At a university level, that was the original idea of the University of California Santa Cruz, which gave students written evaluations of what they had done well and poorly on in each course, rather than numerical or letter grades (though you could still fail a course). As a result, there were also no GPAs or rankings. My understanding is they eventually abandoned it precisely because external people wanted to see the grades and rank students: employers and grad schools like looking at GPAs. So even if pedagogically it worked great (I would need to read more to determine if that were true), external factors made it difficult to continue with.

The college I attend only uses narrative evaluations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_college_of_florida

Neat. I like the idea. As a prof a school with grades, I'm often disappointed by how grade-oriented, rather than learning-oriented students are, being much too concerned with what precisely is going to be on the test, how many points each thing is worth, etc. But it's hard to blame them personally for it, when the entire incentive structure of grades, GPAs, and class rankings is set up to encourage them to focus on it.

Its all context I guess. If you signed up for the honor code, then violated it, you have some moral difficulty there.

I agree though, that the ultimate idea is to educate. If that can be achieved through a back-and-forth exchange with a group or a graduate assistant, then that's maybe how it should normally be done. Maybe all semester, not just during the 'final'.

An alternative to grades is to just have passes: all your transcript should comprise of is which classes you've passed. Then, require students to take a certain number of courses, and to pass a lesser number of them (or just require students, in order to graduate, to pass a certain level, such as English 11 and Geometry, in order to graduate, in addition to attempting a specific number of classes). This makes it easier for teachers to have high standards, because they can see it's hugely unfair to their top students to allow students with no understanding to pass. Furthermore, it teaches students it's OK to challenge yourself, because no one will know that you didn't manage to get through Calculus or upper-level English, while if you do manage to get through it, you'll be able to be proud of the accomplishment, rather than embarrassed of a C.

Brown's curriculum was created with some similar ideas. No one sees which classes we fail. However, we still have A/B/C (though we got rid of Ds, because if you are getting a D, you shouldn't be getting credit), and the C grade is often deflated, which means taking a class pass/fail is seen by many as "slacking off." I really do think it'd be better to just have everyone take every class pass/fail, with the fail cutoff at a little above where most Cs are given now, but external audiences (read employers, med schools, etc.) really seem to dislike that, so the pass/fail option is way underutilized. At the very least, it would make sense to require all freshman-year classes to be taken pass/fail, because students come into college with such different backgrounds, that they need the first year to ramp up before they can begin to be evaluated on level ground (otherwise, students with less rigorous high school backgrounds can get a 2.5 their first year, and never have a shot at being seen as a "successful" student). As a personal anecdote, I've gotten more out of most the classes I've taken pass/fail than for a grade, because they were either the ones I pushed myself the hardest just to be able to pass, or the ones that I cared the most about the material, rather than how tests work/memorizing material, etc.

Kids tend to compare grades anyway, though - they want to have a rough idea where they fell on the curve, if they beat "the smart kid", etc.

That cuts off the motivation to compete against their peers and deprives them of the data that would allow them to analyze themselves in relation to others.