Marked for Life: A Criticism of Assessment at Universities.

From conclusion: The university system most worthy of experimental adoption, as we think, is that involving the abolition of all grades, and even of the pass/fail line. Syllabuses thus could atrophy, since their main purpose is to standardise learning in order to make assessment more rational. Lecturers would then be free to teach anything that students wanted to hear and talk about, and students would be able to transcend the traditional categories of learning. Certificates could inform anybody interested that so-and-so had attended whatever courses and had produced a certain volume of work, and beyond that each person would have to be judged purely on their merits for whatever job they applied for. It would ofcourse be open to students, when applying for any job, to present samples of relevant work they had done at university, just as, at present, artists use portfolios of their work.