The Sacred Art of Winging It
Everything I didn't learn at Evergreen State College.
You’ve been hearing a lot about the election recently, so on polling day eve we thought we’d give you a little break. Jeff Maurer is a comedian who wrote for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and now runs the Substack I Might Be Wrong. He’s a very funny guy. We hope you enjoy this response to one of my articles as much as we did! (And I hope to see you at our election night Substack chat tomorrow—details to follow.)
– Yascha
Recently, Persuasion Overlord Yascha Mounk (not his actual title, I don’t think) wrote a piece called Abolish Grades: A Modest Proposal. In it, he describes how grade inflation at U.S. Colleges has turned them into the real-life versions of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. In Mounk’s telling, universities are beholden to students who are basically customers, and the schools would no sooner offend students with bad grades than Cinnabon would send out a promo saying “Hey Fatty: Enter code ‘LARDASS’ to get a dollar off your next heart-attack-inducing crime against food.”
Mounk’s proposed solution is radical: He says that universities should abolish grades. His solution is also—I’m 99 percent sure—tongue-in-cheek; Mounk’s reference to Jonathan Swift’s famous satire A Modest Proposal tips his hand. In reality, Mounk is saying that if we won’t make grades meaningful, then we might as well scrap them altogether. This would allow colleges to stop pretending that grades are markers of excellence and admit that an “A” in most courses means about as much as five-star Amazon product review from The Dumbest Person Alive.
As it happens, I’ve lived the hypothetical experience that Mounk imagines. For the first two quarters of my freshman year, I attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where most classes are pass/fail. It was a formative experience; I learned a lot. Not about the subjects I was studying, mind you—I learned less about, say, economics than I would have learned if someone had yelled “supply and demand!” at me while passing in a supersonic jet. But I learned that without grades, college is a joke that pushes the concept of wasting your time to bold new horizons.
If you’re not familiar with Evergreen, it was founded in 1967 to explore alternative education. Of course, some would argue that it explores alternatives to education. It is admirably free of thick-necked frat guys drunk on Natty Light but somewhat overrun with dreadlocked white kids drunk on the writing of Noam Chomsky. Its claim to fame is that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is an alum, and personally, I think that’s a great feather to have in your cap. Let Penn university tout its ties to Benjamin Franklin and UVA talk up Thomas Jefferson; Evergreen can claim the guy whose work led to lines like “trying is the first step towards failure” and “don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”, which I consider invaluable additions to our national dialogue.
I came to Evergreen in 1998 because it was geographically and culturally as far away from my small town in Virginia as I could get. I considered the lack of grades to be a feature, not a bug; I wanted to see if a school could function without the stress and grade grubbing that were ubiquitous in high school. Evergreen would tell me whether removing that pressure turns students into the best version of themselves or into the laziest version.
Many freshman courses at Evergreen are structured in big, 16-credit “programs” that combine several subjects. To my memory, mine combined art, history, political science, literature, psychology, archaeology, gender studies, law, design, economics, archery, earth science, animal husbandry, and a bit of Taekwondo. A typical week involved reading a book and then producing art and papers based on that book. At least, that’s nominally what a week involved—the week actually involved finding the one person on campus who had read the book, getting info from them, and then one-sixteenth-assing your way through the assignments. At least, this was my habit and the habit of everyone I knew.
On Monday mornings, we would share artwork that we were supposed to have made over the weekend. Of course, the art was actually thrown together that morning as we frantically shoved breakfast in our mouths—I remember the dining hall on Monday mornings basically being an art studio with a waffle station. When we presented our tossed-off masterpieces to the class, the farce was in full swing; we bullshitted instead of saying “this white space represents the fact that I didn’t have time to draw anything else and the tan blotch is oatmeal that I spilled.” But there was no punishment for shoddy work, because there were no grades.
Seminars were equally insipid; they were thirty-person discussions of a book that none of the thirty people had read. I wish one time I had said something like “It’s weird that at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Pa Joad turns out to be a werewolf.” I’m pretty sure the room would have gone with it. In hindsight, these discussions were valuable education, because bullshiting your way through a meeting when you haven’t done the work is a valuable life skill. Even so, a seminar on Of Mice and Men that turns into a discussion of Stuart Little because the word “mice” threw us off is probably not what higher education is meant to be.
My roommate basically did everything he could to fail our program. He didn’t say a single word in a seminar all quarter, partly because we dared him: Once he had already gone several weeks without talking, we challenged him to keep it up for the full term. And he did, and I had to give him my N64 copy of Tetris Attack as a prize. This turned out to be a pure test of Evergreen’s written evaluation system—would our professor note that my roommate had Harpo Marx’d his way through an entire quarter? She did not; my roommate’s evaluation said he “had some good comments in seminars,” and he passed.
I’m sure it’s possible to fail a class at Evergreen. But I didn’t witness it; everyone in my program passed, and I didn’t hear of anyone in any other program failing. It wasn’t so much pass/fail as it was pass/catch-a-really-bad-case-of-mono-and-drop-out, because I did hear of that happening, twice. In short: College without grades did turn out to be a joke. I quickly transferred to a regular college with regular grades, and though my new school had plenty of tossed-off projects and Olympic-level bullshitting during seminars, it wasn’t nearly as bad.
So, my experience does not recommend the burn-it-all-down option in Mounk’s hypothetical. Which means that there’s only one viable option left: Make grades meaningful. It would be nice, after all, if employers knew which students succeeded beyond expectations and which succeeded at fogging up a mirror for eight semesters. It is a problem that grades at top universities are like reviews of movies with “important” themes, which is to say: Every review is positive because the person doing the evaluating doesn’t want to cause problems for themselves. Mounk outlined the institutional barriers to more meaningful grades in his article, and I don’t think the switch would be easy. But based on my experience, the alternative seems unworkable.
Jeff Maurer is a former writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and writes the political comedy blog I Might Be Wrong.
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As a college dropout, mostly because I couldn’t abide paying tuition to a university whose professor made me draw and color maps of Europe, I appreciate this point of view. I also didn’t like being referred to as the devil in my Black Studies class. Or having my psyche destroyed in Acting so it could be remade by a maniac. All those “graduates” however got job interviews in the recession because they have the piece of paper I lack. It’s okay. I did fine ignoring academia, but not everyone can.
No, changing to pass vs fail would just result in everyone getting a pass.
The solution is rank grading. That is how it works in the real world after the little darlings leave the mommy environment of education and have to work. They have to compete not on some defined performance measure, but against their peers.
Working in a unionized steel mill when I was 18, I was surrounded by older coworkers that threatened me to slow my work so the bosses did not start expecting more from them. That is the collectivism sickness. There is a saying in Russia that the workers pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay them.
But in our democratic capitalist society the spoils go to those with demonstrated productive skills in competition with everyone else's demonstrated productive skills.
Just like in athletics, the goal of the coach is to advance both individual and team demonstrated productive skills. The same should be for academics. Students should compete with each other for ranking, but that competition should include their performance working with other students to the benefit of the team (classroom). And the teacher will be required to rank all the students from one to the bottom number of students in the classroom.
That force-ranking requirement will fix grade inflation.