Last week, I wrote about getting into college without high school grades or a tradtiional transcript. In this follow up post, I’m going to talk about my actual college experience after a lifetime of education without getting grades or taking high stakes tests.
For context, I went to a liberal arts college with a reputation for extremely intense academics. I don’t think the workload was any higher than other schools, but the intellectual standards were very high and the work quite challenging.
Before college, I never got grades, but I had taken plenty of tests. They were never very high stakes, but I took the SAT several times (which is high stakes, but if you have the privilege to be able to afford it, you can take it several times and lower the stakes) and I’d taken plenty of tests at school, though they were never for a grade, just for feedback.
All of that experience was pretty much irrelevant for college. Standardized tests are very unlike anything in college, at least in my experience (I think this may be less true at huge universities that do large multiple choice finals for first year classes). But regular high school tests aren’t very relevant either. In high school, the expectation is that a good student will get close to 100% of the questions correct, and a poor student should still be getting the majority of questions right. On my very first calculus test in college, I got a two out of ten.
I completely panicked. I was convinced that my entire quirky, alternative education hadn’t prepared me for college after all. It turned out the average score in the class was a one out of ten.
No amount of high school testing is going to prepare you for that because that's not the way high school tests work. But it wasn’t that hard to adapt to, nor was the workload. I wanted to be there, and this was just another new situation. I’d been through many: going to different schools, going to different summer camps, and living in another country for a year.
The thing I found much more difficult to adapt to was getting grades. My alma mater didn’t report grades directly to students. Each semester, you just got a piece of paper that listed your grades as “satisfactory”, unless you were getting below a C. The theory was that grading is very hard, so if you’re getting above a C-, you’re doing just fine. We don't want you to obsess over grades and we’re just not that interested in them. They exist in case you want to go to graduate school.
I think that this was a huge relief for many of my classmates. For me, it made me feel like I was under secret surveillance. That was pretty stressful and difficult. For my first two years, I felt a lot of panic that I wasn’t doing enough work and was a complete failure. I had a lot of depression. (I wasn’t alone in this. Depression and anxiety aren’t uncommon for college students.)
At the end of my second year, my friends convinced me to check my grades. You could do that by asking your advisor or ordering a transcript from the registrar, but it was a really taboo thing to do, so I avoided it for a long time. But I finally ordered a transcript, realized I was doing fine, and was able to relax and mostly enjoy my last two years of college. (In fact, my grades went up in my junior and senior years, when I stopped worrying so much about whether I was working hard enough.)
What made the grading experience so hard was that, for my entire life, my own assessment of my knowledge and my learning was the one that counted the most. Now, it wasn't that I never got feedback. If I did a bad job on something, people would give me feedback, and that feedback helped clarify my picture of what I was doing well and what I needed to work on. But the feedback was always “formative” and meant primarily to support my ability to get better at things I wanted to do.
There was never a “point-in-time” external judgement that would then be attached to me for the rest of my life. But that’s the nature of grades, or at least that’s how they felt to me. This list of letters would determine my options for graduate school, and thus for my ability to meet my career goals. (At the time, getting a math PhD was the be all, end all of my life goals. Wow, I was naive.)
I don't think most of my classmates had so much trouble with this. Honestly, I think most people have been gaslighted into believing that your learning is what your teacher says it is, long before college. Your teacher is the real expert and their assesments are the ones that count; your own assessments are untrustworthy.
So that for me was the biggest adjustment to college. It took a couple years, and I did go through a challenging time. But I don’t think it was any more or less challenging than what most people go through in the transition to college. I was as academically prepared as anyone—a better writer than most; maybe not quite as good at organizing my reading and notes than many—and mature enough to avoid a lot of social drama. I credit that to having space to grow up before college.
But in the end, I came out of colelge side stronger for the challenges, with a much clearer view of the pros and cons of grading (mostly cons) and a really clear sense of the benefits and harms that come with external assessment. I knew I was capable of handling it where it was inevitable, i.e. in a job situation, and when to avoid taking it seriously. And I kept my curiosity intact.