grades are stupid
Harvard’s been handing out participation trophies. They’re called “A’s”.
A recent study showed that Harvard’s share of A’s has skyrocketed from 25% to 60% over the past 20 years. And its median GPA is 4.0!
That said, I’m not even worried about the grade inflation.
i’m concerned with the very idea of even grading college courses
“nice to know” vs “need to know”
You don’t need to assess mastery in “nice to know” subjects, like art history or cultural anthropology. No one’s losing their job because they forgot who won the Battle of Hastings.
So, why even bother assessing people’s performance in these liberal art subjects?
If they learn something? Great. It will be a part of their corpus of knowledge that makes them well rounded. And if they forget everything? Well, that’s a shame, but that’s all it is and nothing more.
But when it comes to the “need to know” realms, like job skills, grades are a garbage way to measure mastery.
No ER patient is asking their surgeon, “Hey, what grade did you get in med school?”
they care whether the surgeon is great at their job
And the best ways to measure mastery of job skills are the ways that they’re measured in the real world.
Customer interviews and surveys
360-degree performance reviews
“Just knowing” who the best people are via long-term chatter in the ether
If you’re preparing students for the real world, judge them the way the real world does.
pega6 performance reviews
We don’t hand out A’s. We don’t even hand out grades.
We assess our students the same way the working world does—by evaluating the quality of their work and their ability to collaborate effectively.
Our thought process:
Is their work product strong?
Are they great to work with?
Do they absorb feedback and level up or just nod and hope it goes away?
to drive growth, we run bi-monthly 360-degree performance reviews
Students receive direct, honest input from their peers and managers based on their performance in our rigorous sequence of product builds—the backbone of the pega6 experience. These aren’t hypothetical assignments; they’re cross-functional commercial-grade product builds designed to replicate the pace and pressure of a professional environment.
These reviews are the predominant mechanism for feedback, growth, and evaluation at pega6. They help students identify where they’re crushing it and where they need to dig in, and they acclimate them to the exact kind of feedback loop they’ll encounter in the actual workplace.
No one ever received a grade or a test score at work. So, they shouldn’t in their post-secondary education either.
