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While I was getting distracted from work I came across an article titled 19 Principal Pros And Cons of the Pass Fail Grading System and being the Curious George that I am, I just had to read it. I've read a lot of these types of posts before and in the past, the concept of pass/fail classes has always intrigued me because it always seemed like an interesting alternative to traditional grade-based evaluation systems.

The main gripe that people have with a lot of grade-based classes is that a lot of the time grade-based classes are curved on a relative basis. Not all classes are curved systematically but those that aren't curved are often subjects of a more subjective nature such as literature for example. These more individualised classes may not be systematically curved but will often be influenced by instructor biases. Even if the class was filled with the Tolstoy's, Austen's, Orwell's of the World, it's not a stretch to imagine that one of those people will get the short end of the stick despite the fact that everyone in that class is world-renowned. This way of curving students systematically or implicitly makes class performance a sort of zero-sum game - for one person to get an A, another has to get a D even though all the students may be more than capable. If you survey Universities across the globe across all levels of prestige, you'll find a similar pattern consistent across all institutions: The majority of those that drop out of their major are those that are at the bottom of their class, it doesn't matter if it's Harvard or a random state school. Psychologists call this phenomenon relative deprivation theory, whereby we are much more sensitive to our relative position within our immediate cohort rather than our absolute position amongst the broader cohort (see where I'm going with this). Since class curving is a zero-sum game, it creates a toxic environment where students are pitted against one another rather than coming together and helping each other learn. (There are a lot more gripes with the whole grading system that I won't get into here but maybe I'll get into them in the future.)

The pass/fail system offers a solution to this by eliminating the grading bell-curve and thus removing the toxic competitive incentive and zero-sum nature that comes with it. I think in an ideal pass/fail system all students can pass, but passing shouldn't necessarily be easy or overly hard but appropriate for the intended outcome. You want to give students a challenge but you also don't want them to aimlessly suffer; the ideal syllabus should motivate students to struggle by showing them the applications of their studies. By eliminating the grading incentive, students can focus on their actual understanding of the material at hand and collaborate with each other rather than fighting over an arbitrary performance metric. By passing a pass/fail class, the student ideally wouldn't merely know the content but actually understand it because the incentives are more aligned with actual understanding.

The 10 arguments the article lists that are supposed disadvantages to a pass/fail system make very weak arguments in my eyes, I am biased here as we all so I'm always willing to hear alternative opinions. The only argument that has some sort of ground currently is the argument that "8. It doesn’t work with our current system of evaluation in schools." I agree. To implement such system would require a major systemic overhaul of traditional education. In the modern world, things catch fire quickly, one just needs to find a tested alternative that is able to be deployed at scale.