Are Grades Obsolete?
Grades have never served their intended purpose. The current pandemic gives us an avenue to confront the falsities and fallacies associated with our cultural over-emphasis on marks.
“Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich and a tragedy for the poor.” — Sholem Aleichem
Since the 1970s, the number of applications to 4-year postsecondary institutions has doubled while the number of spots at these schools has changed negligibly, if at all. At elite universities, the situation is worse.
For most high-school students, the dawn of this era of intense competition has rendered secondary school not merely a game, but a seemingly never-ending tournament.
The final prize is admission to a dream school, and each class is a free-for-all match. Students and their classmates are no longer contemporaries, but competitors. And their primary indicator of competence falls on a single indicator that is intellectually destructive in its simplicity: grades.
A major point of contention in education during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in secondary schools and higher-education, is how to accurately grade students on content understanding.
After all, grades are what students rely on to reflect their learning and signal their intelligence. They have become a symbolic means of currency, and are often leaned on in some of the most pivotal moments of an individual’s life as they navigate our increasingly information-based society.
School administrations have deliberated what to do; whether to deliver grades as usual, switch to a pass/fail system, or offer a mix of both.
The contention is equally high amongst students, with many arguing that to grade through the pandemic would disadvantage those already disadvantaged.
Students who do well have argued the opposite. It would be unfair to deprive students who do well from the token of their success and a major constituent of their identity; their marks.
It is obvious grades are a social force. Yet the increasing focus on grades by students as a sign of their success, and on educators as a sign of theirs, often goes unfettered.
At face value, the pandemic poses the problem of adequately returning to the previous pervasive educational norm of relying so heavily on grades. However, it also presents a unique opportunity for a dialogue to challenge the validity of our cultural perceptions and emphasis on grades. To do this, we must first fully understand their history and rationale.
I. The History
Prior to the 1800s, grades were sparsely used, with students merely passing exit examinations. By the early-to-mid 19th century, Harvard, Yale, and other eminent institutions began using grades, as “they increased attention to the course of studies” and encouraged “good moral code.” However, there was no evidence that they necessarily encouraged learning or developed students as critical thinkers.
By the 1940s, normalized grading systems reached widespread use, and by the 1970s, roughly 70% of institutions were grading students. This was not without opposition; as early as 1933, various academics and educational critics were sounding the alarm on the metric that they viewed perverted the learning the process by detracting from the learning process and gamifying education in a way comparable to poker where students attempt to “get by” or “win,” both of which being meaningless terms in the context of learning.
II. The Rationale
The rationale for grading, both when first introduced, and today, is threefold: to sort, to motivate, and to provide feedback to students.
Sorting
The primary cultural need for grades is for them to serve as signallers of competence; to sort who is smart, who is average, and who is neither. Fundamentally, using grades as an indicator of intelligence is ignorant at best, and asinine at worst.
Studies have shown that the same teacher is likely to give a single piece of work different grades when submitted multiple times, with variation between marks being even greater when done by different teachers. In other words, grades offer a vague and subjective rating rather than an objective assessment, and even that assessment is often weak and meaningless.
Prominent intelligence researcher James Flynn ran a study where students from an eclectic variety of public and private universities were tested by practical critical thinking problems in the domains of economics, math, and the physical and social sciences. Flynn found that students in the top decile of their class performed no better statistically than those in the bottom decile of the same class.
Worse, this sorting creates artificial, inaccurate castes that force students to compete with each other, whether voluntary or involuntary, as a function of the fine degrees of difference in performance reflected in granular grading. Where there is little or no difference in work standards, it encourages a struggle to create it.
This begs the question, why sort? To the rest of society, it provides no meaningful information regarding the critical ability of students, and within the school context it is well-documented that sorting only invokes and exacerbates inequity by disallowing socioeconomically disadvantaged students from access to higher learning by being prematurely and incorrectly sorted in their early academic careers.
The rationale that grades are needed to sort students is not fallacious, it’s transgressive, and contradictory to the value of equity of opportunity that is fundamental to a virtuous academic system.
Motivation
Worse yet, grades are no better at motivating students to learn than they are at providing any kind of meaningful sorting of them.
Although they certainly motivate students to want to get good grades, or rather avoid getting bad grades, they don’t actually motivate learning.
A study showed that among Japanese students told a test would count toward their final grade, interest in subject-matter dropped and students anxiously avoided tackling difficult questions relative to those who were told the test was merely to monitor progress. Grading did motivate students, but rather than to learn, it motivated them to do the bare minimum to achieve the highest grade.
In my own observation, this approach is only exacerbated in upper years as students approach university applications, and when they enter the university environment. Students stray from engaging and exploring the content that they learn, and filter it more and more until all they give attention to is what is testable. I’m sure everyone has been in a classroom, where, rather than engage professors, students are more inclined to ask “will this be on the final?”
In other words, students are both more likely to be interested in content if they aren’t graded, and more likely to retain it.
Ultimately, grades do motivate students, but only to achieve high grades. In doing so, they also depress creativity, tarnish genuine intellectual interest in course material, and cultivate a fear of failure born from intra-class competition and the immense social pressures attributed to a single metric.
Feedback
At the very least, grades are a necessary feedback mechanism, right? After all, students in a classroom without grades for 3-months reported feeling somewhat confused and ambiguously directed by the lack of grades as feedback information.
Wrong.
Grades have become viewed as such an integral piece of academic feedback because of the way students have been conditioned. In academic contexts, grades are the ultimate output, and to most students they hold greater value than their actual learning.
However, because of the system that has developed, grades are no longer constructive information; rather, they reflect whether you are a success, or failure. And as per the late, prominent Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, people are most likely to use feedback as inspiration in striving to a higher standard when it comes as information, rather than reward or punishment.
Once again, at face-value, grades do provide a certain form of feedback, but this façade of coherence fails to encapsulate and evaluate students in their infinite qualitative variations to provide constructive direction.
III. The Alternatives
It is abundantly clear that grades do not effectively serve their intended purposes, so what are the alternatives?
The most prominent alternative to grades is the narrative assessment. Rather than giving students a simple grade, and perhaps added comments on an assessment, narrative evaluations provide students with detailed, individualized feedback. Students are given specific information about where they excelled, as well as areas they can improve on through actionable learning directives.
The benefits of this model are immense.
Providing nuanced and detailed feedback on a personalized basis provides students with rich, comprehensive feedback on how they can develop as thinkers while providing motivation to better learn course material.
Meanwhile, it strengthens relationships between students and their instructors and eases tension and competition amongst classmates. Moreover, it provides students with a model pervasive in the adult world, wherein people are given qualitative performance evaluations rather than unambiguous grades.
The most common objection to narrative assessments is that they are labour intensive. However, many argue that instructors already do most of the work needed to deliver narrative assessments.
Even if there is added time-cost in evaluating assessments, the educational benefits are immense.
And it isn’t as if it is an unfeasible model to implement; large public universities like UC Santa Cruz have already done so. Even Yale, one of the first schools to implement grading, is beginning to shift away from it.
Another common objection to alternative systems is that grades are necessary to sort students in applying to higher education and provide objective relative standing. However, many universities actually prefer narrative evaluations for the richness they offer.
Regardless, it isn’t as if admissions are objective, anyway. Given how competitive applications are, admissions offices ultimately look for people who are “admirable,” a qualitative feature not objectively measured. In other words, they subjectively choose who they like.
IV. The Opportunity
I’m not naïve; it’s abundantly clear that grades cannot be quickly removed from educational systems. However, a grade-less system is not a utopian fantasy. Methods like narrative evaluations can be put in place to dilute the emphasis on grades and create more hospitable, intellectually open, and cultivating learning environments for students.
Rather than being a pressure cooker of anxiety, frustration, and anger, schools can become intellectual incubators cultivating collaboration, not competition, and inspiring intellectual growth, not indolence.
Grades have long been obsolete, and the current pandemic forces us to confront that fact. It also provides us with an avenue for discourse and change.
School shouldn’t be a game. It should be a dream. And the first step toward that dream begins with addressing the issue of grades.
