My intro to psych course was run this way in college. There were a certain number of points assigned for tasks. You knew how many points you needed to get each grade. All the assignments that got you points were essentially pass - fail. But if you failed you could try again until you passed.

So you could choose to go for an A but there was no guarantee you would get one. And it sounds like that is the case here.

Getting an A was a lot of work. But if you did that work successfully you got an A. You really had to develop competency across a wide variety of areas.

I thought it worked really well, and I found it really motivating.

Much better than the speech professor that told me to my face that he was giving me Cs, not because of the quality of my work - which was A material, but because he didn't like my attitude (I was a punk)

My organization recently started a summer intern program.

I was granted my own intern.

I had to interview 12 19-21 year old college students before I could find one that had some grip on reality and a resume I could understand. Fortunately I found a good one that is going to stay on part-time this fall! There are still some kids that have great potential - but that number is dwindling rapidly.

Way back in the early 70's I had a college History professor that told us on the first day of class that there would be no home work, no tests, no requirement to attend class, and we would tell him what grade we should get. I got an A in that class, but learned almost nothing.
Rod

Much in a way that various publications rank colleges on various desirability characteristics for review by potential students, some organization should publish reviews of colleges by use by potential employers, objectively and numerically ranking them by the rigorousness of the education provided, and the legitimacy of the grades provided.

If this is done, HR staff could review these rankings, and use them to rank applicants by both the GPA the applicant received, and the legitimacy of how GPAs are determined by the college from which it was received. It would think HR organizations would find this very useful, and it would be interesting to see the effect it would have on college desirability by students. It would also be interesting to see how may universities current reputations would compare to objective rankings.

I had a professor who did something similar in law school. But he asked if this was something the class would go for, and would have graded conventionally if we had wanted it.

I asked him about it later, and he said that he had done it before, and that the self-evaluation generated grades that were remarkably consistent with an actual grade curve (bell shaped) and also consistent with his own informal evaluation of the student's performance.

It wouldn't work for very large classes, but he was convinced it worked for smaller classes.

I think that as long as the final grade is based on merit, knowing up front what the cost is for a particular grade is valuable. What eludes me is how grade curves would factor into this. But that’s a common lex discussion in itself.

When I went to Technical school, we did a quarter long project. We picked our project and the instructor told us what grade we would earn if we did it to his satisfaction. We could then switch to one that was harder for a better grade.

It was easy to see who his pets were as they did simple projects and got and A.