THE POINT-COUNTERPOINT PUBLICATION FOR DECEMBER 8, 2010

The Pluses &Minuses ofGrades

POINT No Better Alternative

Grades may be imperfect, but they are the best method we have to assess student performance.

RUTH SCODEL I hate grading, and I’m sure many other professors do too. It trivializes the e!ort students put into their work by representing a whole semester of thought and e!ort with one crude letter. Strengths and weak-nesses di!er greatly from student to student, and are incomparable. I cannot grade without imagining the disappointments, and sometimes complaints, that will ensue. Nonetheless, I grade with genuine belief.

When we look at graduate applications in the Clas-sical Studies department, we divide them into two groups based on GPA. "e whole committee reads the group with stronger grades, while one or two col-leagues check the lower-ranked group for applicants who are more promising than their grades suggest. "ere are a few of these, but not many. Grades are the best guide for us to determine which students deserve to be admitted to our program.

Once we have used grades to make the #rst cut, we look at the applicants holistically. We explore what strong grades may mean—a hard worker, love of the #eld, talent with languages, or broader intellectual curiosity. "e grades themselves don’t tell us these things, but they imply that it’s worth our time to look. "is is how almost every such program works, and this process tells us why grades are useful.

"ough we have recommendations and a writ-ing sample, grades are the essential #lter. Narrative evaluations may tell us more than grades do, but there would be no way to rank them and they would make our process much slower. Portfolios are essential in evaluating students for a program in, for example, graphic design, looking for evidence of a particular skill. Otherwise, portfolios are hard to evaluate (how much editing by others went into a particular work?), and take more time than we have.

Grades are, inarguably, a very crude measure of what a student has learned in a particular course. "ere is a signi#cant margin of error, and at their best they don’t tell very much about a student. "ey don’t distinguish between students who enrolled in a course that included material they were familiar with and students who were pushing themselves to their limits. "ey also don’t distinguish students who found the material di$cult from those who were ir-responsible and didn’t study. "ere are faults to the grading system, but there is no better alternative.

We need the grading system because our society tries to be a meritocracy, and meritocracies are better than the practical (utopian) alternatives. High school grades are the best predictor of success in college, and without them disadvantaged students would be even more disadvantaged.

We need a ranking system for admissions to law schools or medical schools. Consider, for example, what would happen if all our big universities start-ed giving students narrative evaluations or having them create portfolios. "e admissions sta! already has a mountain of material to evaluate, and does not have the time to si% through narratives or portfolios.

Without grades, they would just rely more on &'() and *+() scores, forcing the score of this one test to determine their admission.

Grades look more objective than they really are, and that is a problem. Even in courses with exams that strictly test facts and have very clear rules of evalua-tion, there is inevitable subjectivity in evaluating lab reports, for example. It is not clear, however, that any other form of evaluation would be better. Portfolios don’t pretend to be objective, but they are almost im-possible to compare, and narrative evaluations are too o%en bland and unhelpful.

Of course, single grades are not very informative. GPA’s typically are. "ere is no signi#cant di!erence between an applicant with a ,.- and one with a ,.., but there is a large di!erence between ,./ students and ,.0, and between ,.0 and ,.1. Patterns among #elds are also signi#cant—a student who is getting B-minuses in science courses and As in history needs to rethink being pre-med.

Even though we all hate them, grades have their merits, even at the level of the individual course. Most faculty do want to be fair. "e very crudeness of the letter-grade system forces us to think about how one B-plus compares to the next. It is much easier to evade that kind of responsibility when you are writing a nar-rative; you can easily let your feelings about individu-al students in2uence what you write (this is one of the problems that make writing recommendations very di$cult). Whether we are grading exams, papers, or a whole course, almost all of us look at our outcomes and try to make sure that we haven’t been unfair. We can’t always be sure that we have succeeded, but we are doing our best, and letter grades help.

Grades lead to grade-grubbing and unnecessary competition. "ey are very, very far from perfect as an incentive or an evaluation. But before we give them up, we should be careful that we don’t create more problems than we solve, in the less-than-utopian re-ality in which we actually operate.

"e author is the D.R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin, and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.

Volume 24 Issue 10

COUNTERPOINT What Ever Happened to Learning?

Grades get in the way of genuine learning, which should be the goal of all education.

E.D. ROTHMAN

December 8, 2010

Some of my students ask more questions about grades than about the subject I teach: statistics. “Are we re-sponsible for this material? If my grade isn’t good should I drop this class? Should I do this assignment even if it won’t count towards my grade?”

"e aim of education should be to help students learn the material and for them to enjoy doing so. A%er a few minutes in a kindergarten class, even a skeptic would see the natural desire to learn. Unfor-tunately, the older student o%en loses this intrinsic desire. We should eliminate these silly As, Bs and Cs and instead focus the exhausting e!ort of grading on actually helping students learn.

If the only purpose of an education is achieving a certain score, a grading system may seem sensible. However, the real world is not based on such an al-phabetical quest. As a graduate, you will solve real problems, and a teacher—the authority #gure who ranks students—will not be present.

A teacher’s authority in determining grades has seemingly bene#cial results but can actually under-mine educational opportunities. With knowledge comes responsibility. Jacob Bronowski, a champion of the scienti#c study, suggests that this responsibility is “to challenge the established view and not sit idly by while others de#ne the world for you.” If the person evaluating you is also the person you challenge, then a clear con2ict exists. We are creating yes-men and yes-women in the classroom and subsequently in the work force.

Extrinsic rewards establish a clear goal. Assigned grades based on tests or papers provide incentives to achieve such goals. But W. Edward Deming, a qual-ity expert, reminds us to ask, “By what method is the goal to be achieved?” For instance, students may limit course selection to those classes which o!er a higher chance for them to get an A. For others, there is such a great incentive to achieve a higher grade that they cheat. Generally, incentives lead to short-term think-ing; deep understanding is sacri#ced by an emphasis on memorization.

Limiting the number of As causes wasteful com-petition, discouraging cooperative learning. "ose identi#ed as losers in the competition will have re-duced joy in learning and will establish lower expec-tations for themselves. Among so-called winners, we reinforce undesirable actions such as cramming for exams rather than actually internalizing the material. Competing students are unlikely to loan notebooks, provide insights or allow others to read their work.

Another fault of the grading system is that one cannot separate the student’s contribution from the teacher’s contribution to the score. A grade does not re2ect how one will do in a future system. Re2ected in the label “teacher’s pet,” the interaction between the teacher and the student is not small; students who learn to function in the system can perform better than students of comparable ability and e!ort who are not so focused on grade games.

How should teachers provide useful feedback? "e feedback must acknowledge that our interest is in helping each student, not determining if one student is “better” than another. "e feedback should be pro-vided early and continuously. We must provide stu-dents with principles to be mastered. When a student demonstrates mastery, we will provide additional principles to master. At any point in time, the number of principles mastered can be high for some students and lower for others. However, like a dissertation, the size or number mastered would not be the primary factor in the deciding when the student can graduate. While most students may #nish college in four years, others may need #ve. We want students to learn to question, to apply what they have learned to new situ-ations, and to teach what they have learned to others. "ese abilities are far more bene#cial in the long-term than the accumulation of facts.

Because students learn in di!erent ways and at di!erent speeds, teachers should focus on providing options and methods of learning appropriate to each student. "e student’s responsibility will be to learn how to become an aggressive scholar in his or her own area of study. Everyone should be an A-student in their speci#c expertise.

A student excited with the desire to teach others what he or she has learned could prepare an electron-ic portfolio, for instance, that would include mastered material. "is modern electronic portfolio would provide potential employers and professional school admissions o$ces with examples of applications that he or she deemed important to describe. "is skill set would be informative of his or her ability to move from a student who is potentially smart to an able leader who can communicate e!ectively.

Ranking students with grades creates an alter-native purpose for education and therefore inhibits learning. Grades record what has happened rather than identify what could happen. "ey do not mea-sure an individual’s contribution to the learning pro-cess. "e alternative is clear: when a student demon-strates mastery, an A should be recorded. Otherwise, we need not assign a letter.

"e author is a professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research.

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