Effect of pass/fail grading vs. letter grading on pharmacy students' achievement goal orientations

Introduction: In the Fall of 2021, the grading scale for a pharmacotherapy case-based series of recitations in a pharmacy practice course was modified from a letter grade format to a pass/fail format. The aim of this study was to assess how different formats of grading affected pharmacy students' achievement goal orientations based on the 2 × 2 conceptual framework developed by Eliot and Harackiewicz (i.e. performance-approach, performance-avoidance, mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance).

Methods: Second-year pharmacy students who completed recitations in a pass/fail format and third-year students who completed recitations in a letter grade format received a questionnaire containing a Likert instrument (the Achievement Goal Questionnaire-Revised) that was previously validated and designed to evaluate students' achievement goal orientations along four different sub-scales. Baseline characteristics of the two groups were compared, and appropriate statistics were applied to the demographic information and questionnaire results.

Results: Questionnaires were completed by 99 % (n = 268) of pharmacy students (132 second-year students and 136 third-year students). There were higher mean scores for mastery-approach (4.7 v. 4.2; P < .001), mastery-avoidance (3.7 v. 3.4; P = .006), performance-approach (4.3 v. 3.9; P < .001), and performance-avoidance (4.1 v. 3.8; P = .010) for the second-year (pass/fail) students compared with third-year (letter grade) students.

Conclusions: Second-year pharmacy students who took a case-based series of recitations with a pass/fail grading scale had higher mean scores for each of the sub-scales within Eliot and Harackiewicz's 2 × 2 goal orientation framework compared with third-year pharmacy students who took the recitations in a letter grade format. Using the study results along with current literature on goal orientation theory, it may be beneficial to pharmacy students in courses with both pass/fail and letter grade formats for educators to encourage approach goal orientations while discouraging avoidance goal orientations.