Your professor is teaching a class on sociology of education. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Solomon Ayodele
Some universities have begun to remove marks from first-year courses, replacing them with a simple pass or fail. Supporters argue that this reduces anxiety and encourages students to take unfamiliar subjects. Critics reply that students lose useful feedback about where they stand, that motivation falls without a mark to aim at, and that employers and graduate programmes will simply look elsewhere for a way to rank applicants. Should first-year marks be removed? Why?
Camille
I support it. The strongest evidence is about course choice: where first-year marks have been removed, enrolment in subjects outside a student's main field rises sharply, and it rises most among students who were previously most cautious. That is exactly the behaviour a first year is supposed to encourage and exactly what a marked first year discourages.
Ravi
The enrolment finding is real but I am not sure it survives contact with what happens next. If the first year is unmarked, the second year carries the entire weight of the ranking, and a student who used the first year to explore arrives in the second with less practice at being assessed and everything riding on it. We may simply have moved the anxiety rather than removed it.