Blogg-Ed Indetermination

Q: What does a grade of “A” mean?

• The student has demonstrated mastery?
• The student has scored in the upper 5% of all student scores on a particular assessment.
• The student has successfully re-written a prior assignment incorporating all of the suggestions one a project previously judged to be a B+.
• The student is in a class in which the teacher does not believe in grading and assigns everyone an “A.”
• All of the above.
• None of the above.

Give up? Me too. And this is why it’s time for letter grades, numerical grades, and their variations to go. You can’t derive common meaning from a subjective, ill-defined, and emotion laden system so why pretend that you can?

In the early 1970’s I attended a conference, the National Conference on Grading Alternatives I think it was called, and came away with a wonderful little book called Wad-Ja-Get. Though no longer published, you can find it used on Amazon.

From that conference and after reading this book I was convinced that the traditional grading systems used in schools were bogus. Forty years later, they are as entrenched as ever. Was I wrong in my judgment, or are schools clinging on to things that don’t work? Smart people wouldn’t do that would they?

I think we have to admit that smart people can do dumb things, especially when there is so much resistance, so much inertia, within a moribund system and and no agreed-upon alternatives to offer.

Throughout my academic career I was labeled a “good” student, meaning I got “good” grades: A’s and B’s. (Though I suppose nowadays my few B’s might make me suspect.) These grades were supposedly indicative of my learning and performance in various subject areas: math, science, English, history, and so on. Any area in which you got a “poor” grade (C or below) meant you were not “good” at it, or the “teacher didn’t like you.” But the truth of the matter was that I was good a guessing what the teachers wanted to know on tests. God help me if I had to go back and re-take these same high school exams some forty years later! I have forgotten most of the facts and trivia I was so good at reciting then, but I would argue I am infinitely “smarter” than I was then.

“Okay, smartypants, what’s the alternative?”

Let student work speak for itself. We have the technology now to create electronic portfolios of student work that can follow them throughout their careers as students. Let teachers and others comment on student work, and these comments follow the work as well. More work for teachers? Perhaps, but speech to text technology has come a long ways, and vocalizing one’s opinion and professional judgment on the work of students will, I wager, lead to better assessment of student work. Still not enough time? Cut back, perhaps way back, on the number of assessments. Teach students how to assess their own work, and the work of their peers.

Self-assessment and reflection are critically important skills for students to learn at an early age. How are they to learn how to do this properly unless they are taught by mature, self-assessing and reflective adults?

“But what will the colleges do without grades?”

They will learn to deal with it. Work with colleges to help them understand your process and allow them to see actual examples of student work from their portfolios. This would be infinitely more valuable to them than grades or test scores.

“But it’s such a radical idea!”

Letter grades are a relatively new phenomenon in education, one that came along with universal education and the idea that with education now available to the masses, a mechanism was needed to differentiate performance. (Perhaps this was a way to continue class distinctions in society. I don’t claim to be an historian of American education.) But as a matter-of-fact narrative or oral assessment were the norm for hundreds of years in our past, and so returning to such a system may be perceived as a return to a previous practice.

“You’re a dreamer if you thinks schools will ever abandon grades!”

Why thank you. Being a dreamer is, I think, quite a nice compliment. Mark Twain said that an “optimist is a dreamer, more elegantly spelled.” I plead guilty as charged.