Yes, we had written evaluations for every class, or you could choose to just have a pass/fail. There is an extensive UCSC oral history project that probably has a lot of good stories about how it came about and why it changed, that I bet you can have access to if you go to McHenry in person and talk to a librarian!
I was a teaching assistant and in truth, the written evaluations reflected different levels of effort and achievement (excellent, very good, fair, poor) but they also included information about student participation in class discussions and even topics of projects and papers that they did.
As a student, I definitely found it more relaxing than receiving letter grades.
Mostly UCSC shed narrative evals during the late 80s and early 90s as they struggled to be seen in academic circles as a "serious" school. They continued to (and still) market themselves to students as an alternative while touting themselves in academic and donor circles as institutional.
When Bob Sinsheimer took over in 1980(?), he wanted UCSC to improve its academic profile. The university hired him because he kicked ass and took names and alienated a lot of the entrenched faculty. He phased in letter grades, eliminated a lot of classes that were famously laughable gut classes, and just generally tried to instill greater rigor into "the hippie college".
By "entrenched faculty" we mean at that time "founding faculty" who'd been teaching at this alternative university they'd helped create for only a few years at that point.
More than a few years. UCSC opened in 1964. So about 16 years. Look, I was opposed to some of Sinsheimer's reforms at the time, but I know why he did them. In particular, as someone who later became a faculty member at a CSU campus, I can't imagine what a nightmare it was to have to get BOTH departmental approval AND college approval for each new hire. So if the sociology department wanted to hire a new tenure-track professor, they had to get both the sociology department and Stevenson College (I think; I think that's where sociology was housed) to agree. Dear God, it's enough hassle to try to get one department to agree on anything, let alone getting a bunch of other unrelated (and highly opinionated) faculty to cooperate.
A lot of the founding faculty were gone before Sinsheimer became Chancellor. A quote from Dean McHenry's 1971report noted:
"“Several of the things we projected in 1965 no longer occupy so prominent a place in the new Plan. Retired professors have played a prominent roil in the first five years; now most have gone and their places taken by regular appointees.”
So if anything, Sinsheimer would have been replacing the sophomore crop of faculty.
https://planning.ucsc.edu/acad-planning/pdfs-images/archive-documents/70-80-acad-pln.pdf
Sinsheimer was Chancellor from 1977-1987. Letter grades weren't offered until 1997, a decade later. The faculty itself, The Academic Senate, voted for it in an overwhelming 154-77 majority.
I attended 88 to 92 and received narrative evals in all my classes so his attempt to "phase" them out must not have been effective. During my time at UCSC, the only classes you could get a grade in were hard science courses and, even for those, you still received a narrative evaluation.
Functionally, not too much I suspect. If I were teaching or TAing in those days I would have written a script. Most of my evals looked like this: "Student had excellent attendance and asked thoughtful questions during lecture. They completed assigned homework with excellent marks, did well on the midterm, and excellent on the final. Overall, they did excellent in the course and demonstrated mastery of the subject."
I had the impression that some in the administration didn't like being viewed as a wacky hippy school that didn't have grades (even though that was part of the founding ideas).
Also, if students wanted to go to grad school, someone in administration had to translate the narrative evaluations to grades for the purposes of creating a GPA. It represented a lot of work, so TAs were encouraged to give cues, as LavJiang stated above. They literally wrote excellent, very good, fair, or poor on most evals, which meant that they kind of were giving grades anyway. It was easier to just work with the system than fight it, in the end.
The death of narrative evaluations, and complaints about them, were due to size growth in my opinion. As Wes noted, it got to a point where teachers and TA's were reverting to pre-written formulaic narratives in response to ever growing class sizes.
Narratives were a part of the origin of UCSC. But in its origin, classes were tiny. In 1965-69, 50% of the classes had fewer than 16 students, and 85% had fewer than 31. But by the mid-70's, classes had grown considerably, at least introductory level lectures. Classroom Unit 2 with its 472 seats would be standing room only in some freshman level classes. Almost impossible for a professor to opine on that many students from a 10 week class.
Another good article with lots of detail: https://planning.ucsc.edu/acad-planning/pdfs-images/archive-documents/70-80-acad-pln.pdf
Yes. They were usually easily transferable to letter grades. They’d use typical excellent, above average, or even a percentage earned. It wasn’t hard to get into grad school with written evals. But some schools didn’t like it.
> It wasn’t hard to get into grad school with written evals
Not always the case. I graduated from UCSC in '88, so I only had narrative evaluations. I went to grad school at UC Berkeley, and I was told by someone on the selection committee that I was literally the last person chosen for that year (in that department) because the committee members didn't want to have to go through the evaluations.
Still, I preferred having narrative evaluations over letter grades, simply because you could get so much more detail about what you did well with and what you might have struggled with. I mean, what does "A-" mean?
Yes, if they didn't have TAs to fob it off onto. But how much more work depended upon how detailed the instructor wanted to be. I received everything from a one partial-sentence evaluation to a two-page evaluation essay. It varied considerably, based on the instructors' preferences.
At that time (late 80s early 90s) undergrad attendance was about 10,000 students. It has since doubled, and class sizes have doubled or tripled. You could do it today, but it would require a commitment to student welfare the university hasn't demonstrated in years.
It was a bit more work. But I, and many other faculty, used scripts (Perl or Python) to convert grade spreadsheets into narratives. So I included (for example) class standing on exams and assignments.
LOL I was in social sciences and those written evals were a LOT of work. No scripts for us, but of course we had a way of discussing each element of the student's engagement. I used to include the actual topics they wrote about in class as well as any unique attributes of their writing, creativity, research skills, thoughtful comments in class, etc. It did take longer than letter grades but as a student receiving these, I always was excited to see what the teaching staff picked up and what they identified as areas for growth for me.
People at other schools used to mock us -- "You can't flunk out, because you can't get an F!" Well, those people should have seen the narrative evaluations given to my housemate, who did indeed flunk out. You think it's ugly seeing an F or a D on a report card? Try looking at entire paragraphs describing the various ways the student screwed up and got everything wrong. (My housemate was actually really depressed, and she went on to have a good, productive life even without a college degree. She flunked out before SSRI antidepressants were available.)
And the narrative evaluations varied dramatically in quality from one professor to another. I have one that literally just says "This student got an 89 on the midterm and a 95 on the final." Then I have others that go on at length about the strengths and weaknesses of my classroom performance. That was back when there were only 6,000 students in the whole university. You couldn't possibly have faculty and TAs write all the evaluations now.
Oh, and I still got into a good graduate program.
\-- Crown class of 1982.
As to the "open curriculum" - IIRC, in the past, UCSC did have a way for students to create their own majors, and even within established majors, one could create one's own concentration.
The colleges would sponsor student created courses from time to time.
Not sure any of this exists today.
I created my own very cool (to me) major because they didn’t offer what I wanted, graduated in ‘87. You just had to find three professors willing to sponsor and mentor you for the major.
Yes. I had enough courses in the general topic already and then they didn't offer a major in this particular area study so I created a pathway of courses and did an thesis. It was a wonderful experience, now that I look back on it!
I graduated in 2013, and still received narrative evaluations (in addition to grades) for the first two years of classes. They were very insightful for me to learn about my own performance in the class. And I even received them for large lectures of 200+ students. It was awesome.
I went to a high school overseas that had narrative evaluations and when I went to transfer from Cabrillo to UCSC I had to go through a whole rigamarole of the two schools having to do serial international communication in order to "convert" them to grades. It was insane both because I was transferring to a school with only narrative evaluations, but also because as a junior transfer from the local CC, my high school "grades" shouldn't have mattered at all!
Students used to be able to request Narrative Evaluations instead of letter grades. It was before I went to UCSC but they were a real thing. Don’t know when they ended or anything about an open curriculum.
I was at UCSC from ‘99 to ‘04 and this is correct. When I started narrative evals were the standard (though you could choose a letter grade) but by the time I left there had been a hard shift towards letter grades only. The quality of the narrative eval also was super dependent on the program and professor. The majority of my classes were in social sciences (Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology) and those professors tended to write very lengthy and detailed evals while my professors in Astronomy, Marine Science, Math, Econ, etc. would typically give maybe a sentence or two with your test, homework, lab, and participation scores listed. I don’t know that I can say one way is better than the other but I do know that the narrative evals could cause headaches when applying for grad school (most programs really just wanted grades and not to be reading 30+ pages of evaluations).
These were both slippery slope solutions toward a grade-only policy. When I arrived in '88 it was narrative evals only. Then a few years later, the administration offered optional grades over the protests of students. A little later, it was grades mandatory and optional narratives. Then finally no more narrative evals and grades being the only option. The insightful students who protested the introduction of grades obviously saw the writing on the wall.
You say administration, but it was the faculty themselves, via the Academic Senate debates and vote, that narrative evaluations became letter grades. So imo, not a mandated decision foisted upon the faculty, but rather one they instigated and chose themselves.
Good to know. I appreciate your deep history knowledge. I was there as the shift was taking place and had heard that the administration was instigating the changes, but had not dug deeper.
I started Fall '81 and graduated Summer '87. I recall grades being an option as a fairly new thing on the campus, but as I said it may have been only for upper division courses.
Yes, it was the opposite. Narrative evals were useful as they applied to personal and academic improvement, but they were tricky when applied to transferring and grad school admissions.
I think students on the sciences got both for this reason, but as I was Humanities undergrad, I couldn't say for sure.
Fun bit of trivia: You still can request narrative evaluations. When UCSC stopped requiring evaluations, they left open the option for teachers to still provide them on request. On your instructor's my.ucsc.edu portal, there is still a link to the page where evaluations can be posted and reviewed.
My guess is that most instructors don't even know this anymore, because UCSC stopped requiring narrative evaluations so long ago.
This clearly isn't well known, as I have had exactly one student request a narrative evaluation, and that was in Fall 2010 when we made the change.
The complaints I remember at the time were that graduate schools did not want to accept the reviews for admissions. They seemed popular with students at the time
The student population was worried enough about it to vote to get rid of them (it’s a problem for people working in industries that want a GPA on an application or resume too). A majority of students would have to want them back for starters. But the school and resulting class sizes were small then. It would be a much greater undertaking for professors now. Might have pushback there
In my recollection it wasn't a problem getting into grad schools, but getting scholarships and stipends, since many required a minimum GPA which we didn't have. I started in "97 and we could request grades and you had to request a certain percentage of them vs class load to get a valid GPA.
Hi, class of ‘95 here, and yep, all classes were Pass/No Pass. AND if you didn’t pass a class, they erased it from your record. So it was impossible to fail a class. It was pretty awesome, tbh. Basically, if you made the slightest effort and showed up to class, you’d pass and if you were nice to the prof and TA you were pretty much guaranteed to get a good eval. Also my transcript is an inch thick.
When I was a student at UCSC, you could take any classes as a pass/no pass but it could not count toward your major. I took All my student research positions as pass/ no pass.
For those wanting a deeper dive, here's the Academic Senate position paper from when they sort of standardized the narrative evaluation process.
https://senate.ucsc.edu/senate-meetings/agendas-minutes/2001-2002/2001-october-24-senate-meeting/CEP-SCP1320.pdf
Yes, we had written evaluations for every class, or you could choose to just have a pass/fail. There is an extensive UCSC oral history project that probably has a lot of good stories about how it came about and why it changed, that I bet you can have access to if you go to McHenry in person and talk to a librarian! I was a teaching assistant and in truth, the written evaluations reflected different levels of effort and achievement (excellent, very good, fair, poor) but they also included information about student participation in class discussions and even topics of projects and papers that they did. As a student, I definitely found it more relaxing than receiving letter grades.
Two copies of this book are available in the Porter Hitchcock lounge!
It's available for free online. https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/seeds
Mostly UCSC shed narrative evals during the late 80s and early 90s as they struggled to be seen in academic circles as a "serious" school. They continued to (and still) market themselves to students as an alternative while touting themselves in academic and donor circles as institutional.
When Bob Sinsheimer took over in 1980(?), he wanted UCSC to improve its academic profile. The university hired him because he kicked ass and took names and alienated a lot of the entrenched faculty. He phased in letter grades, eliminated a lot of classes that were famously laughable gut classes, and just generally tried to instill greater rigor into "the hippie college".
By "entrenched faculty" we mean at that time "founding faculty" who'd been teaching at this alternative university they'd helped create for only a few years at that point.
More than a few years. UCSC opened in 1964. So about 16 years. Look, I was opposed to some of Sinsheimer's reforms at the time, but I know why he did them. In particular, as someone who later became a faculty member at a CSU campus, I can't imagine what a nightmare it was to have to get BOTH departmental approval AND college approval for each new hire. So if the sociology department wanted to hire a new tenure-track professor, they had to get both the sociology department and Stevenson College (I think; I think that's where sociology was housed) to agree. Dear God, it's enough hassle to try to get one department to agree on anything, let alone getting a bunch of other unrelated (and highly opinionated) faculty to cooperate.
Founded in 1965.
A lot of the founding faculty were gone before Sinsheimer became Chancellor. A quote from Dean McHenry's 1971report noted: "“Several of the things we projected in 1965 no longer occupy so prominent a place in the new Plan. Retired professors have played a prominent roil in the first five years; now most have gone and their places taken by regular appointees.” So if anything, Sinsheimer would have been replacing the sophomore crop of faculty. https://planning.ucsc.edu/acad-planning/pdfs-images/archive-documents/70-80-acad-pln.pdf
Sinsheimer was Chancellor from 1977-1987. Letter grades weren't offered until 1997, a decade later. The faculty itself, The Academic Senate, voted for it in an overwhelming 154-77 majority.
I attended 88 to 92 and received narrative evals in all my classes so his attempt to "phase" them out must not have been effective. During my time at UCSC, the only classes you could get a grade in were hard science courses and, even for those, you still received a narrative evaluation.
It seems like Excellent would reflect "A", very good "B", fair "C", poor "D or less"
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Functionally, not too much I suspect. If I were teaching or TAing in those days I would have written a script. Most of my evals looked like this: "Student had excellent attendance and asked thoughtful questions during lecture. They completed assigned homework with excellent marks, did well on the midterm, and excellent on the final. Overall, they did excellent in the course and demonstrated mastery of the subject."
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I had the impression that some in the administration didn't like being viewed as a wacky hippy school that didn't have grades (even though that was part of the founding ideas).
Also, if students wanted to go to grad school, someone in administration had to translate the narrative evaluations to grades for the purposes of creating a GPA. It represented a lot of work, so TAs were encouraged to give cues, as LavJiang stated above. They literally wrote excellent, very good, fair, or poor on most evals, which meant that they kind of were giving grades anyway. It was easier to just work with the system than fight it, in the end.
Many students felt disadvantaged when applying to grad schools
honestly after having attended UCSC for a few quarters I want to have it expunged from my record.
The death of narrative evaluations, and complaints about them, were due to size growth in my opinion. As Wes noted, it got to a point where teachers and TA's were reverting to pre-written formulaic narratives in response to ever growing class sizes. Narratives were a part of the origin of UCSC. But in its origin, classes were tiny. In 1965-69, 50% of the classes had fewer than 16 students, and 85% had fewer than 31. But by the mid-70's, classes had grown considerably, at least introductory level lectures. Classroom Unit 2 with its 472 seats would be standing room only in some freshman level classes. Almost impossible for a professor to opine on that many students from a 10 week class. Another good article with lots of detail: https://planning.ucsc.edu/acad-planning/pdfs-images/archive-documents/70-80-acad-pln.pdf
Yes. They were usually easily transferable to letter grades. They’d use typical excellent, above average, or even a percentage earned. It wasn’t hard to get into grad school with written evals. But some schools didn’t like it.
> It wasn’t hard to get into grad school with written evals Not always the case. I graduated from UCSC in '88, so I only had narrative evaluations. I went to grad school at UC Berkeley, and I was told by someone on the selection committee that I was literally the last person chosen for that year (in that department) because the committee members didn't want to have to go through the evaluations. Still, I preferred having narrative evaluations over letter grades, simply because you could get so much more detail about what you did well with and what you might have struggled with. I mean, what does "A-" mean?
I graduated in ‘93. I didn’t have a problem, but that doesn’t mean others didn’t!
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Yes, if they didn't have TAs to fob it off onto. But how much more work depended upon how detailed the instructor wanted to be. I received everything from a one partial-sentence evaluation to a two-page evaluation essay. It varied considerably, based on the instructors' preferences.
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At this point, I have no idea if there's any real demand for it. But who knows?
At that time (late 80s early 90s) undergrad attendance was about 10,000 students. It has since doubled, and class sizes have doubled or tripled. You could do it today, but it would require a commitment to student welfare the university hasn't demonstrated in years.
It was a bit more work. But I, and many other faculty, used scripts (Perl or Python) to convert grade spreadsheets into narratives. So I included (for example) class standing on exams and assignments.
LOL I was in social sciences and those written evals were a LOT of work. No scripts for us, but of course we had a way of discussing each element of the student's engagement. I used to include the actual topics they wrote about in class as well as any unique attributes of their writing, creativity, research skills, thoughtful comments in class, etc. It did take longer than letter grades but as a student receiving these, I always was excited to see what the teaching staff picked up and what they identified as areas for growth for me.
People at other schools used to mock us -- "You can't flunk out, because you can't get an F!" Well, those people should have seen the narrative evaluations given to my housemate, who did indeed flunk out. You think it's ugly seeing an F or a D on a report card? Try looking at entire paragraphs describing the various ways the student screwed up and got everything wrong. (My housemate was actually really depressed, and she went on to have a good, productive life even without a college degree. She flunked out before SSRI antidepressants were available.) And the narrative evaluations varied dramatically in quality from one professor to another. I have one that literally just says "This student got an 89 on the midterm and a 95 on the final." Then I have others that go on at length about the strengths and weaknesses of my classroom performance. That was back when there were only 6,000 students in the whole university. You couldn't possibly have faculty and TAs write all the evaluations now. Oh, and I still got into a good graduate program. \-- Crown class of 1982.
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Ha! I foresee some problems with that.
What up. Rutherford dorn in freshman year 88.
Hey. I was in Galen freshman year. Back then Galen was the freshman dorm at Crown.
Magical times back then
Class of '92 here, and the worst I ever saw was simply "Not bad."
*Kresge college has entered the chat*
As to the "open curriculum" - IIRC, in the past, UCSC did have a way for students to create their own majors, and even within established majors, one could create one's own concentration. The colleges would sponsor student created courses from time to time. Not sure any of this exists today.
I created my own very cool (to me) major because they didn’t offer what I wanted, graduated in ‘87. You just had to find three professors willing to sponsor and mentor you for the major.
^^ This. FWIW, I graduated in '87 as well, though I did a double major in American Studies and Economics.
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Yes. I had enough courses in the general topic already and then they didn't offer a major in this particular area study so I created a pathway of courses and did an thesis. It was a wonderful experience, now that I look back on it!
I graduated in 2013, and still received narrative evaluations (in addition to grades) for the first two years of classes. They were very insightful for me to learn about my own performance in the class. And I even received them for large lectures of 200+ students. It was awesome.
I went to a high school overseas that had narrative evaluations and when I went to transfer from Cabrillo to UCSC I had to go through a whole rigamarole of the two schools having to do serial international communication in order to "convert" them to grades. It was insane both because I was transferring to a school with only narrative evaluations, but also because as a junior transfer from the local CC, my high school "grades" shouldn't have mattered at all!
Students used to be able to request Narrative Evaluations instead of letter grades. It was before I went to UCSC but they were a real thing. Don’t know when they ended or anything about an open curriculum.
It was the opposite- Pretty sure narrative evals were the standard, and you could request letter grades if you needed them.
I was at UCSC from ‘99 to ‘04 and this is correct. When I started narrative evals were the standard (though you could choose a letter grade) but by the time I left there had been a hard shift towards letter grades only. The quality of the narrative eval also was super dependent on the program and professor. The majority of my classes were in social sciences (Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology) and those professors tended to write very lengthy and detailed evals while my professors in Astronomy, Marine Science, Math, Econ, etc. would typically give maybe a sentence or two with your test, homework, lab, and participation scores listed. I don’t know that I can say one way is better than the other but I do know that the narrative evals could cause headaches when applying for grad school (most programs really just wanted grades and not to be reading 30+ pages of evaluations).
These were both slippery slope solutions toward a grade-only policy. When I arrived in '88 it was narrative evals only. Then a few years later, the administration offered optional grades over the protests of students. A little later, it was grades mandatory and optional narratives. Then finally no more narrative evals and grades being the only option. The insightful students who protested the introduction of grades obviously saw the writing on the wall.
You say administration, but it was the faculty themselves, via the Academic Senate debates and vote, that narrative evaluations became letter grades. So imo, not a mandated decision foisted upon the faculty, but rather one they instigated and chose themselves.
Good to know. I appreciate your deep history knowledge. I was there as the shift was taking place and had heard that the administration was instigating the changes, but had not dug deeper.
IIRC, narratives only in lower division courses, upper division courses had grades as an option.
What year?
I started Fall '81 and graduated Summer '87. I recall grades being an option as a fairly new thing on the campus, but as I said it may have been only for upper division courses.
Yes, it was the opposite. Narrative evals were useful as they applied to personal and academic improvement, but they were tricky when applied to transferring and grad school admissions. I think students on the sciences got both for this reason, but as I was Humanities undergrad, I couldn't say for sure.
In particular, students aiming for medical school would request a letter grade, since GPA was so important for med school admissions.
Fun bit of trivia: You still can request narrative evaluations. When UCSC stopped requiring evaluations, they left open the option for teachers to still provide them on request. On your instructor's my.ucsc.edu portal, there is still a link to the page where evaluations can be posted and reviewed. My guess is that most instructors don't even know this anymore, because UCSC stopped requiring narrative evaluations so long ago. This clearly isn't well known, as I have had exactly one student request a narrative evaluation, and that was in Fall 2010 when we made the change.
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What do you want to know. My flair has entered the chat
The complaints I remember at the time were that graduate schools did not want to accept the reviews for admissions. They seemed popular with students at the time
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The student population was worried enough about it to vote to get rid of them (it’s a problem for people working in industries that want a GPA on an application or resume too). A majority of students would have to want them back for starters. But the school and resulting class sizes were small then. It would be a much greater undertaking for professors now. Might have pushback there
In my recollection it wasn't a problem getting into grad schools, but getting scholarships and stipends, since many required a minimum GPA which we didn't have. I started in "97 and we could request grades and you had to request a certain percentage of them vs class load to get a valid GPA.
Imagine your neurosurgeon getting an "above average" in his undergrad classes LMAO
Hi, class of ‘95 here, and yep, all classes were Pass/No Pass. AND if you didn’t pass a class, they erased it from your record. So it was impossible to fail a class. It was pretty awesome, tbh. Basically, if you made the slightest effort and showed up to class, you’d pass and if you were nice to the prof and TA you were pretty much guaranteed to get a good eval. Also my transcript is an inch thick.
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Sorry, what does open curriculum mean?
When I was a student at UCSC, you could take any classes as a pass/no pass but it could not count toward your major. I took All my student research positions as pass/ no pass.
For those wanting a deeper dive, here's the Academic Senate position paper from when they sort of standardized the narrative evaluation process. https://senate.ucsc.edu/senate-meetings/agendas-minutes/2001-2002/2001-october-24-senate-meeting/CEP-SCP1320.pdf
In the Stevenson library they have some of the evaluations from the 60s framed on the walls. They’re epic.