Mr. Rayburn omitted another concerned party that might be upset about a move away from letter grades: college admissions officers. Thus, Mr. Porreca's statement about Uni needing to retain some kind of letter or number grading system might be accurate. On the other hand, we're a lab school, and we ought to be able to try reporting assessment results (note my choice or wording) in a non-standard way if we have either a valid reason OR an experimental question we wish to pursue. I suspect that Mr. Rayburn has at least some experience using a narrative system, as do I and at least a few other faculty I know of, so it wouldn't be something new and unprecedented