Harvard University faculty recently voted to cap the number of As awarded to students in an effort to make student marks more meaningful. Last month I wrote Teacher Evaluation is the Worst but this month I want to contract that argument down to simply: Evaluation is the Worst. Grades are stupid. I have thought so for almost as long as I have been teaching – definitely for decades. How do you measure learning? Seriously. That is a serious question. You can’t. That is a serious answer.
In recent years my writing students (from first year college writers to graduate students) have earned a lot of As (77% last semester). I teach writing and sometimes literacy pedagogy which means that my content is famously subjective. How do I measure a student’s growth over the course of a semester? How much of that growth can I (or my institution) actually take credit for? Personally, I don’t think I can take a whole lot of credit although I do take a great deal of personal pride in finally learning how to create a supportive classroom community structure that doesn’t hinder learning. Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post “What does student success look like?:
So what is student success? I think we need to spend a lot less time, energy, and money focusing on benchmarks and minimums and more time, energy, and money on fostering student motivation and confidence. Basic skill competence is not enough to ensure success – for our students or our world – we must also encourage dreams and urge our students to pursue them.
Student success is not defined by test scores and graduation rates. Student success is about dreams achieved, but even more than that student success is about the creativity, thinking, and learning that takes place along the way. How do you define student success?
I still believe that student success is about dreams and creativity and the learning that happens on the journey to achieve those dreams. If anything I believe that more now than I did more than a decade ago. I have written often about where we have gone wrong and I blame capitalism (see Capitalism, AI, and Creativity). I am not alone (see Grades Are Capitalism in Action. Let’s Get Them Out of Our Schools). Learning can and should be fun more often than not. Sure, there are serious subjects that require some serious study but capitalism has sucked so much joy out our school system it makes me want to smash things. Capitalism has broken our brains and caused our brains and bodies to grow awry then sold us snake oil as the cure. I believe creativity is the cure for capitalism’s toxins and ridding ourselves of grades and other meaningless forms of evaluation is a good place to start the healing.
Last month when I wrote Teacher Evaluation is the Worst I noted that most of my annual evaluations have involved no effort to help me grow while simultaneously not engaging with my actual teaching in any meaningful way. Grades do the same thing to students but I suspect the harm is more corrosive because my students have swum in these toxic waters their entire educational careers while as an elderly Gen-Xer I was able to develop my prefrontal cortex and some self-confidence in a much different environment. Sure schools in the 1970s and 1980s had their issues and plenty of children were failed in countless ways (because learning was never meant to be mass production) but we read books and textbooks, wrote our notes by hand, and typed our papers on typewriters. If we needed more information than was available from our textbook or the grocery-story encyclopedia set at home then we had to visit the library and use the card catalog then wandered the stacks with only the Dewey Decimal system as our guide. And our teachers had to assess our work the old-fashioned way – by collecting data through observation and evidence that they gathered personally in a variety of ways. Standardized testing did not play a role in our education until high school and even then we mostly had to opt in (I’m looking at you Regents Examinations).
I have written numerous posts about grades and assessment over the years as I struggled to find a way to reduce their toxic influence on my students and classroom. In my early years I focused on gamification and ways to give students agency over their grades. Simultaneously I also strove to give my students agency over their writing and fought against my institution to reduce disposable writing assignments. I began to develop way stations rather than weigh stations to help my students grow as writers. Then I took a shaky step into the ungrading world with conference grading. My long ungrading journey eventually landed on reflection supporting the writing workshop model that has always drawn me as both a writer and a teacher.
I promise my students at the start of the semester that if they make a good faith effort to go on this journey with me they will grow as writers and their good faith effort will be rewarded with an A. Many students earn 100 points (the most available). I do not assign meaningless tasks. We do a lot of low-stakes writing and reflection to develop their unit deliverables which are also accompanied by a reflection. My students understand what they are writing and why they are writing. My students set their own writing goals and reflect on their progress toward those goals. Those skills are what I’m teaching. Not the perfectly polished essay that is devoid of impact on the writer and reader. Those skills are what will help my students when they write for an audience outside my classroom. So students who practice the skills of low-stakes writing, setting goals, reading their writing and the writing of others with an eye toward those goals, and then reflecting about what they have learned along the way should get an A in my not-so-humble opinion. I have always seen my job as helping students to grow as writers and grades just get in the way. Is there a teacher out there that has found that grades and assessment makes their job easier? Is there a student out there that has found that grades and assessment helped them learn and grow as a human and (writer, reader, scientist, mathematician, etc.)? Grades are a distraction and time/energy suck in the best case scenario and enormously destructive in the worst. This has always been true but capitalism made it worse. Is there anyone who can make a serious argument for how standardized testing has improved learning in our schools? Has a standardized test ever led to a lightbulb moment when a student plugging away in the homework mines suddenly and gloriously sees the light and learns how to read a sentence rather than sounding it out one word at time?
Grades are stupid and Harvard faculty are stupid for bowing to capitalism but then that is the whole point of Harvard so none of us should be surprised. If Harvard was truly interested in making their degrees more meaningful then they would just move to entirely pass-fail. Students either satisfactorily completed the expected work or they did not, so what does any gradation in between matter? Students have either satisfactorily mastered the expected skills or they have not and that is the point of education. Capitalism has forced us to constantly rank ourselves against others (see bell hooks) but that does not reflect or measure learning so why are we still playing this game. Grades cannot be used to measure learning and so I return to my original thesis, but as I am just a lowly educator and not a capitalist my opinion doesn’t matter. Grades are stupid is a hill that I will die on.
