Grades cause anxiety in universities – for teachers as much as for students. 

While there are occasional mavericks who try to get by without grades, I think grading is necessary and even quite useful. One possible suggestion is to think differently about grading. Currently, grade reports and summaries are a dry list of absolute scores with little useful information about how to improve or how past performance connects to course goals and objectives. Thomas Goetz' TED talk below has provocative implications for grading within the university. 

Now, I know that this model depends upon Bell curves, uniformity, standardized curriculum design and so on. There is a governmentality piece of this which we shouldn't accept wholesale. But I claim that it certainly isn't worse than what we are doing now.