Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.
“I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I’m in.” The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, “is not the coursework. It’s learning how to be an adult.”
That took a toll on her grades. “I didn’t do well,” said Malak, who powered through and is now in her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC.
Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.
Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.
Read more at NPR.org
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