“Am I racist if I hold standards for students?”
That was the question presenter Lauren Servais struggled with during a 2021 California Community College webinar on alternative grading strategies. Despite her reservations, Servais ultimately embraced “grading contracts,” an approach to grading in which the teacher distributes marks based on a student’s effort, not the outcome of his or her work.
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Across the country, universities are using this and other alternative grading models that guarantee high marks based on some standard other than merit. Alternative grading schemes like these—often advanced in the name of “equity”—are complicating parallel efforts to address rampant grade inflation, and even spreading the influence of quasi-Marxist ideas in the academy.
The popularity of alternative grading schemes has been rising for years. Teachers of writing courses were early adopters of contract grading, as some questioned whether instructors could consistently and fairly evaluate essays under traditional grading systems. “Specification grading” gained traction in the mid-2010s, particularly in STEM fields; similar to contract grading, it requires students to complete a set of tasks associated with each letter grade in order to achieve that grade.
Contract grading, meantime, evolved into what some called “labor-based grading” by the late 2010s. Asao Inoue, one of its most prominent advocates, draws on Marxian thought on labor and value. Traditional grading systems award value based on quality of work; labor-based grading awards value based on quantity of effort. To Inoue, shifting from traditional to labor-based grading redistributes power in the classroom and advances social justice and antiracist goals.
These practices have significant effects on students’ measured success. In a 2022 report on alternative grading approaches, the University of California Regents highlighted UC Irvine’s organic chemistry department, which adopted grading rules “with a goal that everyone could not only pass, but get an A.” CHEM 128: Introduction to Chemical Biology, a required class for chemistry majors at Irvine, experimented with this grading scheme for the Winter 2022 term. According to data from Zotistic, a tool that collects grade data using public records requests, grade distributions shifted significantly. In Winter 2019, when traditional grading methods were used, 35 percent of students received an A grade. In Winter 2022, with the new system in place, 91 percent did. (UC Irvine did not reply to a comment request.)
Alternative grading schemes aren’t just appearing in California colleges. Universities in Arizona, New York, and Nebraska advertise them, too. Some, like Ohio State University, promote them as an “antiracist assessment.”
Alternative grading creates incentives for professors to grade leniently. Teachers who adopt contract grading tend to earn high ratings in student reviews. In the UC Davis math department, for instance, roughly nine in every ten students surveyed preferred choosing their own grading schemes.
Allowing students to choose their own grading schemes is a bad idea. Students, particularly low performers, will naturally pick systems that work in their favor. At UC San Diego, student Kevin Zhu wrote in 2024 that alternative grading schemes “make a joke out of meritocracy” because they “punish students who try and reward the students who do not.”
Institutional incentives motivate universities to adopt alternative grading methods. University of Houston–Downtown professor Adam Ellwanger noted that contract grading may be especially common in first-year classes or general education courses because “passage rates in general education courses are a major metric by which coordinating boards and legislatures assess institutional effectiveness.”
Harvard is currently trying to combat grade inflation by capping the number of A’s its professors award to students. Other universities, like Yale, which promotes contract grading, are watching and learning from Harvard’s approach. But even if they, too, reduce the number of A’s they give, the “guaranteed B” problem will remain.
In the end, grade inflation is a problem of incentives. Universities that want to restore grades as meaningful measures of student achievement should not waste time on alternative grading approaches that dilute rigor.
Photo: FG Trade / E+ via Getty Images