Agreed. But also, there's no point in giving grades if they don't mean anything. If you expect everyone who puts in nominal effort to get an A, then the class should be pass/fail.
I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties.
Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.
Yeah, and I also like your idea of every class being pass/fail. I'm sure I've heard of some colleges doing it but I haven't looked into whether it's considered to be an improvement. Also I wonder what the results would be in terms of norm-setting if this was done at Harvard or something next?
I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties.
Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.