A Brief History of the Student Record

Sometimes the best way to look forward is to look back. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Ethan Hutt, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, about the history of the student record, the benefits and drawbacks of our system today, and how he would like student records evolve. As we highlight in the episode, be sure to check out Dr. Hutt’s book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To) – https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248410

Transcript

Matthew Sterenberg (00:01.334)

All right, I’m here with Ethan Hut, Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And I found you because you wrote a paper on the brief history of the student record. And you’re also the author of this book, Off the Mark, which is a phenomenal read. And I’m not just saying that because you’re on the podcast. It’s great. I actually highly recommend.

Ethan Hutt (00:24.459)

Thanks for the plug, you know?

Matthew Sterenberg (00:29.558)

I really think anyone involved in education can read it. It’s very readable and there’s a lot we could dig into today. But I’ll pass it over to you. How did you get interested in student records, grades? How did this happen?

Ethan Hutt (00:48.075)

You know, it’s funny because, well, I mean, think it’s, as an education historian, you gravitate towards things that are records. But I actually am just really fascinated by how really simply, how things that fade into the background of like our everyday work actually control really important parts of how organizations work, how school is experienced. And so I just got really fascinated by this idea that

Wow, know, education is really complicated, but we need a very simple way to record who’s doing what for how long. And like, everyone agrees that this is like maybe not the optimal way to do it, but it’s like really useful. And so it’s just balance. And so I’ve always been really interested in this. The core challenge that’s at the heart of student records, which is how do you communicate?

to a broader audience that isn’t in the classroom, like about the work of schools. So that’s how I got interested in, like you said about the book, interested in grades, tests, student records, Carnegie units, like all the mechanics of schooling that really have a kind of outsized influence on the work of educators, on the experience of students. I just find it endlessly fascinating.

Matthew Sterenberg (02:08.14)

Yeah. And reading the book, it’s, it’s really, you know, I found myself underlining a lot of things and it’s, it’s just enlightening and also depressing, to be honest, in a certain way where you’re just like, and you say this in your article, the student record is a, basically a series of compromises. And that’s how it feels reading your book where it’s like, well, we could do this approach, but here are the downsides of this approach. And so I think that’s just.

Let’s just address that there’s not gonna be a, we’re not gonna solve it today. And there’s gonna be more compromises, just a matter of what we wanna emphasize. But if you could Ethan, like walk us through the brief history of the student record, like what are some of the evolutions of the student record as to get to today?

Ethan Hutt (02:57.687)

Yeah, so it starts out where you have to understand that in the beginning of school, there are no records. And it’s really important to understand that you need records because you’re trying to communicate with an audience that is not present, that’s in the future, and that you need something that’s durable. So in the early days of schooling at the college level, all students are taking the same courses. So the idea that you would have

to have some kind of mechanism to equate courses in different subjects or different lengths of time. It’s like when everyone’s taking the same thing, you don’t need that. So important to understand that like you can have education and you can make certain decisions about the structure of that education or who the audience for, hey, how is it going in class is right there. They don’t need you to write anything down. They don’t need you to preserve anything. And you don’t need.

you know, sort of accounting mechanisms because everyone’s doing the same thing. Like if UNC decided tomorrow all students are taking the same thing, we wouldn’t need credits. You just say like, well, did you pass all your classes? So there is a time well into the basically the start of the 20th century where most colleges have pretty standard track and there is no recording other than maybe they’re recording like honors that, you know, a student who does particularly well.

Maybe the recording grades though, you know this idea of like course rank or that the idea that you would go on beyond that Or that you would need something like a GPA just doesn’t that that’s not like a thing that’s in demand At the basically at the turn of the 20th century you get you know You get a lot more people finishing high school and you get a big expansion of colleges and people are interested in colleges You also get starting at Harvard and Michigan places that are really starting to think like

A lot more students are in college now and they don’t all want the classical track. They don’t all want Latin and stuff. We wanna provide some electives. We wanna provide some choice. We’re introducing things like science into the curriculum. We’re creating science schools like the Sheffield School at Yale. And so there’s a sense that like, okay, the one track everybody’s on it is starting to fall. Harvard creates a…

Ethan Hutt (05:18.913)

famously creates its elective system. And then you start introducing this problem of like, okay, how do we equate things? And at the time there was a view that, you know, the brain was basically a muscle. And so as long as courses were flexing that muscle in about the same way, you could kind of equate them, which was originally the kind of idea about the length of time being a proxy for, you know, challenging subject, the same amount of time of exercise so they can be equated. This gets more formally introduced

with like the Carnegie unit, Carnegie comes around and in one sense is trying to separate high school level work from college level work, but basically standardizes this idea that seat time is gonna be the thing that equates different subjects and the accumulation of a certain amount of time doing certain kinds of things is gonna be how you earn a high school degree and then the high school degree makes it. So that’s where you begin to see people and this is right around the turn of the 20th century, 1910, 1920s.

that people are beginning to talk about credits and this idea that like units are kind of like a currency in grading. After that, you see like a proliferation of people trying to figure out like, and this is one thing that is I’m sure registrars will be very familiar with. When you, and this is where a currency also helps as a language. If we both have schools and I say, Matt, I’m gonna take your units, if you take my units,

you’re basically acknowledging each other as being part of the same system, as being at some level equal in that exchange. So colleges start becoming much more accustomed to sharing students about transferring credits, recognizing credits at other places, trying to standardize like how much credit are we going to give for certain kinds of things or certain activities? How many credits do we want to have students do in certain kinds of fields?

And so you begin to sort of see the system begin to come together and concretize around this idea of, okay, if we’re colleges of a similar quality, we wanna have the same level of rigor. That means the same number of units, the same amount of time in key subjects. And so that’s kind of dominates in the, you know, basically the first half of the 20th century. And then in the sort of like the 60s and 70s, you get a lot of people saying like,

Ethan Hutt (07:42.561)

what a lot of people say now, which is like, is time really the best measure? like, what about things that, know, are these units really the same? And gee, if you just pass a class, you get the same amount of credit and that you can use further. And like, we should actually get underneath the credit and see what kids are actually learning. And so this sort of concern that like, well, maybe a credit and a unit isn’t the same, it isn’t equivalent or shouldn’t be.

There’s a big question in the 60s, especially as you get non -traditional students, both GIs coming back from the war, but just an expansion of who is in higher education as desegregation kind of falls away or is being displaced at a lot of institutions. And you get a big study in the 60s and 70s of trying to find alternative ways. Carnegie launches this big study, should we revisit the credit hour? And it’s kind of funny because they ultimately come down to, this is what you were alluding to before, which is

kind of works more like than it breaks. So this idea that we want to really poke at things or we want schools to be reevaluating each other’s credit, like really puts some of the smoothness and risk. And so the task force on educational credit, which was what the group was called, and it was the American Council on Education that did this, Carnegie was very involved as well, kind of says like,

we could do worse than what we have and they kind of leave it alone. You do see pockets of other people doing narrative grades and alternative things or certification for activities outside of things. But basically we revisit it and we kind of say like, well enough alone. And that’s why we, you know, that’s kind of where we are today is we’ve tweaked things, but the core technology has pretty much stayed the same since like the early part of the 20th century.

Matthew Sterenberg (09:31.776)

Yeah, it’s, it’s the, the benefits and drawbacks of it. You know, the standardization you think about the registrar, like what is their life on a day -to basis? It’s, know, articulation agreements, it’s transfer credit. have students that are increasingly mobile, you know, thinking more about choice. And the last thing you want to do is upend a system and make it.

harder for students to transfer, right? I have lost credits or whatever it may be. I mean, maybe that whole system gets thrown out so we don’t have to like think about it like credits. mean, part of the challenges.

you know, thinking about the students were impacting immediately and not necessarily down the road, right? The people that have credits and what happens to those students, but that’s the life of a registrar is, is trying to give credit to the right people so that they can persist to a degree, continue and get that valuable credential, right?

Ethan Hutt (10:30.155)

That’s exactly right. there’s the other part, is like, you know, people say, you should open it up. You know, that’s like, you know, it’s too tight and this is, you know, it’s too, the information is too sparse. And it’s like, yeah, but there’s something really, as you’re saying, there’s like a sacred trust that you put in a registrar where you say like, I may have started my credential and then I have taken time off. And it’s really important that when I get back,

that those credits or that there’s some record that I did that or I had the certain number of units or that they were there and they were recorded. There’s a big debate in the 50s that this idea of like the record system is too big. You can’t just use last names. And so they start saying like, we need to find like unique identifiers. And they start using social security numbers. And there’s like a huge concern about the privacy around this. And okay.

granted, but it’s like, no, no, but we need to make sure that the credits are yours, that we can identify who it is. And as people get much more mobile, as the universe of where students are going, it used to be very, very regional. And now I think a lot of registrars are, it’s not just national, it’s international. it’s really important this sort of that.

that the simplicity of the record keeping and that it’s located in one place and that the student record is someone’s responsibility and is not just like throw it on the blockchain or like throw it open and just let people put whatever they want on there. It’s like, there’s a real drawbacks to that kind of thing. And it’s, as you say, like, it’s not that we couldn’t think of other ways to record or other things that we might want to put on a transcript, but the simplicity is what makes it

valuable and manageable and then that it’s housed with the registrar and not shared among a whole bunch of other people. There’s real wisdom in that kind of approach.

Matthew Sterenberg (12:34.432)

Yeah. And you highlight this really well in the book too, which is if these things are going to be currency, you know, they have to be widely accepted. If it’s going to have any value at all, you know, it has to be understood and has to be valued, has to be transferable. And so, that’s absolutely critical, right? And that’s the value of the system that we have today largely. So I do want to like dig into micro credentialing and badging, which you highlight in the book too, which, you know, you highlighted

You know, it’s time and seat really the measure that we should be having. And there’s this move to competency based education and badging and micro credentialing. And it’s solving kind of a clear problem, which is, you know, what did you really learn in this class? You’ve got to be in Latin American history, but what did you really learn? And we have kind of a binary system today with a clear problem. So many people have some college with no degree. So I have nothing to show for it. And kind of badging is.

Let’s get you some credentials along the way. But it’s not a perfect system either. And you highlight just the over -credentialing and the commodification of going after credentials, which I think is really interesting. Dig into that a little bit for me.

Ethan Hutt (13:48.555)

Yes.

Ethan Hutt (13:52.789)

Yeah, so mean like, so one critique of degrees is that they’re they’re commodities, right? Like I want to get my units so that I can get my degree and the degree is valuable to me because I can exchange it for a job. And so they talk about just, and we’ve all had this where a student comes in like.

I don’t care what class it is. What’s the easiest way for me to get the three units I need to graduate? Like everyone who’s been involved in education has either had that conversation directly or been adjacent to it. And so there’s this critique and it’s a totally reasonable one, which is that we’ve turned with grades and credits and degrees, we’ve turned education into a commodity, something that’s most valuable as an exchange as opposed to what the credential actually represents. And the challenge of

micro credentials or badging is like, it just amplifies that, right? You’ve turned one credential into potentially like many, many, many sub -credentials and commodities. So one of the questions that we have is, and I think you framed the trade off really nicely, which is, if the question is, okay, we have students who are partially finished with a degree and have nothing to show for it because they haven’t earned enough to finish, can we credential them in the things that they are actually

demonstrated mastery and accomplished, you know, that may be something where we say like, that’s a good trade because we’re actually providing them with the potential to exchange or get recognized a certain set of skills that otherwise would not be visible and would not have, they would have no currency on it. And that is a, that may be an instance where like that makes a ton of sense to try to, you know, break up a degree into certain kinds of skills that then allow students to make those visible and trade on them.

I think in another context where often it’s like, we’re talking about, we want to burnish the CVs or the resumes of high school students. Let’s give them a bunch of badges. Let’s turn the high school curriculum basically into a Boy Scout badge. And now you have, instead of 10 units that you’re evaluating, now you have an infinite number. And to the point that I said before, a lot of times one of the challenges of the badging

Ethan Hutt (16:17.939)

world is that it’s often even more decentralized in our schools. So, you know, whereas, you know, my high school issues those credits and those units and the degree, the diploma and same with the colleges, you know, there are a lot of online institutions, companies of various quality, and it becomes really hard and like, you know, to push the currency metaphor, you know, one of the most dangerous thing

dangerous things in a currency environment is banks issuing bad currency because it pollutes everything. And then people start to either question the value. They start to worry. you you get this sort of you want kind of a tighter control. the idea of just like, we should allow infinite badging that solves the problem. It’s like it doesn’t really solve the commodification problem. It also doesn’t. The other challenge of of of

diplomas and transcripts that you suggest is the information is really thin. We call it the thinness problem of the information where like letters and as you said, like the name of the course aren’t always as rich in information as we would like. It doesn’t really solve that problem either because again, unless you know something about the issuing body of the micro -credential or the badge, you know, it’s one thing if it’s like Google decides they’re gonna

Matthew Sterenberg (17:32.184)

Thank

Ethan Hutt (17:42.433)

credential people in some kind of, I don’t know, whatever, computer science. It’s another if it’s like, the ABC Academy has issued this and then it’s like, then you get into this problem. So that’s the issue and that’s something that colleges have often really struggled with is like, who do you let in and who do you recognize when community colleges massively expanded in the 50s and 60s, the articulation agreement was a real point of contention, it still is.

And that, again, is talking about the relative stance of institutions with respect to each other. And that’s the kind of like brave new world of the badging and credentialing conversation is universities are going to have to decide how much they’re going to lend it or if they’re going to do it themselves, which would be, like I said, probably a better solution because at least they know what the badge means and who’s issuing it.

Matthew Sterenberg (18:39.551)

Yeah, it feels like we were always going to end up in some sort of cycle with this, where it’s like, all right, badging competency based, well intended, we’ve got a credential people as they pursue. You know, we just don’t want to have the binary degree and not degreed. And we want to have like the metadata. We want to have the course descriptions. People have to understand what this badge means. But at the same point, like you said, it’s kind of the wild west right now where some colleges

You know, we talked to people and they’re like, I don’t know what badges are going out. Right. And that’s not a good thing. Right. So what are the badges for credit? Are they anti -pathetic credit? And then what’s the cycle that we might be in? It’s like, well, then we’ve got to standardize it. And then once you standardize, know, innovation becomes a little bit more of a challenge. And so it’s just funny. Like it always seems like you end up with, you know, you’re always going to have trade -offs. You’re going to have some, some we solve here and

and we, we have issues here. That’s just the way it feels sometimes. And that’s why I made a joke, but like, that’s why your book is, it’s a great book, but it’s like depressing in the sense of you’re like,

Ethan Hutt (19:48.225)

You’re not the first person who said that. We would have sold both more copies of the book if we had just said there are three simple ways. Here’s a hack. There’s like three simple ways to fix the school system. But I think anyone, honestly, we tried. Our editor was pushing, can you give us something hopeful? we’re like, my family has a lot of educators in it and I’ve been in school my whole life.

Matthew Sterenberg (19:55.152)

Right, right.

Ethan Hutt (20:14.163)

And you just like, if you’ve been around schools, you just know that these simple things just, the reason we have imperfect solutions is because the problems are complicated and people’s situations are complicated. And we have a massive system. Like the thing that I often say to folks when they’re like, well, we need, you you just fix it. It’s like, well, would you trade institutional autonomy for, you know, getting rid of some of these things because

you know, in a lot of other countries, especially at the high school level, you know, they are happy to, you know, get rid of standardized tests or have less emphasis, but they insist that everyone takes the same courses and that everyone use the same textbooks and everyone reads the same, like you get standardization somewhere. And so the big challenge for, I mean, I think the single, it’s hard for registrars, sorry registrars.

But like the best part about the American system is the diversity of institutions. We have a bunch of different institutions that have all decided to do things a little bit differently and in their own way. And we have this like delightful diversity of schools. It is our greatest export. It’s the best success. Like everyone comes and tries to figure out like how did America do this? And it’s like we literally, we always on the backs of registrars, like we literally built the system.

Matthew Sterenberg (21:25.536)

And it’s one of our greatest exports still to this day. Yeah.

Ethan Hutt (21:40.543)

And we built a bunch of institutions and then tried to later figure out how to make it a system. Like, so all of these things were retrofitting a system together through basically, you know, accounting devices to try to make it standardized. And like, we feel the creaks of that kind of retrofit all the time. But for my money, it’s like, that’s a good trade. You know, it may not be that every credit is exactly the same at every institution, but the fact that you can

move institutions or you can move states and yeah, it’s close enough. I think that actually is a good trade. I’d much rather have that than to say every school in America, every college in America has the same curriculum. They use the same textbooks. It’s the same four pathways through. are no new majors. There’s like all the innovation of our schools is predicated on like, well, you can kind of port in like units and.

hours and things. mean, that, you know, so it’s like, you got to kind of deal with the hand wavy part, but it allows for a tremendous diversity of institutions and forums and innovation. And so like, yeah, I mean, that’s the trade off.

Matthew Sterenberg (22:55.446)

One of the themes in your book that continues to come up is just, you know, in the pursuit of grades, we are not focused on actual learning. You it’s, you give the example of, you know, the question that gets asked a lot with the idea of going to college and having the best kind of admissions profile. Like, should I take an AP course and get a B or should I take a regular course and get an A? And you’re like, well, what’s lost in this is no one’s asking like what course is going to

teach me more, where am going to learn more? But one of the themes that I think comes up a lot is, it seems like it’s written from the perspective of someone who loves to learn. And so as I was reading it, I was like, I totally agree in some respects, but is the transactional nature

a bad thing? You know, like I’m learning to get to this next step. You know, what’s the tension there of learning to learn and learning to get to the next thing?

Ethan Hutt (23:58.763)

So Jack, my co -author, he loves to learn. I just like to get things done. I’m actually with, so I actually think my advisor, David Labarie, he always argues that like,

The best that actually, and I tend to agree with this is like the idea that a student is gonna come into my class and figure out the path of least resistance, if that’s what makes sense to them. I actually think that is a tremendous skill. For my money, it’s like when people say, for all the critiques that we get about grades and how, grades don’t actually represent learning and that, actually,

GPA is the single best predictor. High school GPA is a better predictor of how students are gonna do in college than like the standard test scores, like the SAT or the ACT. And I actually think that that’s partly because it is a very important skill to sort of assess like, okay, what is being asked of me? What is actually being required? And I think students are hyper rational when they come to like, students are really good at calibrating their effort.

to exactly what it is that they need. Now sometimes that can backfire, it can actually dissuade students, because they sort of make the calculation like, the upside isn’t there for me, so I’m actually not gonna dedicate myself, and that has a really long tail, like consequences, where they don’t ever get the skills because they’ve decided that no matter how hard they work, or they don’t have the bandwidth to work as hard as they would need, and so the grade motivates them to actually like,

not work as hard as they might otherwise. But I actually think it’s a reasonable skill and that’s kind of why in the book we… Yeah.

Matthew Sterenberg (25:45.474)

We do it every day in our jobs, our, like, what is gonna be the most efficient way I can mow the lawn and make dinner tonight? You know, like, yeah.

Ethan Hutt (25:52.139)

Completely. And when you’re in a job, you’re like, okay, I have multiple tasks. We really need three of me, but there’s only one, so I have to manage. so I do think that that kind of balancing and that kind of calculation makes a ton of sense. It’s also kind of why in the book we end up not in the, we should get rid of grades. Our argument is that if we can move and adjust our tasks in

in our courses so that the kind of gaming and the kind of decisions that students make are at least around tasks or things that we think have real value. there it’s, you cause I think a lot of times we, I’ll admit it, you you sort of say, I need things for my grade book. I need to make sure that I’m assessing at some kind of like, you know, so maybe I’ll do a little thing here or a little thing there. And it’s like, that’s probably stuff we should.

cut out, we should really make sure that the things that we are are focusing students attention on because they care about their grades, those are really high in the skills or the dispositions or the experiences that we want students most to learn. So we talk about the importance of the use value of things like try to make things not for their own sake, but to some, you know, some core purpose. And if students want to game around those activities like

That’s better. That’s a better outcome than if they’re gaming around, you know, silly, busy work. So yeah, we don’t come out against grades or tests because we actually think that that calculation is just, you’re not going to get rid of it. That’s how the end, and grades motivate students. We know this. So why take away the motivation? We should just better align the things that we are grading or the things that we’re rewarding and the things that we would say we care about when we, when we want a student to take Latin American history or something like that.

Matthew Sterenberg (27:48.728)

So last question for you, Ethan. So at Parchment Instructure, obviously, it’s all about digital credentialing at Parchment and how we initially was moving things from analog to digital, right? And then how do we send it as data and how do we transfer this information a lot better? And now it’s kind of like thinking about how we elevate it and not just make it easier to, you know, we don’t want to just do something that

isn’t great more efficiently, let’s actually start to reimagine it. And as we’re talking with institutions, this is at the top of mind for us. Like, how do we think about a comprehensive learner record? What does that even look like? Is it a more holistic representation of my time at this institution? Is it a holistic representation of my entire educational experience? How is that curated? Who owns the record institutions and or students? Big question, but

Just generally, I want your two cents on how do we reimagine the student record and what guardrails should we be thinking about?

Ethan Hutt (28:54.625)

mean, so the first is like, do think that the, have to, one of the things that has made records successful in the past is that they have been owned by one person and the number of people that have the ability to write on the, to inscribe on the student record is kept to a minimum. So people know like, who the instructor gave the grade.

not the registrar, it’s like the instructor, that reflects the instructor’s judgment. And that’s kind of a sacred thing. Like no one can change my grade as an instructor. That’s like, that’s my, that’s where I etch and the school owns it. And they are the ones who named the courses. I mean, I do think that that’s a strength that’s worth preserving. One thing that I do think is goes to a real core problem or no, a real core limitation to a transcript that

in the past was a necessity because of the nature of record keeping. Record keeping was physical. There were rooms with file cabinets and the amount of information that you could store reasonably was small and it was really finite. Now, as you’ve alluded to, the digital world has totally changed that. So one thing that I think we say in the book that I think is very much in your wheelhouse and I think is very much goes to a core critique of what

what student records are is that we can never really see what’s behind the grade. So I got to be in Latin American history and like, what does that mean? What did I do? And the ability up for us now to make grades, what we call in the book, like double clickable, like to see behind that, to say like, okay, the final paper, it would be really easy for college to say, for instance, the final paper, the final project.

some version of it has to be basically attached to the transcript. It gets uploaded to whatever the LMS is and it goes to the grade. so everyone knows. I do think that a lot of times we all, we trade on the fact that no one will ever look behind the grade. It’s why students are able to kind of argue with us like, give me one more point, give me one more, because like that’s the only thing that matters because no one will ever see the final exam that’s behind it. So.

Ethan Hutt (31:15.531)

you know, attaching a syllabus and a final paper to every grade, not because everyone’s going to want to look like there really is a value to economy of communication. But there are some people that would be interested in looking behind. That seems something that is very, very doable. It doesn’t change the basic mechanics of who who gets to like inscribe on the transcript. Like it maintains the strength of like very few points of intervention. But I think it could.

massively improve both the dynamics around grading, because if a student knows that the paper that they wrote, you know, that maybe is not actually an A, like follows them around, they may take it more seriously. And it may actually frame the learning object as a more serious and enduring thing, not just the grade, or at least it puts it on equal footing. So that’s something that I think feels very much within the capacity of like our technology. It addresses a limitation that

was an actual physical world material limitation of the past that we don’t necessarily have anymore. And, know, kind of changes some of the dynamics. So that’s like, if I had one wish, that would be the big one is that we make it a standard practice to do that kind of thing and build out kind of from there. That would be, that’s like the top of my wish list.

Matthew Sterenberg (32:35.288)

Ethan, great to talk to you and another plug, get the book, off the mark, you and Jack Schneider. I really did enjoy it and I think if you’re in education, you’re gonna enjoy it too.

Ethan Hutt (32:48.747)

Well, thanks for having me. was great to chat with you. And like I said, the registrar, we need a little statue of registrars on all campuses because they’re the ones who actually make all the backend stuff work.

There’s always more to learn.