TORONTO – When the University of Toronto Faculty of Law
decided to take a look at its grading system, it wasn’t considered anything
other than regular housekeeping.
But the advisory committee appointed for this purpose hit on
a revolutionary idea: replacing the letter grades the school has been handing
out since its inception in 1887 with a five-category system. Instead of A through F, the new system would be High Honours, Honours, Pass, Low-Pass, and
Fail.
“We did our own research,” assistant dean Sara Faherty said.
“We looked at a number of peer institutions in Canada and the U.S.”
They looked at the psychology of giving grades and found
that fewer grading categories correlated with less stress and anxiety.
Faherty noted that students were extremely motivated on
arrival into law school, but focused a lot on their GPAs and choosing courses
based on which one had the potential for an easy grade. The school wants them
to focus on their intellectual engagement with the subject as well, she said.
“We wanted to reward excellent performance, we wanted to
motivate,” Faherty explained. “We really felt like we landed on a system that
worked really well for our students.”
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Other stress relievers the law school has employed include
“doggie visit” days and reflexology treatments.
The president of the students’ law society, Aaron Rankin, is
graduating this year.
“Students, I think, understand that the function of grades
is to communicate relative performance, so giving old grades new names is a
modest step that may not affect most students’ perceptions of the grading
system,” he said.
“However, I applaud the faculty’s interest in students’
well-being.”
Promise Holmes Skinner is a second-year law student at the U
of T. As part of her position on the Caucus (the branch of student government
dealing with academic affairs), she knew that the advisory committee was
looking into alternative grading systems. She thinks the new system, if implemented,
would save future students some stress.
“Most of us have never earned a grade lower than an A before
coming to law school,” she explained. “Receiving a B may be a blow to a law
student’s ego, but I don’t think the faculty is concerned about protecting
students’ egos.”
Instead, she believes the school wants to show students that
if they’ve met the school’s standard, then they get a Pass, and if they’ve
surpassed it, they get either Honours or High Honours.
“I think that receiving a Pass will have a far less negative
connotation than a B, and an Honours is far more satisfying than a B+,” she
said.
The school hopes to see if they can implement the new system
in the fall for the new batch of students. If that happens, current students
will follow the same grading system until they graduate.
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