The Asterisk Year: Grades, Admissions, and Equity in a Pandemic

Julie Posselt, Theresa Hernandez, Deborah Southern, and Steve Desir from the Pullias Center and  Fatima Alleyne from University of California, Berkeley, share their collective perspective on a year that continues to defy description. 

Unprecedented. Extraordinary. Challenging. Difficult. Unusual. Our emails remind us daily that these times are like none other. 2020 gets an asterisk, and we are only half way through. 

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived as many graduate programs were already re-thinking admissions criteria and processes. While equity concerns have helped propel a movement away from the GRE, accelerated by COVID-19, how we treat grades has for the most part gone relatively unquestioned.

Both how we assign grades and make sense of them in admissions deserve a closer look, especially this year. In leading two NSF-funded initiatives (IGEN and C-CIDE) working to advance equity and inclusion in graduate education, we are attuned in particular to the ways that typical admissions practices reproduce inequities for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Grades provide feedback to students about their learning. Grades also shape student aspirations and future opportunities. Today’s students are therefore experiencing anxiety about how their grades in the spring 2020 “asterisk semester” will be interpreted by faculty and others judging their worthiness this fall for admissions, scholarships, and fellowships. For equity in systems and the mental health of those who move through them, educational institutions must take care in both how they construct grading schemes and assign grades.

We get a lot of work done in higher education via mundane routines that involve professional discretion. Assigning grades is one such routine. In admissions, making sense of the grades on a transcript is another. However, evaluation is a racialized process, and biases are baked into such moments of professional discretion, often without accountability. As with so much in the preparation of faculty and teachers, grading is rarely taught and norms for interpreting grades in admissions are implicit.  

Now to this first racialized process (grading) we add a second: responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which have also disproportionately hurt Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities. Many institutions have expanded pass/fail options in a show of empathy for students, whether the move is reacting to these specific inequities or merely to the pandemic. That empathy is a good first step, but only if those faculty tasked with evaluating pass/fail grades for admissions similarly extend empathy.   

Toward providing guidance to admissions decision makers, we have been conducting rapid-response research and convening faculty and administrators to discuss impacts of COVID on graduate education. In individual interviews conducted of 14 professors from STEM graduate programs, ten said their assessment of pass/fail grades in a typical year depends upon additional information in the transcript and application, according to ten of the fourteen professors interviewed. They interpreted pass/fail grading as something that needs triangulating with letter grades from other terms and courses. Nine of the 14 expressed they would not think twice about accepting pass/fail grades related to COVID for Spring 2020. 

The other five indicated that they would be open to pass/fail grading during COVID, but for admissions review they still wanted ways to understand Spring 2020 within their broader story of the applicant. For these five, as with how most made sense of grades in a typical year, performance in 2020 is not to be ignored but contextualized. 

When asked, the professors we interviewed were evenly divided on what advice to give students with six advising pass/fail and the other six advising students to carefully consider their options. This bimodal pattern is consistent with empathetic and strategic varieties of student advising.  The empathetic perspective acknowledged students’ anxiety, and provided unwavering guidance to take courses pass/fail this year. The others suggest various ways of strategically providing an explanation of how COVID had impacted them.

Our research along with knowledge we have gathered from a recent C-CIDE and IGEN co-hosted webinar and panel, as well as from UC-Berkeley College of Engineering workshop series on grading practices suggests some takeaways on how we assign grades:

• Acknowledge that grading is a choice: Instructors can choose student-centered grading practices that motivate learning, and that do more and less to promote equity. 
• Pause to think about the concept of the grade: Ask to what extent a final grade is a true reflection of student learning and how it’s also a signal of privilege/access.  
• Experiment with alternative approaches to assess mastery that motivate learning, such as assigning no grades for homework, allowing exam retakes, and/or adopting a 0-4 grading scale.  
• Don’t try to figure it out alone. Check in with your colleagues and seek expert feedback to help interrogate current practices. There is an established literature on grading.
• Engage faculty and administrators in dialogue about how COVID-19 is affecting student learning and experiences, with a goal of co-constructing equitable norms regarding how you will motivate learning and assign grades in courses– especially online.

USC Rossier Dean Pedro Noguera has written, there is no going “back to normal” after this year. And quoting Roxane Gay, while “the rest of the world yearns for a return to normal. For Black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.” Staring down the remainder of this complicated year, it is important for us all to take moments to pause regularly and think about how small tweaks to our routine actions during this period can steer us toward racial equity.

Just maybe, the asterisk on 2020 will mark not an aberration, but the start of something new.