Nov 2026 by Evan B. Tsingos
How, then, can we assign grades? In many cases, we won’t!
Once we accept that allowing AI use is the only tenable future, grading as a concept becomes mostly useless. When students have the option to surrender their thinking wholesale yet maintain the illusion of having learned, assessment fails to be an assay of understanding, mastery, or any other target we might devise. For bedrock classes like Statistics 110: “Introduction to Probability” or Economics 10: “Principles of Economics” that can easily be graded solely on exams, letter grading still makes sense. But for everything else — from Irish folklore to string theory — it’s time to switch to pass-fail.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/10/5/tsingos-harvard-abolish-grades/