Grades and learning
by David Zetland
The one-handed economist
Schools tend to go to one extreme or another when it comes to grades: they are either confidential or posted openly.
The reasons for confidential tend to involve self esteem, privacy, peer pressure and bullying. The idea is that students will be mean to each other if they know the grades of others.
This idea is a bit flawed — students can be mean in many ways, grades are feedback on work rather than evaluations of personal character, etc. — but you can see its parallel in discussions of pay at work.
The alternative of open grades is popular with those who want to show the product of potential, habits and behaviour — and how sometimes inputs do not lead to outputs. Sure, So-and-so (the model student) got an A, but what about S0-and-no (the rebel), who also got an A? Going further, open grades help students calibrate their own performance; they help groups of students compete with each other (I’ve published on this); and they force teachers to give clear objective feedback to students who will compare their work.
Learning is a process, and grades are signals of whether than process is going well. Although I’d prefer to post ALL my grades openly, I actually fall somewhere in between — I give open grades on some assignments (along side openly penalising failures to follow guidelines), but I give confidential grades on others. That’s just how things work out.
But my one-handed conclusion is that individual grades only make sense when you can compare yourself to the group. That’s how you know that your B+ is amazing (top grade on the exam!) or a disaster (everyone else got an A- or above).
We learn by comparison, so don’t ignore its potential.
Back when I was a student at a large state university, grades could only be posted without names because of the “Buckley Amendment.” Student ID numbers were used, I think. That certainly accomplished the goal of giving students a sense of grade distribution while preserving confidentiality.
I took a probability and statistics course from a noted mathematician who gave everyone an A. If you weren’t going to get an A, he recommended that you drop the course before the drop date. He gave one test that everyone did poorly on. He used that as a starting point to get our mechanics up to speed. For the next week or two, he focused on mechanics. He then gave a make up test. It was the exact same test. We all aced it. I still remember some of the stuff today.
He was an unusual sort and quite memorable. He spent his summers at Los Alamos working on “death rays”. At the start of the term, he gave one student some money and asked him to place a can of Coca Cola on his desk at the start of every class. He was Italian-American and wore an elegant Italian suit in the increasingly casual 1970s. Now and then, he gloss over a point by waving his hands and saying “Italian proof”.
School policy was that grades were private, but we all knew everyone’s grades at the end of his class.
grades are evil. it promotes competition, i suppose, which is evil. it also promotes false motivation..work for the grade not because you care about the subject… which is a sin against the holy ghost [if you think i am being religious here, you must have got a gentleman’s C in literature] and they sure as hell are not objective.
And it makes teachers lazy. I gave kids whatever grade they needed, but i spent a lot of time with them giving feedback.