What are the consequences of adopting a pass or fail grading system?

What is the validity of student-grading in education?

• With grades I mean any of the systems described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_(education) The contrast to grades would be a pass/fail system. I'm particularly interested in grading in a medical education context. But, all answers are welcome. 1) How well do grades reflect knowledge? 2) How well do grades predict future academic or career success? For example, do medical students with high grades become better doctors? 3) What effect has grading on the learning environment? More or less cheating? More or less competition? More or less extra-curricular activities? 4) What effect has grading on student performance? 5) How consistent are grades? Does one teacher agree with another on the same assignment? I'm collecting as much research as I can on this subject. Hava a look. Here: http://www.mendeley.com/groups/3371391/grades-in-medical-education/ Feel free to answer related questions, that I have forgotten to mention here.

• Answer:

  Well I am not medical, but a final year engineering students, hope this helps : 1. Grades reflect knowledge only to a small extent, what grades represent is how much and how fast you can learn to present in exam, and get a good grade, what good a grade is if you can't remember it after the exam. e.g. in my 1st year if I got a "C" grade in a course and an another guy got an "A" grade, and now test our knowledge after 2-3 years, it will be almost same, so where does grade matter in terms of knowledge. Especially in engineering you have to remember a lot of formulas before exam, most of students even who got an "A" grade will forget those in a few days after exam. It is not true for all courses, there are some courses where grades do reflect actual knowledge. 2.Yes grades predict the future academic or carrier success, but that future is only short term, in long term it won't matter at all, what matters will be what's your experience in the field and how you applied even your little knowledge into doing something big. In case of Doctors, i think the behavior of person also matters a lot, how affectionate or kind he is towards patients etc. 3.Learning environment deteriorates, students can't study a particular subject of their interest. Competition and cheating both increase, extracurricular activities decrease. Most of the times students don't study to learn anything, they study only to get a good grade, they know how to solve a question step by step but why they are doing this, they don't know. It kinda kills the curiosity and ability of students to think outside the box. 4.Student performance is very dependent on grades, but this effect can be on positive or negative sides both. A bad grade can cultivate an inspiration for a student to study more, or on the other hand if a person is scoring less in most of the courses for many semesters, then the student creates a lower self image of himself, he targets small things, he never dreams of getting an "A" grade, he adjusts himself to be satisfied by lower grades. 5. Consistency of grades is on two level: teacher level & student level. In the former, it depends on teachers to some extent, different universities have different standards of grading, but after the college they all are seen equally in terms of grades, which is unfair. Second thing is if you may have noticed, that a particular set of students always score a better grade in any course irrespective of nature of the course or their interest in that course, same thing for those who can't score inspite of having a good interest in that subject.