Proposal to Require Grades Stirs Up UC Santa Cruz

It doesn’t have a football team, ROTC military training or required grades. But now professors at notoriously liberal UC Santa Cruz are seeking to change that.

At least the grades part.

More than a third of the university’s 588 faculty members pushed Friday for a vote on a policy change to require that all 11,000 students receive grades. Professors met and decided later in the day to postpone the vote so they could gather more input from students and staff.

More than 1,000 students attended the Friday night meeting, expecting a vote on the controversial issue. Professors were forced to walk a 300-foot path lined with hundreds of silent students linking arms and holding signs.

“Grades are a method of sorting vegetables,” one sign read.

The move to issue letter grades would abolish a three-decade tradition at the Redwood-fringed campus, where students have been evaluated in brief essays describing their course work and learning.

Students indignant over the proposal said they didn’t come to UC Santa Cruz for traditional grades.

“I don’t ever want to get grades,” said Jen Sethsong, a junior sociology major. “Grades say nothing--A, B, C, D, F--but a narrative evaluation talks in detail about my strong and weak points.”

UC Santa Cruz, which opened in 1965 as an alternative to more traditional University of California campuses, has shifted its grading policy over the years.

These days students can get a grade if they want one, but last year only one in three students took that option.

Last month, 187 faculty members asked the Academic Senate to dump the narrative tradition altogether.

“The narrative evaluation system has an honorable history, but times have changed and a new approach to grading is required,” the professors wrote.

They said that eliminating evaluations--which now are optional--would help the university attract and retain students with strong academic records and make it easier for graduate schools and employers to evaluate student achievement.