Ursula Plesner is Head of Studies for the Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Psychology at Copenhagen Business School. Here, they have decided to do something about the pressure students experience in their first year of their bachelor's degree. Ursula is the spokeswoman for the "grade-free first year" project , the title of which speaks for itself. Instead of the 7-point scale, students will instead learn from more qualitative feedback from teachers, supervisors and fellow students.
Many students feel stressed
Ursula explains how many new students feel increasing pressure when starting higher education. Educational institutions are seeing more and more students suffering from stress and having to drop out of their studies. CBS is now trying to do something about this. In a pilot program that will run for the next couple of years, CBS will give students more qualitative feedback instead of grades. This will take the form of more group/cluster work, as students will interact more with each other and will be able to give each other good feedback.
Try reading about paradox management here.
Can you complete a degree without reading a book?
You wouldn't think so, would you? But Ursula talks about a phenomenon called "gold notes" where students make notes on all academic texts they are required to read and then share the texts on Google Docs. She explains how there are rumors that some students go through an entire course of study without reading a single academic text. This is a scary trend that CBS is trying to prevent by introducing a "grade-free first year" so that all students can hopefully manage to read the texts themselves.
If you want to hear more about this topic, listen to our podcast on it here.
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