Written with Michael Brown
Mary: I ended our last post with an overly broad statement about the difficulty of creating and implementing assessment of critical thinking. At the time, I was thinking of assessment from the point of view of an administrator: How would I use this tool to measure a professor’s ability to teach critical thinking and a student’s ability to learn to think critically? Mike, your focus on teaching has also made me think of assessment in terms of grading, in terms of a professor assessing the students in his class. As we near the end of the semester, we discover if our students have learned what we thought we were teaching them.
Mike: Like many of my colleagues, I have a revulsion to grading. Not because it takes time but because it seems to miss the point of the course itself. I was lucky to have taught early in my career at a school — Sarah Lawrence College — that did not grade students in the usual sense. Our evaluation of their work involved writing a short paper discussing what they had done, and it was thought out partly in dialogue with the student. That would certainly not satisfy registrars and others who prefer a simple metric in order to compare students, rather than see what their work actually consists of. Standard methods of assessment and grading distort what is most important about learning and education — including teaching.
The fact is, grading is not really assessing. It is giving a number to students that allows each to be compared to all others, a practice that is statistically misguided and counter-educational.
Mary: I agree with you that there is a disconnect between teaching and grading. When I taught, I hated grading. The easiest class to grade was statistics. The exams were multiple choice and it seemed so black and white. At the other end of the spectrum was political theory. All of the assignments for my class were essays, and I was looking for ways to give students credit for their thinking, creativity, and risk-taking.
However, I disagree with you on your second point. I do think that grading is assessing but, I also believe that it is much more. As we all know, grades and grade-point averages are one of the main gate-keeping mechanisms in education, triggering promotion, expulsion, and other rewards and punishments. If professors hate to grade and grades are what help our students move up the ladder of success, perhaps we need to rethink what goes into grading and how gpa’s are used.
Mike: The focus on incentives and credit may be unavoidable. But even those distort because they amount to a single index of work that does not actually boil down to a single object that can be indicated by a number. I agree that giving a grade can open up a discussion about work between teacher and student, but beyond that I am still convinced that it belies what the student has done and tends to standardize the idea of knowledge in a way that cannot be intelligibly communicated to the student.
It may be that there are two perspectives in which this discussion needs to take place. One is from the standpoint of the student wanting a credential and the teacher wanting to bring some finality to a course that, if it is a good one in the human sciences, can have no real finality for a serious student. The other is from the standpoint of work actually done — by the teacher who is trying to give the student access to the process of creative thinking and the student who has actually tried to do that sort of thinking. From that perspective, grading is neither an incentive, if we intend to encourage further work, nor an assessment, since it does not assess what the student has actually been doing.
The idea that a final product is what a course is all about is not one I am prepared to accept.
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5 Responses to Grade Hatred
iris411 - November 23, 2010 at 9:07 am
The grading itself is probably not the pith of this issue. The problem seems to be how student interpret grades and what do they do with them.
missoularedhead - November 23, 2010 at 9:33 am
I don’t think that grades are necessarily the best way to assess student learning, and there are all sorts of attendant issues that need addressing, such as grade inflation and what a grade really means, but at the same time, it is a standard we all understand in generally the same way. If you give a student a ‘C’, that tells me something, and if you give all of your students an ‘A’, that also tells me something (not very good, mind you, but something).
hariseldon - November 23, 2010 at 9:38 am
This is a very important post because it is one of the few public admissions I’ve seen that the gate keeping function of higher education is inimical to its stated purpose, that of, well, education. Someone attempting to actually learn something must risk making mistakes; someone seeking a credential must demonstrate mastery. While the certification function of higher education may, at present, be a necessary evil, a failure to recognize it as such has all sorts of negative, unintended consequences. Examples abound: for all the hoopla surrounding American students’ lack of interest in STEM subjects, nobody has looked at the fact that these subjects tend to be harder on the GPA than, say, your average course in film studies. Nor have we asked whether students are being certified in what they actually need to know. In my field of applied mathematics, for example, extreme proficiency in the mechanics of simplifying polynomials under the time pressure of an in-class exam is likely to be far less useful to society than identifying the correct problem in the first place.
dboyles - November 23, 2010 at 10:53 am
Fundamentally, isn’t education about those with experience in a given field putting those without experience to work in order that the latter who qualify may accede to meaningful work in the context of society post graduation for the good of that society? If so, coursework requires accountability on the part of the student. It also requires accountability that faculties put students to work and hold them accountable for that work, something that we as a nation are very lax doing or have forgotten how to do, judging from all the hand-wringing about Johnny not learning beginning in kindergarten and extending all the way through the educational pipeline into the university years, with society bearing the consequences. Formal knowledge systems require formalities for that accountability. The problem is not grades per se, nor an emphasis on them, but misplaced emphasis on grades that no longer represent actual mastery of material as an indicator of student quality or quality student work, whether it be STEM courses or English composition that is under consideration.
drjanniaragon - November 23, 2010 at 7:16 pm
There is so much to say about grading. I think that the overall assessment can be instructive to the student; however, this is really the student who has put some effort into the finished product.
One thing (of many)that I do not like about grading is when you know that this is not the student’s best work, but you have to assess it fairly compared to the entire class. These are those moments when I wish that I could have a long conversation with the student and assess her/his knowledge based on the conversation. I am well aware that the research and finished product are important skills to have, so I am not arguing for oral exams! Here, I just add to the fruitful dialogue.