The lack of grades isn’t the first thing you see when you enter one of these schools. The bulletin boards are the cause. Where you would typically expect a list of honor roll names, there are lengthy, narrative-style write-ups about students—paragraphs, not numbers—pinned. An evaluation for a senior is more akin to a recommendation letter than a report card. Almost instantly, it seems like something is being done differently here, and those who are doing it don’t care if the rest of the nation agrees.
A tiny but increasing number of American high schools have been discreetly ceasing to assign grades for years. Not a single A. No Bs. No GPA. Not a class rank. Written feedback, mastery descriptors, portfolios, and the odd enigmatic phrase like “demonstrates emerging fluency” can take their place. It sounds like a parent’s worst nightmare, particularly for the type of parent Jeff Selingo refers to as the “panicking class”—families who have persuaded themselves that any transcript that isn’t number-ranked, color-coded, and optimized for admissions is a covert act of sabotage. However, while their parents anxiously check their email, teenagers are graduating from these institutions and gaining admission to Brown, Wesleyan, Pomona, and occasionally the state flagship.
Admissions officers are unsure of how to handle them. For some time now, that has been the standard joke. “Can you walk me through what I’m looking at?” was the first question a counselor at one of these schools told me a few years ago when she received a call from a reader at an Ivy League school. For these children, the school profile—a two- to four-page document that Selingo and other higher-ed observers have claimed is one of the most crucial and often overlooked components of an application—becomes the entire game. Everything must be explained. The curriculum, the community, the grading philosophy, and the reasoning. The application does not land if the profile is not sharp.
It’s possible that these schools are actually making admissions officers read more carefully, which can be either a benefit or a burden depending on the time of year and the number of applicants. A reader at a prestigious university in the Northeast acknowledged that she truly anticipates those files. According to her, they resemble reading about an individual. It is not a spreadsheet.
Of course, there is skepticism. Parents are concerned. Traditional high school counselors scoff. It is argued that in the absence of grades, schools lose a comparable metric and students lose a clear indication of where they stand. You make a valid point. However, the no-grade schools have been arguing for years that grades were never as comparable as anyone claimed. One school’s B is another’s A. In Boise, a weighted 4.3 indicates something different than it does in Bethesda. When you spend enough time with the apparatus, it begins to resemble a collective myth that everyone has come to believe in.
The fact that these schools even exist is fascinating. It’s because prestigious universities continue to accept students, sometimes at rates that subtly surpass those of the nearby high-pressure prep schools. It’s difficult to tell if this is an intriguing anomaly or the beginning of something. Seldom does the system change rapidly. However, the no-grade experiment at least raises the question, “What is a transcript actually for?” for a procedure Selingo describes as opaque even to insiders. For once, it seems like the most honest part of the entire process to watch admissions officers struggle with the answer in real time, half-confused, half-curious.
