The usual contract for taking a course involves a syllabus, which contains a rubric and expresses a set of binding terms. Having read the syllabus, a student chooses whether or not to accept this contract. Over the course of four months, there are then openly available scores based on the student's work, which correspond to the rubric, assessed by a graduate student or professor. One is there to protect one's transcript and this contract outlines one's ability to fairly do so. This is not the case at UC Berkeley. I took 15 courses at Berkeley, totaling 60 units, and I do not know what a grade corresponds to. For those thinking this implies only that a grade was lower than expected, I often received an A and I don’t know why, other than that the professor clearly liked me or that they just would not proffer less than an A in a lower-division course.
After being denied recommendation letters from two professors in my department, once with an insult, it was suggested that I look back at the feedback on my work. More on this below. I decided to do so, auditing the assessment across all 60 units. Of these, 31 units were in the Philosophy department and 18 were in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, DAGRS. The remaining 11 units were 9 in Haas and 2 in a student-run course, a DeCal. DeCals function as a resume filler for ambitious students and to fulfill the Department of Education's Credit Hour and time requirements. Beyond the 15 courses, I audited 6 more units in IEOR and Haas, and dropped many courses mid-semester, often due to being made to feel uncomfortable by faculty and other students based on my disfavored personal traits and political views. Professors would go on daily tirades about politics, or students would make comments about race or sexuality that interfered with my ability to work. The following postmortem is limited to the humanities courses, the 31 Philosophy and Classics units.
Berkeley syllabi sometimes omit rubrics and are revised during the semester. When a rubric is present, there is always at least a 10% margin for opacity in assessment, given for participation. This means there is no way for a student to know the difference of at least a full letter grade, as stated in the rubric, during or after the course, unless one specifically draws unneeded attention to oneself and pursues this information outside of class. At Berkeley, there is a very high level of social inhibition in asking any question, for fear of it being graded as implied participation that may fall outside of the expressed participation assessment of a rubric. Most students don't speak at all in class for the entire four months of a course, and it is common for students to not speak to another human being for weeks at a time. Many instead spend their time during lectures and discussion sections looking at pictures of East Asian food on WeChat or playing video games behind their computers. Beyond the chillingly antisocial participation environment, rubric categories are generally midterm papers and exams, and final papers and exams, with the most heavily weighted assignments being finals.
Here are the numbers from my 11 courses. Excluding participation, the range of rubric percentage for which I never received a grade or feedback never drops below 10% for a single course. Including participation, which was 10% to 20% of a grade, the percentage of rubric for which I never received a grade or feedback ranges from 10% up to 75% in one course. Fortunately, this 75% was with the one professor sympathetic to underrepresented views. In only 2 of the 11 courses, I received a final grade and written feedback on the final. That number increases to 4 of the 11 courses if you include receiving a final grade without any feedback. Obviously, there were no cases with feedback and no grade. The mean average of total rubric percentage with neither a grade nor feedback over 11 courses was 42.5%. Assuming, charitably, that a student should not expect to be told their score for participation (10-20% of grade) and should not receive any feedback for participation, this mean drops to 27.95%. This total mostly consisted of final papers and final exams, which were the most heavily weighted assignments, but also included 2 midterm papers.
While you can do with these numbers what you will, to me they affirm two things. One, that for a philosophy department whose views are nearly entirely social constructivist, it actually relies 42.5% on a student's innate (or learned prior to Berkeley) ability to perform. Two, it suggests a cause or purpose for this surreptitiousness and lack of transparency, that there is some other implied assessment or even extrinsic motive. I found these latter to be entirely consistent with the rest of the hostility and discrimination I experienced at Berkeley. Before coming here, I anticipated the biases would be curricular and my ability to keep them off my transcript would be a matter of academic performance. I assumed my transcript was a matter between me and the material, not one between me and the views of faculty and graduate students. However, I did not account for the problem being social and therefore more outside of my control (somewhere within 42.5% outside), and for this social discrimination to have the opportunity to directly affect a transcript (an effect somewhere within that 42.5%). Some amount of the 42.5 margin of error corresponds to categorical intolerance and discrimination.
More often than not, the above ideal contract for taking a course is reduced to handing the keys to one's transcript over to faculty in fear, granting them moral impunity in deciding whether or not they like you. This becomes a problem when a student is socially disfavored for their political views or for being the wrong race, gender, or of the wrong sexual orientation. The problem compounds as a burden on one's performance when one is constantly reminded of this status by course material, peers, faculty, and administration every day in an antisocial setting. In these rare cases of vastly underrepresented social, politically right-wing, white, male or straight students, getting a fair grade, e.g. getting a professor to like them, becomes a much more onerous task. These outlier students are just more work for faculty and, in the best cases, they just do not know what to do with you. In the worst cases, they know only that they do not like you.
