‘F’ Is for Future Shock at Santa Cruz

SANTA CRUZ — There’s something new on the University of California’s campus here: For the first time in a quarter-century, students can get a D or even an F.

That’s F as in fail, flunk, flameout. . . .

Grades are still merely an option at UC Santa Cruz, a school so well known for its laid-back style and beautiful setting that people used to joke that its initials stood for “Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp.”

So the free spirits who sit in classes amid the towering redwoods are not exactly trembling with anxiety.

Nonetheless, some students--and many former ones--are fearful of the new option that allows freshmen to accumulate grade-point averages.

Why? Because it threatens to make UC Santa Cruz just like any school.

To them, the advent of GPAs, class rankings and bell curves is part of an insidious campaign to rob the campus of a distinct spirit that fosters learning for learning’s sake and allows students to take an intellectual flier without risking a nasty mark on their transcripts.

“It is just another step toward normalizing Santa Cruz and taking it from an experimental place of higher education to another business for UC Regents Incorporated,” said senior Michele Jenkins, a linguistics major. “A lot of freshmen are going to opt for grades and Santa Cruz is going to lose a lot of its uniqueness.”

More specifically, critics see the faculty’s push for grades as foreshadowing the demise of the “narrative evaluation,” which is at the heart of the school’s unusual way of measuring performance.

Professors now write a paragraph, sometimes a page, evaluating each student’s class work. That is, if the student passes.

If they do not pass--hardly anyone says “fail” here--they get no credit, but there’s no blot on their record. No mention of the class. No grade. Nothing.

Although school officials promise that professors will continue to write the narrative evaluations, some see Santa Cruz venturing onto one of those proverbial slippery slopes. As former Registrar C. James Quann put it: “Any reasonable person would realize that as soon as you take the step they have taken, the narratives will slowly disappear and grades will come into the fore.”

But in voting by a 2-1 margin to adopt grade-point averages, faculty members said such a move was necessary to recruit the super-smart, goal-oriented students who professors worry are being lost to other schools.

The vote, taken last year, gave students a choice this fall in each class: stick with pass / no pass or go for complete grades.

And there it was, a huge black banner hanging on a barn at the campus entrance, reminding students of their option by playing off the “Got Milk?” national advertising campaign. The banner here asked: “Got Grades?”

The deadline to choose was last week. In essence, students had to pick not only between grading systems, but competing visions of UC Santa Cruz’s future.

A Long Tradition as Alternative Campus

From the start, the school set out to be different from other UC campuses.

“Cast in the crucible of the counterculture movement” as Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood likes to say, the school opened in 1965 as an alternative to impersonal universities where faculty were criticized for fleeing teaching to do research.

Modeled after Oxford and Cambridge, Santa Cruz was split into intimate residential colleges where students ate and slept, took classes and had no choice but to develop first-name relationships with faculty. Professors had “slack time” scheduled into their days so classroom discussions could continue over coffee.

Founding Chancellor Dean McHenry also wanted to free students from the tyranny of grades.

“Our attitude is that every one of these students is an honor student and can make the grade,” he said at the time. “We want to avoid intense pressure on students for grades, the kind of thing that can mark a person for life or even make him want to commit suicide.”

Passions ran high in favor of using a pass / fail system with personalized evaluations. The late historian Page Smith, who left UCLA to join the Santa Cruz experiment, said: “It seems to me as silly and unnatural to ‘grade’ my students as it would be to grade my children. Each has different merits and deficiencies.”

Conventional grades were an option in select courses. But fewer than 5% of students opted for them. And the faculty soon declared even that system too harsh.

In 1971, the Academic Senate converted the pass / fail system into a pass / no record system. And for the small number of students who insisted on grades, the Ds and Fs were eliminated--they could get A’s, Bs, Cs, but none of them could fail.

However touchy-feely that may seem today, UC Santa Cruz was among the most popular of the nine UC campuses during those halcyon days--attracting students who posted the highest average SAT scores in the elite system.

Now, two decades later, its incoming students have the second-lowest SAT scores of any UC campus, ahead of only UC Riverside.

Clearly, the times they are a changin’ at Santa Cruz.

But not in every sense.

Most students still live in eight residential colleges overlooking the Pacific and the campus has avoided many of the trappings of the Big U, preferring a casual, quirky existence befitting its locale in a funky beach town with a huge roller coaster right on the water.

The school has no football team and an unlikely mascot, the banana slug. Former Black Panther Angela Davis teaches in the history of consciousness department.

At the same time, UC Santa Cruz has grown into a sizable research university. Its student body is 10,000-strong and is set to rise to 15,000 in seven years. This fall it added a school of engineering.

And limited though the grading option has been, the percentage of students choosing it has risen, from 6% in 1982 to 19% last year.

High school students are not what they once were, either. They are more career-oriented than a generation ago, more intent on using college to “get ahead” than to explore existential questions.

So although UC Santa Cruz has many well-respected programs, such as in psychology and ocean sciences, California’s best high school students are going elsewhere in a UC system that includes Berkeley and UCLA. To fill out its growing rosters, the school now admits everyone who meets minimum UC qualifications.

As the SAT scores have dropped, campus boosters have become sensitive about Santa Cruz’s image. There’s open resentment, for instance, over a graduate’s recent film, “Glory Daze,” which portrayed life here “as so cushy,” in the words of one reviewer, “that it could almost serve as a university promotional film for slackers.”

It was in that context that officials here began rethinking the campus’s niche.

A Step Toward the Mainstream

A 1993 survey found that UC Santa Cruz was the largest school in North America to offer narrative evaluations. Only 17 of the 3,700 colleges and universities took such an approach to grading. Nearly all the others were small alternative private colleges, such as Bennington and Sarah Lawrence.

Last year, the Academic Senate proposed a step toward the mainstream as a way to draw more top students. That was the option of full grades, meaning that incoming freshmen could begin accumulating GPAs.

It would be a small step, though. Not only would the grades be optional, class by class, the students who opted for them would have an escape hatch--the right to drop a course up to the last week of the 10-week terms.

Still, the proposals were enough to mobilize fierce opposition.

“Let there be one place that could be different,” said Diana Reece, a member of the Alumni Council, which sent a letter to every professor, then phoned them to share scripted points of persuasion. “Some of the conversations were quite emotional. Our message was, ‘Don’t vote for the grade-point system.’ Theirs was a cry, a plea. They were saying, ‘We understand and feel with you that this was a great system. It is just not working anymore.’ ”

The faculty argued that students on occasion have had difficulty getting into graduate schools without grade-point averages. Although a survey of 1993 graduates found that 93% who wanted to continue their education were accepted by a graduate school, a study of aspiring doctors gave a discouraging diagnosis: Only 32% got into medical school in 1996--below the national average of 37%.

That prompted testimonials from alumni such as Michael S. Brown, who said narrative evaluations helped him get into Cornell’s graduate school in city planning. “A faculty member turned to me,” he recalled, “and said, ‘After reading your transcript, I knew you. I knew exactly what we were getting when we picked you.’ ”

But teachers here insisted there was at least a perception that the lack of GPAs handicaps graduates.

“The word has spread to high school counselors,” said physics professor George Brown. “As a result, students who have any doubt about their careers will opt not to come to Santa Cruz.”

The faculty commitment to narrative evaluations also had waned as the founding professors retired, younger ones took over and the student-faculty ratio rose from 9-1 to 19-1. Professors now have to pump out 30,000 evaluations three times a year.

“The really critical issue is ‘Can we continue to do the narratives?’ ” said economics professor John Isbister. “We don’t get any funding for them, any extra time [for] the enormous burden to do them year after year.”

Even so, Isbister advocated retaining the narratives, saying that they engage students in learning, not gamesmanship.

“When a student comes in and asks me about tax policy, I know they are really interested in tax policy,” he said. “At other places I’ve taught, when a student comes in to ask about tax policy, really what that student wants to know is, ‘What do I need to do to get an A in this course?’ ”

Not surprisingly, the narratives had fewer defenders among professors in the sciences and those who lecture to large classes. Some keep “ghost grades” to track the performance of hundreds of students in basic courses--even if the students never see them.

“The science people really favor a grading system,” said chemistry professor Olof Einarsdottir. “The narratives can be a pain when you have a class of 300. If you get an A, you really don’t need a narrative. You are an excellent student.”

For now, though, Einarsdottir and other faculty will have to continue writing the longer evaluations--even for students who get grades. That was part of the system voted in here in March 1996, then forwarded to UC authorities for endorsement. “I think it is probably the right direction,” said UC President Richard C. Atkinson.

That left one final group to vote--the students.

The ground rules were laid out in course catalogs and fliers that greeted them when they arrived this fall: They would have until Oct. 15 to make their decision in each class. If they wanted a grade-point average, they would have to opt for letter grades in at least two-thirds of their classes. They would get grades only if they notified the registrar--otherwise they would be evaluated under the old system.

Given alumni outrage at the grades, administrators braced for the students’ reaction.

Faculty and administrators gathered earlier this month for one of a set of campus forums on the subject at the Wagstaff Fireside Lounge, expecting undergraduates to pepper them with questions. They waited more than an hour. No one showed up.

Where were they?

Mathew Uretsky, a 17-year-old from Moorpark, was sitting on a nearby lawn while a fellow student, Kendall Schwartz, braided his hair. He said he was considering studying literature and was having no trouble making his decision--no grades.

“For the journey I want to take in life, the evaluations are a lot better,” he said. “With an evaluation, you are thinking and learning, not just trying to parrot the professor to get a good grade.”

Across campus, at the Sinsheimer Labs, the science crowd also seemed set on a plan, the same one favored by their professors.

“I’m going to go with grades just to be safe,” said freshman Jessica Denton, 18, a biology major. “I’ve heard a lot of grad schools don’t like the narratives. We talked about it in my dorm. Among freshmen, it’s weird to get to decide. We’ve always had grades.”

Of course, the upperclassmen have not always had them, at least not complete grades.

“It will affect some people’s GPAs,” Rebecca Vega, a senior in marine and molecular biology, said of the new Ds and Fs. “People used to say, ‘Oh, I failed a class. No big deal. It won’t show up on my transcript.’ But now it can.”

Even before the registrar’s office had the full tally, it was clear that a low percentage of the veteran students would go for full grades. Indeed, the final count last week showed that only 26% exercised the option.

The freshmen, in contrast, “Got Grades” at a 34% rate.

How to interpret it?

The group fearful that UC Santa Cruz has stepped onto a slippery slope may view it as the start of a trend that will see each new class embrace the sort of grading system found on most any campus.

Or perhaps it’s evidence that Santa Cruz is still Santa Cruz.

At least for the moment, it remains a magnet for the children of the children of the 1960s.

Students like Lilac Serra, 17, of Marin County, who was sitting at a picnic table in the sunshine, reading through her--yes, lilac-colored--sunglasses. She reported that she’s the daughter of a “hippie lawyer”--well-known San Francisco defense attorney Tony Serra--and that two of her brothers went here. Their names? Shelter and Ivory.

“This school worked very well for them,” she said. “I like the freedom of it. There are a lot of opportunities here, and not a lot of stress like at other places.”

Her grading choice? Pass / no record will do just fine, thank you.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Changing Campus

UC Santa Cruz once attracted students with the highest SAT scores in the University of California’s nine-campus system. But in recent years, scores at Santa Cruz have been among the lowest.

AVERAGE TOTAL SAT SCORES FOR INCOMING FRESHMAN

Note: Test was rewritten in 1995, and scores rose.

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STUDENTS’ CHOICES

This fall the university gave students the option of receiving the full range of letter grades.

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Letter Pass/ grades no pass Freshmen 34% 66% Upperclassmen 26% 74%

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Science students are more likely to opt for grades than those in other fields.

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Letter Pass/ grades no pass Science 50% 50% Social sciences 21% 79% Humanities 15% 85% Arts 13% 87%

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Sources: UC Santa Cruz, UC president’s office