Grades are Gross

I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of Alfie Kohn. If you're not an educator, then you likely haven't heard of him. If you are an educator, then you likely have heard of him and have an opinion one way or the other. The thing about his work that bothers me is he feels more like a contrarian polemicist than a committed educator, as if stirring the pot on education is his purpose, rather than improving the way our students learn and our teachers instruct.

Still, he has some valid points, even if his conclusion wanders away from what I'm interested in. I don't care so much about the "ranking" of students, as he posits in this article, as I am in the concept of grades. His first four or five paragraphs are more interesting and worthwhile (it would impact all students, rather than the higher echelon of aggressively academic kids) but he quickly pivots into a lengthy rumination on valedictorians and other types of ranks. Since Kohn doesn't want to approach the "no grades" idea here (though, to be fair, he does talk about this stuff elsewhere), I figure I can use this as a starting point myself.

Grades are Gross

Ask any teacher how much she loves to grade, and you'll likely get, at best, a sarcastic eye-roll (perfected due to the endless exposure of teachers by the true masters of the craft, teenagers) and, at worst, a mouthful of rubbled teeth. Now, keep in mind, grading isn't the process of giving feedback, assessing how much a student has learned, or gaining insights into student achievements. It's a number that is translated into a letter. That's all.

On the plus side, software has made the physical demands of calculation for grades as obsolete as the time in my education classes in college when I learned how to make a grade book in an Excel spreadsheet. "Entering grades" is a form of data entry that requires the same amount of mental processing power as any data entry does--type in the number in the right box, press enter, and repeat. This rhythm can be zen-like, a nice counterpoint to the mental rigors of the other parts of the day. But staring vacantly out the window, dazed, is also zen-like and a nice emulation of the expression of many students, so there are always alternatives.

No, I'm not talking about the process of grading, of deciding the arbitrary amount of arbitrary units called "points". I'm talking about the judgment that is required to somehow communicate what is often an intangible thing via a very broken system.

What's in an A?

I can only speak cogently (?) about how my school's grading system is set up. To keep it simple, we're only going to look at the A range (90% to 100%), with an A- being a 92%. That gives three percentage points (90, 91, and 92) to the A-, with eight points (93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100) for an A. The window for "success" (which, let's be honest, is usually considered an A) is eight points wide, yet the difference between a student's understanding and work between 93 and 92 is almost entirely subjective. This year, I received four emails requesting an extra bit of work to do to bump up the grade from 92.9% to 93. I declined--the point of a final grade is that it's final. I...don't really see what there is to discuss on that front. Anyway, four emails about this topic are four emails too many. All of the students who received A minuses are good students. They perhaps "deserved" an A...or maybe not.

See, grades are almost always an objective measurement of a subjective experience. The ostensible purpose for them is to communicate to colleges and future employers about the student. But what does the A mean? It's a language without a referent, which actually makes it gobbledygook. If the word banana meant this to one person

Gross. I got banana from this site all over my post. Ew.

...but it means this to another person...

Results of Ruminations: Adding fuel to your nightmares since 2008. Source.

...then we have a major failure to communicate. Sure, we all think we know what an A means, but it's a mask that hides what the student has done. For example, what if a teacher offers extra credit on every assignment, regardless of how well it's done? If a student ends up with an A on that assignment, is it because she has demonstrated that the work is "Grade A Quality" or that she used the extra credit to bandage over the mistakes she made? If an A is meant to indicate mastery over content, then what has she actually shown if the extra credit covers it up? How is a college or employer to know that the A on the transcript indicates competency, an easy class, a generous teacher, or the ability to manipulate the system? Grades are a language without solid signifiers, which is no way to communicate at all.*

Of course, the whole point of using the grading system is that it's a standard--something that's universal. But even that isn't the case. Where I teach, everyone gives out the same standards--that is, a 93% is an A in every class. But my fellow tenth grade English teacher will give the same assignment with the same rubric and come up with different judmgents on work than I do. Because of the subjective nature of grading, it cant' actually be based upon a standard--at least, not one that has a single arbiter. If we wanted a more rigorous process, we would have to do what scientific journals (ought) to do: put the work into through peer review and try to reach a concensus on what the work deserves. That, it hardly needs to be said, is impractical and useless.  

A is for Alternative

Standards are useful, provided teachers give up some of the autonomy. It doesn't matter the standard if there isn't uniformity in the application. Inasmuch as it's possible, grades could be useful in terms of formalizing an in-the-moment feedback, a formative expression of student progress. Techniques like mastery grading, which uses a scale of 0 to 4 to indicate how well a student has mastered some of the objective objectives of the coursework, can be beneficial, when done correctly. However, if students from disparate classes are learning the same material and then graded differently by their sundry teachers, even if the methodology is mastery-based, they are still running against subjective judgments.

There's nothing wrong with having a person respond differently to different things. That's part of living. But if a student sends me a paper in which she grossly misrepresents Marxism, I'm going to be less lenient a grader than if she sends me a paper in which she can't get the differences between conservative and conservationist...mostly because the latter would be hilarious to see. My point is, no matter how hard I try, the biases I have prevent me from being "objective" when it comes to grading. I try to tamp that down as much as possible, of course, but the fact is, I'm human and I'm going to read things differently than they were intended. And what hangs in the balance is the student's sense of having understood or accomplished something in the class.

But what do we put in place of grades? Well, the easy response to that is, "Let the work stand on its own merits." If a kid wants to get into, say, Stanford, she would need to put together grade-based work from every subject. Instead of generating numbers that have no real meaning, computing them in an esoteric formula, and then writing a 250 word marginalium called a college-entrance essay to provide brief context for the collection of alphabetical arbitrariness, we could rely upon the increasingly digital world to give an easy repository for the student's work. She could, as she accomplished different assignments, put those pieces into her digital portfolio, organized by year and subject. Then, as she finished her junior year and was starting to court universities, she would select the colleges that she was interested in attending, showcasing the different pieces throughout her high school career. Any college intrigued by what they saw could flag her application, looking forward to seeing the final pieces as her senior year finished up.

In short, the easiest way to get rid of grades is to allow students to show who they are through the education we constantly claim will be needed as they grow into adulthood. "When will I use this in my real life?" students ask, as though they aren't in real life now and are somehow unique enough to have had that thought first. Rather than having the teacher answer that question, have the student put together the proof that she's the skills needed to admit into higher courses of learning.

Learning to Love Learning

I am horrible at math. I am questionable at art. I have little talent in musical composition. I can write well enough. I can read quite well, thank you very much. I know a couple of things about history. I can demonstrate any and all of these abilities in any manifold ways, provided I had the time and disposition to do so. And what else is school but a segment of time to learn how to do those things that the class is designed to teach?

I admit, I didn't become a really engaged learner until I became a teacher. That's no one's fault but my own. If we truly wanted to "revolutionize"** education, we would stop taking anything for granted or natural in our system. We would rethink what we value, whom we value, and how we prove that value. We would remember that grades are good at one thing, and that thing is reducing human beings and their worth to a letter and a number. 

We would recognize that that is gross. 

We would change.

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* You could make the argument that all language is built upon sounds without solid signifiers, which is theoretically sound but practically disingenuous at this point. We created a system that's supposed to communicate, but all it sends out is white noise. Then we, like the subjects staring at the Emperor's invisible clothes, nod and agree that it's music, indeed.

** We don't, for a couple of reasons: 1) Revolutions require bloodshed, and no one wants bloodshed over our education policy in America; 2) There are entrenched interests in remaining in the past and continuing an antiquated, inadequate system. They hide behind catchphrases and dollar bills and "conservative values" and "liberal policies", but the truth is that anyone who truly cares about the education of America's youth is firmly placed in the classroom. Revolutions do not happen in the spheres where the revolutionaries have power, and teachers' greatest power is within their own rooms.