Grading - Part 1
Although the practice of grading students has a long association with the process of schooling, in truth, grading has almost nothing to do with learning, or enhancing the likelihood that what is learned will be of high quality. The reasons why grading persists has much less to do with helping young people learn anything of value, and much more to do with the political and philosophical turf wars that are fought by the adults who control, or wish to control, schools.
What happens to students as a result of these wars is so much 'collateral damage'. And, any student learning that goes on within the boundaries of the rules of engagement through which such wars are conducted is largely incidental and, quite possibly, would have been acquired even if there were no system of grading, or even schooling.
Supposedly, grades play a critical role in a complex network of accountability. Through grading, students, teachers, schools, districts, and states all seek to justify their existence.
If a student brings home a poor report card, then, this may be taken as an indicator that such an individual has not mastered various units of the curriculum, or needs to work harder, or is having some sort of difficulty which is interfering with obtaining good grades. If enough students within a given teacher's class display poor performance, then, this might serve as evidence that the teacher is failing, in some manner, to properly communicate the concepts, techniques, facts, and methods which constitute a given unit of learning. If too many students, from different courses within a school, do poorly on their quarterly reports, then, one may have grounds for concluding that the either the school administrators, or the school board, or both, are not adequately overseeing the educational process within the school. If too many school districts exhibit poorly performing students, then, one has certain grounds for suspecting that the state department of education may not be doing its job with respect to lending the support, resources, money, research, and guidance that will help enable districts, administrators, teachers, and students to succeed.
One of the problems with the foregoing scenario is that grades are not necessarily either an accurate index of what is being learned, or a good method for identifying why certain subject matter is not being learned, or a proper way to assess whether, or not, what is being graded should be taught at all. There are a number of reasons for making such claims, and these reasons are tied to what may be entailed by the idea of 'grades'.
More specifically, let's take a look at the issue of grading from four perspectives and briefly explore each of these in turn - namely, (1) grades are an assessment based on certain sampling techniques (known as tests, essays, projects, and class participation) concerning the performance of students over a period of time; (2) grades are, in part, an expression of an interpersonal dynamic between teacher and student which is immersed in beliefs, emotions, attitudes, expectations, pressures, judgements, values, and commitments that often are highly subjective in nature - both with respect to the teacher and the student; (3) grades are the result of a process that has some public components (i.e., test results, homework, and so on), but which is surrounded by a lot of variables that are largely hidden from view, yet, which may have a huge impact on the shaping of a grade, but, are rarely, if ever, taken into consideration - such as learning styles, rhythms of life, identity issues, and readiness to learn; (4) grades are an integral part of a tracking system that is intended to control the lives of students so that they serve the purposes of school, business and/or government, and, as such, grades really have little to do with helping a student to work toward maximizing whatever his or her human potential may be - which ought to be the essential function of any organized learning process.
As an assessment process [(1) above], grading is extremely problematic. A lot of issues need to be analyzed before one can say that a given grading system constitutes a fair, valid, reliable, or even warranted mode of sampling student performance for purposes of evaluation.
To begin with, one needs to ask why the work of a student is being evaluated. From a purely pedagogical perspective, the answer to this question should always have to do with trying to differentiate those facets of learning that are relatively problem free from those areas with which the student is experiencing difficulty.
As such, testing and evaluation have no necessary connection to the idea of grading. The former can be pursued quite independently of the latter.
In fact, grading often has a deleterious impact on the learning process because it places this process in a context of stress, and there is a great deal of evidence that demonstrates how the presence of stress undermines and adversely affects not only both short and long-term memory formation, but, as well, disrupts a person's capacity to focus clearly. Why anyone who claims to be interested in helping students to learn would, simultaneously, take steps to put such learning at risk needs to do a great deal of explaining as to why such counter-productive steps are deemed necessary.
Of course, some would argue that dealing with stress is an inherent part of adult life and that, sooner or later, a young person is going to have to learn how to engage and overcome the potential effects of stress. One could agree with the foregoing completely, and, yet, nonetheless, point out that such learning should take place in other contexts where the focus of the lesson is on stress management, per se, and not under circumstances where an individual has to try to sort out and learn a variety of very different lessons at the same time.
If a school system wants a student to learn certain material, then, the system should be doing whatever is necessary to faciliate the learning process in relation to that subject matter and nothing else, rather than trying to unnecessarily complicate the process with learning tasks which tend to be at cross-purposes with one another. While there may be some students who are not only capable of taking on stress-related learning contexts, but who, actually, thrive on them, one cannot make the assumption that all students function in this way, and, consequently, the governing principle should be one of simplifying a learning task, rather than throwing themes into the mix which are irrelevant to the subject matter that is to be learned, and which, at best, can only be used to advantage by a small minority of students whose personalities are inclined in that fashion.
In addition to the foregoing considerations, there is considerable evidence to indicate that grading tends to be unreliable across teachers. And, there are several senses in which this is so.
For example, if one takes a given test instrument, problem set, or essay, different teachers will grade a student's performance differently. The differences can vary by as much as 40 points, and this holds for both science and math, as well as subject areas like English - in fact, oddly enough, and contrary to what one might anticipate, the grading of science and math papers often shows greater variability in scoring across teachers than do English papers.
Another dimension of the unreliability of grading concerns the nature of the precise relationship between a grade and what has or has not been learned by a student. This kind of unreliability is commonly referred to as 'validity' and revolves around whether, or not, a given process of evaluation (such as a test) actually measures what it purports to.
What is a test, paper, project or problem set supposed to measure - information retained (and what about the difference between what is recognized but might not be remembered)? understanding? critical reasoning? creativity? correct techniques or methodologies? specific points of view held by the teacher? Different teachers value different things and construct their assignments to determine whether students have absorbed what the teachers consider to be of importance, and while the assignment may serve to determine whether, or not, a student has learned what a teacher values, it doesn't necessarily measure what the student has learned.
From the perspective of the teacher, the assignment may have validity since it seeks to elicit from the student the kind of things which the teacher wishes to discover. On the other hand, from the perspective of what a student has learned through the class given by the teacher, the assignment may not do a very good job if it doesn't access what the student has to offer in this regard, and, in the process, paints an inaccurate portrait of the student's status as a learner.
If a student has acquired a certain amount of information but lacks, say, understanding concerning that information, obviously, the student has learned something, and, as a result, still may do well on certain kinds of test involving multiple choice, true and false, as well as solving 'easier' kinds of problems. However, if the test purports to measure a student's understanding of the material, but, in fact, only measures certain facts that have been remembered, then, the test is not a valid indicator because it doesn't measure what it is supposed to - namely, in the present case, 'understanding'.
Furthermore, what a teacher wants to measure may not be what parents, or administrators, or school boards, or states want to be measured. If the latter interpret a grade to be a function of what they want tests to measure, but, if the teacher's assigning of a grade is a measure of what the teacher considers important, then, from the perspective of the school, boards, district, or state, there is a problem with the validity of the grading process.
This problem may be hidden from public view, however. This is because, except under certain rare circumstances, schools, boards, districts, and states don't spend a great deal of time trying to understand what a teacher's assignment of a grade actually means, or how they arrived at that assessment.
Irrespective of whatever problems there may be in trying to figure out just what a given grading system is trying to measure, as well as whether it does this both reliably and with validity, there is a permanent labeling process which is inherent in a grading process ... a labeling that may impact upon a student's sense of self-esteem, competence, relative worth, identity, and confidence - all of which have potential ramifications for that student's ability to learn. In other words, if I am tested, and through this process, a teacher discovers that I don't understand a particular idea, then, the teacher has something with which to work in trying to find a way for me to come to understand what I do not grasp at the present time. But, if I am tested, and a grade is assigned to me with respect to my performance on the test, then, I have a label - i.e., the grade - which is being attached to me that has no discernible function in the learning process - except as a punishment for not learning things in the way, or in the time that the teacher or the school wanted. Furthermore, the very existence of this label may serve as an obstacle to my ability to learn things in the future if my confidence and/or my sense of worth and/or my level of anxiety are adversely affected by the labeling/grading process.
There are those who might wish to argue that the stigma associated with a bad grade serves as motivation to spur a student on to better efforts, and, in time, will lead, hopefully, to the learning of those facts, methods, ideas, and so on, that the test exposed as not, yet, having been acquired. While some individuals may respond positively to this sort of emotional manipulation and extortion, nevertheless, resorting to threats, intimidation, shame, punishment, and aversion training as the royal roads to learning suggests a definite lack of creative imagination in structuring the learning process - indeed, as Isaac Asimov once had a fictional character in the Foundation series say - 'violence is the last refuge of incompetence' - and using grades is definitely an act of emotional, social, and intellectual violence in relation to many, many students.
In addition, even if one were to accept the idea of using negative conditioning as a motivational tool for learning desired lessons, there is just no excuse for keeping the grade as a permanent record. Either the stigma of a poor grade serves as a goad to greater efforts on the part of the student, or it does not, and irrespective of whether, or not, it works to bring about the desired learning, keeping the grade as a permanent part of a student record, really serves no long term positive, constructive function in the learning process - which is what schools should be most interested in but, unfortunately, often are not. As a result, what the entrenched system of retaining poor grades really teaches many students is about the process of schooling as a vehicle of labeling, tracking, and controlling human beings for purposes other than what is in the best interests of developing the potential of the actual customer of public education - namely, the student.
The problems which surround the use of grading as an assessment process, and whether, or not, it constitutes a valid and reliable way of sampling and evaluating a student's learning profile have been one of the main reasons underlying the move toward standardized testing. A standardized scoring system, supposedly, would eliminate all of the difficulties involving reliability and validity and would help ensure that everyone is being measured in the same manner, and, as well, that measurements mean the same thing to everyone involved.
Unfortunately, there also are a variety of problems that can plague standardized testing. Aside from the questions of validity and reliability, there also are issues of cultural bias and whether, or not, some students are unfairly disadvantaged by the way in which the test is constructed (e.g., the sort of language that is used, the situations that are depicted, the common culture that the test presupposes in relation to those who take the test).
In addition, even if fair, valid, and reliable, one needs to ask whether, or not, what standard tests seek to measure has much to do with what a student needs to learn in order to be a person of good, moral character, or a contributing citizen, or a healthy, emotionally stable individual, or to be able to maximize what the student actually has the capacity to do, as opposed to what everybody else wants that student to be able to do. Standard tests might be able to measure the presence or absence of certain kinds of factual information, but they are not sufficiently sophisticated to evaluate such things as: critical thinking, creativity, and hermeneutical understanding, even if there was agreement on what any of these terms entailed - which there isn't.
To whatever extent standardized tests are reliable and valid, it is precisely to this extent that they probably don't measure anything of essential value because the only way one can get substantial agreement on the meaning of such tests is by throwing out the very sorts of issues which may be most important to gauging the actual worth of a schooling system for the emotional, intellectual, physical, economic, and spiritual welfare of students. Besides, standardized tests are not really about finding out information which may, ultimately, be of any, essential value to students, but are, primarily, about something else: the generation of data with which to play the blame/credit game (who is responsible for the current state of affairs) in order to gain access, or continue to gain access, to the educational money machine which provides a great many people with nice paying jobs.
A youngster may do well on standardized tests but have little insight into the nature of critical understanding, hermeneutical issues affecting interpretation, or have much inclination to ask fundamental, demanding questions concerning history, democracy, philosophy, and the purpose of life. On the other hand, an individual might not do all that well on a standardized test, and, yet, have considerable facility for insightful, creative, critical reflection - things which are not, and, for the most part, cannot be measured through standardized methods.
All of the foregoing points raise issues not only about what should be taught through schools, but how this material ought to be taught. As well, the above discussion raises the question of who should be setting the shape of the curriculum, and the purpose(s) underlying such a process. But, whatever the answers to these questions may be, grading plays, for the most part, a role that is irrelevant, if not counter-productive, to the process of learning that is at the heart of these issues.
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