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The fifth Faculty Pub Night of the 2025-26 season features Jordan Freitas, assistant professor of computer science (Seaver College of Science and Engineering). She will discuss her recent publication, "Grades are Bugs."

About Faculty Pub Night

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of the public are all invited to the 2025-26 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work

Software developers inevitably encounter errors in their code–affectionately referred to as “bugs”–and then follow well-known guiding principles for troubleshooting and improving their programs. Debugging strategies help engineers isolate errors to track down and correct underlying problems. They honor the practices of checking assumptions, managing complexity with carefully architected modularity, anticipating and handling exceptions well, optimizing time and space efficiencies, considering contextual factors and trade-offs, and so on. Ideally these practices result in more accurate, consistent, durable, user-friendly programs that scale gracefully. Pedagogical protocols deserve the same attention.

Grades are Bugs argues that grades are errors in our educational system, undermining desired learning outcomes. Grades were introduced into higher education for purposes directly at odds with the goals of inclusive pedagogy today as well as the neuroscience of human motivation and learning. This paper presents a metaphorical error log and considerations for fixes, in hopes of starting and elevating conversations about assessment of learning in any field by drawing on strengths of a computer science perspective. 

About the Author

Jordan Freitas is an associate professor of computer science and has been making friends at Loyola Marymount University since 2019 by signing up for none too many reading groups and learning communities. She learned about “ungrading” while on sabbatical in 2022 and has enjoyed the many benefits of aligning her approaches to assessment with her beliefs about teaching and learning, most notably getting to know students better. She currently serves as the Faculty Senate Secretary and Faculty in Residence for Rains Hall. When you see Jordan around campus, you will likely also meet her dog Maze who is 8 years old, obsessed with light reflections, and loves making new friends who stop in passing to tell her how good she is.

About the William H. Hannon Library

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact the Outreach and Engagement team at the William H. Hannon library via email at library.outreach@lmu.edu or call 310-338-5234.