UC Santa Cruz: The University That Threw Out Grades

Before the first class met in October of nineteen sixty-five, the faculty of the new university on the hill above Santa Cruz voted to eliminate letter grades. This was not a minor administrative decision. It was a declaration about what kind of place this was going to be.

UC Santa Cruz was built on the Cowell Ranch, a cattle and lime operation that had run for almost a century in the redwood hills above the city. The regents purchased the land from the Cowell Foundation in nineteen sixty-one; the university opened on schedule. What its founders wanted was something that had not existed before in the University of California system: a small college, intimate and intellectually adventurous, embedded inside a larger research institution. The model was Oxford and Cambridge, colleges within a university, but the ethos was something distinctly Californian and distinctly of the moment.

The founding chancellor, Dean McHenry, described the vision as one of orderly disorder: a place where learning would be an experience rather than an accumulation of credits and credentials. Grades, in that framework, were the wrong instrument. They measured performance on a scale designed for a sorting machine, and what the founders wanted was not a sorting machine. They replaced the letter grade with narrative evaluations, written assessments of a student's actual work and thinking.

Then the nineteen sixties arrived with full force. The counterculture found UCSC, or UCSC found the counterculture. The university had not planned to become a symbol of radical education, but the founders' experiment and the decade's mood were perfectly matched, and the coincidence gave the whole project an outsized reputation.

The narrative evaluation system survived for decades under pressure from graduate schools that wanted grades. The partial rollback eventually came. The campus remained, red wood and fog and the strange coexistence of the earnest idealism of nineteen sixty-five with the labor history of eighteen seventy.