Laura Rediehs
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
St. Lawrence University
The problem with traditional grading is that students have
good reasons to worry about their grades, and yet being grade-oriented
undermines the most important goals of liberal arts education. Students have good reasons to worry about
their grades because of the powerful symbolic and social roles that grades play
in students’ lives. Most undergraduate
students are at an identity-forming stage of their lives, and so they are
looking within and outside of themselves for clues about who they are and what
they should do with their lives. It
seems obvious to students to look to their grades in order to read what the
world is telling them their strengths and weaknesses are. This way of thinking is often explicitly
reinforced by parents, professors, and prospective employers.
Grades also have acquired increasingly powerful social
force. Grades are not at all private
communication between teachers and students but have a quasi-public role in
students’ lives. The occasions in which
students are asked to reveal their grades are frequently some of the most
significant moments in students’ lives and connect with some of students’ most
important relationships. There is so
much that can rest on grades—parental approval; scholarships; students’ being
allowed to continue studying; their being allowed to participate in other
meaningful, perhaps identity-forming activities such as athletic participation
or study abroad; and their future opportunities such as eligibility for jobs or
graduate school.
Grades then become a form of currency, a symbolic means
to negotiate a vast network of relationships and opportunities. Learning to operate in a system in which
motivation is controlled by currency is an important life skill for people to
learn to be successful in our culture, but is this really the purpose of
liberal arts education? The savvy
student, then, aware of the social functioning of grades, has good reasons to
take grades seriously. The problem is
that an orientation towards education mediated by grades is not necessarily the
best attitude a student can adopt to reap the full benefits of the most
important goals of liberal arts education.
Grades are essentially numerical and thus can only be
appropriately applied to what is measurable, but not everything that is
measurable is always measured in a course of study. A student too oriented towards getting good
grades can miss or neglect those components of the course that are not
graded. Furthermore, what is measurable
is not always what is most important in liberal arts education. There are many qualitative ideals underlying the purpose of liberal arts education
that cannot be measured on a comparative scale of quantifiable
achievement. In fact, some of these
qualitative goals cannot be definitively judged by a teacher—students themselves
are in a better position to evaluate these dimensions of their learning.
Research
in cognitive science and developmental psychology reveals that human learning
is extraordinarily complex. While
professors can look in on some aspects of the learning process and judge
whether students are putting certain words, numbers, or symbols together
correctly—even reading past the words and numbers to more general conclusions
about students’ conceptual development—there is much about students’ learning
that remains invisible even to the most attentive professors. Students themselves are in a better position
to judge many of the qualitative dimensions of their learning, as well as some
quantitative dimensions, such as their sense of improvement, the intensity of
their effort and engagement, whether they did all of the reading, how well they
paid attention in class, and how significant their learning was for them. But traditional grading can discourage the development and
refinement of students’ abilities in these respects, because strong self-motivation
and keen self-awareness of one’s own learning can bring a student into conflict
with professors’ judgments. Ultimately,
such conflicts are resolvable through thoughtful, mutually respectful dialogue,
but our society and our educational system do not teach students how to work
through such difficulties, and so the easiest psychological tactic is for
students to suppress their self-motivation and subvert their intellectual
self-awareness to the authority of their teachers. But developing self-awareness and developing
self-motivation are exactly some of the qualitative ideals underlying the
purpose of a liberal arts education.
When
teachers strive explicitly to structure their classes in ways that foster the
development of self-motivation and push students to engage authentically with
their education, they can feel that their ideals are consistently undermined by
their students’ efforts to play it safe and try to please the teacher. Authentic engagement with the educational
process is inherently frightening and difficult, exposing the student to a
world larger and stranger than previously imagined, demanding that the student
reconstruct a sense of identity in order to find her or his place in this newly
expanded world. In addition, authentic
engagement with education demands that students push themselves to their very
limits—a humbling enterprise requiring great personal strength. The only way that teachers can reasonably ask
this of students is if the class can become a highly respectful and supportive
environment: a context of mutual trust
and commitment. Challenges and criticism
offered in a context of trust can be perceived and accepted as exciting calls
to growth. When students trust their
teachers and their environment, they can open themselves to the (often
difficult) personal transformation that authentic education inspires.
If,
on the other hand, students feel that they cannot trust their teachers or their
environment, they become guarded and try to play it safe. Their reaction to challenges or criticism
becomes defensive. If they feel
themselves to be in a hostile context, a context of distrust demanding that
they prove their worthiness at every turn, then defensively protecting their
ego becomes an important survival strategy.
The fear-based learning that happens in a context of distrust may look
effective at first, because fear evokes keen attentiveness, but such learning
remains at the surface until the pressure is off, at which point much of what
was learned promptly dissipates. The legacy
of learning by fear is that many such students get better at manipulating the
systems they become cynical about, and become better at appearing the ways
others want them to appear. Such
learning, however, does not help students to develop their subtle perceptual
powers, or their depth of vision; it is not built upon respect, and it does not
strengthen their character or expand their compassion.
Because so much outside of the classroom hinges on students’ grades,
traditional grading imposes an outermost context of distrust framing everything
that then happens within the classroom.
Even when individual teachers attempt to create a trusting and
supportive environment for the students within the classroom, the knowledge
that grades will be recorded on students’ permanent, quasi-public transcripts
at the end of the semester permeates students’ consciousness at nearly every
moment. Despite the teacher’s good
intentions, the grade in this class may have important ramifications in several
different aspects of the student’s life.
Therefore, students feel embedded in a context of distrust, where their
ability to maintain good relations with their parents, stay in school, keep
their scholarships, participate in meaningful extracurricular activities, study
abroad, gain good summer jobs, and find their way to meaningful work after
graduation all hinge on continually proving their worthiness numerically
through grades.
The
situation is made even worse when teachers feel that their own livelihood
depends upon playing correctly by the rules, where the “rules” are often
understood to include some pressure to “resist grade inflation” by keeping
class averages at or below a certain level.
Teachers may also feel under pressure to have a nice, bell-shaped curve
of grade distributions. Such pressures
determine a priori that all students
are not equal—some are “better” and others are “worse,” and half of every class
must be determined to be “below average.”
If a teacher were to say, “all
of my students were spectacular this semester—they all understood the most
important points I was trying to teach!” the teacher’s colleagues would very
likely be suspicious rather than hear such a claim as a testimony of triumph in
teaching. Yet all of us, as teachers,
should be striving to help all of our
students to learn well, and there should be no a priori reason to believe this to be impossible. To assume that it is inevitable that some
students must fail is to adopt a principle of distrust that betrays the
respectfulness we should hold towards all.
Students
really do have good reason to worry about grades. Grades tie their work in individual courses
to larger structures in our complex society and thereby become symbolic (but
not necessarily accurate) representations to the world of who the student is
and how the student will function after graduation. In serving this role, grades frame education
in a context of distrust, demanding that students prove their worthiness again
and again or risk losing much of what is important to them. The fear-based learning that occurs in this
context of distrust is superficial and temporary, and only, at best, helps
students to become savvy manipulators of our currency-based societal
structures.
If
there is a distinctively Quaker pedagogy, I believe it must be rooted in Quakerly principles of trust,
respect, and commitment to the highest ideals of a wholistic,
transformative education. It is
important then for us to explore the question of how we can reform educational
structures to frame our educational institutions in an outermost context of
trust and commitment that will help teachers to encourage their students to
face the more meaningful challenges of authentic education. We still need to set high standards and
ensure accountability—is it possible to do these without relying on the power
of fear-based motivators? And in the
meantime, while the system is the way it is, are there ways that individual
teachers can encourage authentic learning without letting their educational
goals be undermined by the grading system?
Most
ambitiously, I do believe that the grading system can and should be changed to
allow for the appropriate evaluation of students’ preparedness for work or
advanced study without relying on the fearsome power of evaluation to control
students’ motivation. Possible solutions
here include changing to a High-Pass, Pass, Fail system, refusing to convert
these qualitative categories to numbers that get averaged together into a
single, cumulative grade-point index; another solution might be to institute
well-thought-out external examinations, prepared and conducted by people who
are trained in fair and useful comprehensive evaluation, leaving the professors
to be allies with the students in learning.
Professors would still give students plenty of feedback but would not
have to take on the role of evaluating and certifying the students’ mastery of
the material while students are still in the midst of the process of
learning. We should continue trying to
envision other possible large-scale solutions as well.
Meanwhile,
what can those of us who teach within the existing grading system do to create
a context of trust within the classroom, despite the current outer framework of
a context of distrust? My own solution
has been to institute a system of guided self-assessment in all of my
classes. I do everything I would
normally do in designing and teaching each course, except give grades. I do create the assignments, look at
students’ work, and give thorough feedback, but it is my students who give
themselves grades on each assignment, along with an accounting of the criteria
by which they determine these grades.
What I have learned in this process is that students are both very
appreciative of this opportunity, and trustworthy. They approach their task responsibly,
although initially with some trepidation.
By the end of the course, most students say that the process was more
difficult than they thought it would be, challenging them to confront their
intellectual limitations and questions of morality and personal integrity, but
that the exercise did free them to engage more creatively and authentically
with the course. Meanwhile, the
atmosphere in my classes has become more open and trusting, and I no longer
feel that the educational process is undermined by the cautious and defensive
game of tracking scores.
I
hope that Friends in higher education can become innovators in the reform of
grading and evaluation. Finding creative
new solutions to these problems will not only benefit education in Quaker
colleges but may well spark much-needed reform in American higher education
more generally.
Return to Laura Rediehs Grading Page