> At the undergraduate/introductory level, the only important question is "what awareness do you have of the breadth of this field, and what mastery do you have

> At the undergraduate/introductory level, the only important question is "what awareness do you have of the breadth of this field, and what mastery do you have over the concepts that most agree are its "most fundamental"? You and I both agree that class is a "playground", and any "grade" is in fact meaningless. Rather than assigning As, Bs, Cs etc. as a percentile of subjective completion of arbitrary problem sets, As-Fs should be assigned at the discretion of the instructor as a holistic assessment of oral and written examination, completion of problems and problem sets, participation in the class, and general wisdom. I'm not completely sure I agree that this is the solution—if we're re-inventing grades anyway, then I'd like to do something more radical than using the same old A–F and just interpreting them differently (although, even if given free rein to do whatever I liked, I don't know what I would do!)—but I definitely agree that grades, and the standard approach to them, are the most pernicious part of "education" (in the sense of the current schooling system). If there were any way to get away with it, then I would be happy to—indeed, I would prefer to—have all evaluative exercises be diagnostic and informative, only for the students' benefit, and to assign no grade at all, or an A for everyone; but this seems incompatible with a modern university structure (and anyway is essentially forbidden by university administration).