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Joshua Doležal's avatar

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.

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Ben1973's avatar

When I chose to go to Hampshire it was because I needed the pedagogical contrasts of the other four Consortium campuses to achieve my fixed academic end goal: going to Yale or Brown for Graduate School.

I'd been wait-listed at both Universities as an undergraduate applicant, so I knew that attending Hampshire and using the Consortium -- ESPECIALLY Amherst, Smith & Mount Holyoke (and to a lesser extent UMass Amherst) would allow me to maintain a "Little Ivies GPA" that Ivy League Graduate School Programs would DEFINITELY look at.

I ❤️'d Hampshire BECAUSE of it's academic freedom and flexibility and that was also EXTREMELY important to me, I needed to be able to create and navigate my own path + having the right array of academic resources. I also needed the emphasis on building a portfolio of my work and being able to integrate all of these things into a dynamic educational plan.

SO, it was like the perfect fit for me -- Hampshire met my individual academic needs, as the Consortium met my broader academic goals. I know that's rare, but for me it was LITERALLY kismet.

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