Marginalium

Pass or fail grading is a good thing? This recent paper (about quite old data) made the rounds a couple months ago, on some US college seeing declining performance when dropping letter grades. I’ve been asked a couple times to look at it by undergrad students in class. It seems like a pretty standard misleading null result? The abstract reads:

Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We … conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.

Which paints the picture of the grade incentive being important to not only effort in the class but ongoing performance.

But this drop in performance is associated only with the (secretly recorded) letter grade of the pass/fail course. There is stable performance (a.k.a. ‘did not increase’) in later courses where letter grades matter again. So dropping letter grades does nothing over time (no better but also no worse), and does very little (23% of a standard deviation!? come on, please) in the class itself. Does that make dropping grades preferable? Maybe we should give these students their effort back, for more influential things.