keep us stuck, where, for example, a place like Hampshire is “an experiment” and other schools are not experimental?
To repeat the observation by the New York Times in 1971 – “colleges are largely locked into traditional programs—by professors with tenure, costly buildings and laboratories, rigid academic departments and courses, grading systems, and a whole range of vested interests, not the least of which is a conservative body of alumni and donors.”
My 3.5 years at Hampshire were completely foundational to everything I have done since. Being trusted to find, lose, and make my own intellectual way was powerfully transformative. I took only 20 classes while in college and spent the rest of my time applying what I was learning, collaborating, being an activist, and developing a sense of delight with what was possible.
What might we do to experiment this year? To name and dissect the vested interests that keep our institutions so connected to grades and cum laude designations and honor societies, for example? Perhaps we can start by asking administrators why our institutions still have grades. Maybe we can insist on faculty credit or compensation for facilitating students’ independent work. We could make curricular changes to create courses with, let’s say, pass/no pass options instead of final grades. Those teaching at smaller institutions might propose to create tutorial courses, where students develop auto-didactic skills within groups of like-minded peers. Minimally, maybe we can ensure that we support untenured and precariously employed faculty who aim to make grading and pedagogical changes.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of David Clark, Robert Talbert, or this publication.
Anonymous, Jan 11 1971. “Flexibility is the Rule at Hampshire.” New York Times, pg 49.
Franklin Patterson and Charles Longworth, The Making of a College. 1975. MIT Press.
Robert Reinhold, “Unconventional Hampshire College at a Milestone.” 1974, New York Times, Sun June 2.
Accreditation Committee, “Hampshire Self-Study,” January 1974.
Chip Brown, “Hampshire faculty may grade five-college students.” Climax, Sept 17, 1974.
Quotes related to distinctions are from: Kit Hadley, “Distinction Defeated by Council.” Climax, 1973.
Mike Mufson, “Division One – Going…Going…Where?” Climax, May 5, 1980.
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This is indeed the conundrum: "The feeling that we need to assess students in ways that seem intelligible to people “outside” – outside of our classrooms, our colleges, our pedagogical desires – seems omnipresent and vexing."
I appreciate your discussion of how grades can become an end in themselves, where even honors like "with distinction," become the focus rather than the learning process that yields a distinctive result.
I'm now curious about your take on "labor-based grading," which bases its external assessment purely on participation, while offering almost purely formative feedback on the academic work itself. I've always been of multiple minds about these things. On the one hand, I think some measure of mastery is meaningful. On the other, I know all too well how grubbing for particular grades can stifle meaningful learning. I tried to encourage students to embrace ownership and trust that grades would follow naturally. But it was an imperfect system. My concern about labor-based grading is that it offers no baseline assurance of competence to anyone outside the institution; someone could earn an A in a writing course while making little progress toward actual competence in writing.