Persistence Over Perfection

For Smith students, an ideal course grading system is one that inspires learning over lobbying, relationships over rankings.

That is the central finding from a research project that Professor Caroline Melly launched with students in her Anthropology 200/300 course last fall. Through literature reviews, archival research, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with students and faculty, the project explores the “culture” of grading at Smith.

Students will present their findings at an event for fellow students on Wednesday, April 1 at 12:15 p.m. in Campus Center 103/4, and at a Teaching Arts Luncheon for faculty and staff on Friday, April 10 at 12:15 p.m. in Neilson Browsing Room.

For Melly, who is director of Smith’s Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning, the research helps fill existing gaps in understanding about grades at Smith.

Although faculty members have talked about and experimented with different forms of grading over the years, Melly says, “I was surprised to find how little we truly know about grades, and how students’ identities and experiences of success impact their sense of belonging.”

In addition to what the project reveals about grades, Melly hopes it will serve as a model for how research can help people make positive change on campus. “With this project, we wanted to make more complex and human, the student experience of grading,” she says. “I hope it helps us make good policy decisions about teaching and learning.”

The study identifies an important paradox about grading at Smith: Students still want to be graded on their performance and rewarded for individual merit. But they also want a classroom feedback system that leaves more room for risk-taking and failure.

The research also showed that Smith students and faculty share a desire to reduce the stress and anxiety currently associated with grades.

“It can often feel like students and faculty are on opposite ends. But our data shows that students and professors want a lot of the same things,” says Juliana Fernandez ’27, one of five students from Melly’s fall course who are continuing work on the project this semester. “I’m hoping our project can create more community at Smith, with students reaching out to professors they trust for help when they’re feeling overwhelmed.”

With the growing use of AI, concerns about how to properly assess student work are on the rise at colleges and universities nationwide. In recent months, grade inflation—the practice of awarding higher grades for the same or lower levels of student performance—has been in the media spotlight.

As part of their research, Smith students reviewed a report from Harvard University that showed 66 percent of undergraduates there earned A’s and 84 percent earned an A or A-minus in 2024–25. (Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty are due to vote in April on a proposal to cap the number of A grades that instructors can award in each course).

While the Harvard report is useful for identifying issues with grading, the solutions it poses “feel like something you would release to keep everyone quiet and keep things the same,” says Smith research team member Claire Gordon ’26.

Gordon, who is majoring in anthropology, hopes the Smith project “will make an impact on how professors see us as students. Most of us will accept a grade gracefully and without complaints, even if we’re not happy with it."

“If anything, we crave more feedback and connection with professors," she says. “These factors play a much larger role in our academic fulfillment than a 4.0 ever could.”

At a recent working session in Bass Hall, Melly and her students brainstormed about the best ways to present their findings by identifying essential opinions expressed in the interviews they conducted.

Group members also shared ideas for ways to change the culture of grading at Smith, including organizing a “mistake fair” where students and faculty share stories about how they’ve learned from failures.

When asked about what she learned from the project, Nuala MacDonald ’27 said she found “investigating meritocracy as an ideology and a practice” particularly eye opening.

“I was surprised by how much time and energy we use in school and society to rank people, when this is clearly an impossible task,” said MacDonald, who is a member of the Smith rowing team and an intern at the Wurtele Center for Collaborative Leadership. 

“We are who we are because of the mistakes we've made,” MacDonald added. “This research gave me a lot of hope for building more vulnerable classroom cultures where persistence and patience matter more than perfection.”

Other members of this semester’s grading culture research team are Alivia Liu ’28 and Tyresse Oviedo-Fermin ’26.