Credit/D/Fail a sign of hypocrisy in Yale grading

If you're anything like my friends, you hunted frantically for a group IV to take Credit/D/Fail. You piled into "Science Fiction, Science Fact" along with half of Yale; you built your schedule around EE101; you were suddenly interested in astrophysics or ecology. Sure, you also shopped some interesting-sounding group IVs—but they weren't available for credit and the professors proudly proclaim that their classes were not guts. This predicament is unsurprising: out of the 302 undergraduate courses in group IV (counting cross-listed courses twice), only 59 make Cr/D/F an option. Overall, the number of Cr/D/F courses available at Yale is a quarter of what it once was.

The disturbing lack of Cr/D/F options is just one example of how grading policy decisions valued for their expediency have actually inhibited academic exploration. These compromises are made palatable through official equivocation about the importance of grades. "A grade is a measure but also a reduction of an educational experience," Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, said, while trying to explain why GPAs are not printed on transcripts. But this symbolic gesture provides no benefit—GPAs are still calculated and used, anyway—and simply inconveniences students who must check and re-check GPAs to make sure they do not misreport them.

Grades and GPAs, despite any of our misgivings, are a measure important to graduate and pre-professional schools and employers. Even Yale College uses grades and a variation on GPA to calculate honors. In fact, the existence of Cr/D/F is a tacit acknowledgement that fear of poor grades can keep students from taking classes that interest them or introduce needless stress into their lives. Offering students an alternative like Cr/D/F—but without any real power to exercise it—is just as empty a gesture as refusing to print a GPA that is nevertheless calculated in their computers. And as long as Yale can claim to believe that GPAs are a "reduction" of a student, it can continue to argue that changes to Cr/D/F, as Brodhead did with me, are impossible and not worth discussing.

Brodhead did send out a letter to faculty urging them to offer their classes for credit, but this clearly did not solve the problem, and he refuses to deny professors autonomy in the matter. He explains that students often abuse the option of taking a class for credit, turning in embarrassingly poor work and lowering the morale of the class. Consequently, professors disallow it entirely. However, there is no reason for all students to suffer due to a few abuses, particularly when it only magnifies the problems in those classes that do offer Cr/D/F. Instead, professors should exercise their right to remove students from a class if they feel they are doing substandard work. Or they could even—gasp!—be more liberal with D's. Yale should have faith in the desire of most of its students to actually learn.

The current policy is only made worse by the deadline for electing a letter grade being so early. The system rewards pessimism and strategizing. And when Brodhead offered students in History Professor Lee Blackwood's class the option to switch Cr/D/F at the end of the semester two years ago, it was a slap in the face for the rest of the college. The reason the option was offered—that there had been confusion about grading—was not one unique to Blackwood's class. In fact, there have been plenty of classes where I had no grades to gauge my performance by the time the Cr/D/F deadline rolled around.

A simple way to protest all of this ridiculousness would have been to mark all of your classes as Cr/D/F on your registration form. If the registrar dealt with the burden of work when the forms to cancel Cr/D/F options come around, maybe the absurdity of the whole thing would finally become apparent to the administration. Even University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, sees the silliness of not printing GPAs on transcripts. "I don't think it would be horrible to write down a number," he said. "I calculate them in my head anyway. I have no idea what the rationale is." Kushal Dave, PC '02, is a senior editor of the Herald.

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