If you’re not familiar with the winter celebration of Festivus, and the Seinfeld episode that made it famous, you should be. This non-religious, non-commercial holiday celebration incorporates many idiosyncratic traditions, including the display of an unadorned “Festivus pole” and a closing ceremony that involves “feats of strength.” But by far my favorite tradition is the Festivus “airing of grievances.”
In Seinfeld, the airing of grievances provides an opportunity for each celebrant to explain how their friends and family have let them down over the past year. In the words of Frank Costanza, “I got a lotta problems with you people—and now you’re gonna hear about it!”
Last year, I wrote a post here at Unmaking the Grade airing my own grievances with the process of assigning final grades. The post generated some controversy over on LinkedIn; in fact, I can’t remember having received more pushback on anything I’ve written. So, I thought I would tempt fate again—this time, with backup.
In this audio experiment, my colleagues Josh Eyler and Liz Norell join me for a conversation in which we air our grievances about all the ways grades have let us down over the past year.
Josh is the director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, where I work. He recently published the book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Liz also works with me at the teaching center as associate director of instructional support. She recently published the book The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching with the University of Oklahoma Press’s Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series.
I’m excited to have this conversation with my colleagues. We got a lotta problems with grades—and now, you’re gonna hear about ’em.
Listen to our airing of grievances above or read the transcript below. And leave a comment to air your own grievances with grades!
Transcript
Emily: Okay, welcome, Josh and Liz. I'm really excited to have you here for this conversation and, I think, the second annual airing of grievances. I did an airing of grievances last year, but this is the first time that I've been able to do an airing of grievances with other people. So, welcome to the airing of grievances.
Josh: Happy to be here airing the grievances.
Liz: All of the grievances.
Emily: We have many, and we air grievances often amongst ourselves. And so I'm very happy to make our grievances public today, particularly around the conversation about grades, and we'll touch on some other things, I think, as well, because grades touch on so many aspects of our teaching lives. So the way we're going to do this is we're going to share one round, each of us will share a grievance, and then we'll have a little discussion. If we have time, we'll move on to round 2, or maybe a lightning round of grievances, and then we're going to try to end on a positive note with some Festivus miracles that have happened to us, or that we hope will happen soon. So let's get started with round one of airing of grievances, and I think we should start with Liz. Liz, what's your grievance that you would like to air today in celebration of Festivus?
Liz: My first Festivus grievance is any kind of communication with students that signals to them either distrust or suspicion from the instructor. So, this might be in the course design. It might be in the grading policy, since I know we're focusing on grading. It might be in syllabus language. It might be in lots of different things, even just kind of the way that we interact with students. But I just, I'm really tired of students getting the message that we know that you're going to try to game the system. And so we are going to watch every move you make. And sometimes even faculty feel that way, that everything that they're doing is being watched by someone within their department or discipline, and they're being judged for that as well. That's my grievance.
Emily: That is a grievance that I think I also share. I'm wondering if this feels self-defeating for you in that, you know, I think when you start communicating distrust to students, like, immediately, I feel like it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? That you communicate that this is a space where everybody is just trying to get one over on you. And then it makes people—I don't know. It kind of makes people into the image that you have of them, right? Like students become, I guess, less trustworthy the less you trust them. I don't know if that's an experience you've had.
Liz: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about that quote, I think it's Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.” And it's kind of the same thing with students. If we think they can, or if we think they won't, we're probably right, because if somebody thinks the worst of me, I'm either going to check out, or I'm going to rearrange my life to prove to them that they're wrong about me. But when I have lots of other competing demands on my time, I'm probably not going to take the time to do that. And so yeah, I think the key thing here is that communicating a lack of trust also generates a lack of trust from the students, and when there is a classroom without trust, learning becomes much, much, much more difficult.
Emily: What would you say are some distrustful grading policies?
Liz: Well, I mean anything where you're enacting a late penalty, or requiring doctors’ excuses or death certificates to give people more time to do their work. Yeah, I see Josh's face! Yes, that's—
Emily: Coming in hot!
Liz: Yes, I mean, but it's true! People ask for that, and it's ridiculous, right, that in order to, like, extend the deadline or to let a student make up a test—you know, those kinds of things just immediately communicate a lack of trust. But there are lots of ways that this can happen. I saw a syllabus this semester from a department which shall remain nameless that said, “There's no such thing as an excused absence.” And I thought, really? Like, we just emerged from a global pandemic. And you're going to tell me that no matter how many deathly viruses are in my body, I cannot be excused from class? That seems like the wrong approach and suggests that you just assume that everyone who says they're sick is lying.
Emily: Josh, do you want to weigh in here?
Josh: I just like that we're not pulling any punches five minutes into the podcast. episode. This is on brand for us. And no, I think Liz is absolutely right. I think we're at our best as educators when we are trusting students, and any grading policy that suggests that we don't is doomed from the start. So, I'm glad she pointed that out.
Emily: Yeah, I mean, I do think, you know, it's worth thinking about. Obviously, I know we all agree that, like, having policies that help students stay on track are great, right? You know, having policies that encourage attendance and that incentivize getting work in on time. And, you know, having deadlines and structures for students to help keep them on track and help keep us sane, right? Because I can't read mountains of late work all the time. But, you know, there are ways to do that in communication with students, I think, rather than kind of imposing policies on them that that communicate that you think that they're going to fail you at some point.
So, Josh, let's turn now to your grievance. Tell me about your grading grievance.
Josh: I have a big grievance, Emily, and I want to get it off my chest, and that has to do with grade inflation. And this is a grievance of mine for a couple of reasons. Grade inflation, I think—it's not that I don't want to engage with it intellectually. It's that it tends to dominate national discourse about grades. So you see 72,000 op-eds about grade inflation every year, and how it is the death knell of education as we know it. But also it's a grievance of mine because when you begin to have conversations about grading reform, grade inflation will often be interjected into the discussion and sort of stop it before it can gain any momentum. And I think sometimes people bring up grade inflation from a place of curiosity: “I've noticed that grades have gone up over the years.” And sometimes, though, and this is where the grievance stems from, I think that when folks bring up grade inflation, it's actually a proxy for some ill-founded fear that the courses we are teaching are less rigorous, and the standards are lower than they once were, and my major problem with that is that we don't have any evidence at all to suggest that any of that is true. I refer to grade inflation as a myth. Some people think I've gone too far. I don't really care, because I think most of what people are noticing about grades is what we would call grade compression, that a smaller range of grades has been given over time. But there can be lots of reasons for grade compression. More prepared students are entering universities. There's better teaching than there has been over the last few decades. You know, Cornell did a study to try and figure out why grade compression was happening. All they could come up with is they're letting in more prepared students. And so, it's more often grade compression. But the real issue here is that in order to prove that grade inflation is happening, you would have to have a ton of information about how grades had been given in the past, the criteria that was used for giving those grades in the past, and the assignments that had been given to match with those criteria, and then show that the same courses being taught now, using those same criteria, were giving higher grades. And we don't have any of that! We barely have information about the grades that were given decades ago, let alone how they were given, you know, in individual courses. So I think that grade inflation is a grievance of mine, because it often sets up obstacles to more productive conversations that we could be having about this.
Liz: Bravo. 100% agree. Endorse.
Emily: I feel like that was a really concise speech. Really, really like nicely put. I love it, and I know that you've kind of thought about this a lot, and talked about this a lot with people who maybe don't necessarily agree. I do have like a devil's advocate question: so, you said we don't have evidence that classes have gotten less rigorous over time. I feel like a lot of people anecdotally think this, maybe not just about their colleagues classes, but maybe about their own classes. Like, they have this sense that they used to teach to a much higher standard than they they do at present, due to the the population of students they used to have and the population of students that maybe they now have. And I'm wondering if you've heard this from people, or if you have this sense, or you know, what do you think about your own teaching? Does that feel right? Wrong? What are your thoughts?
Josh: Right. Well, I've certainly heard it before. And you know, I think, like most things, memory is fuzzy, and nostalgia is a very opaque kind of veil that sort of covers over our memories, and so we often have a lot of bias about what we have done in the past and what we are hearing from other people. So, I'll give the most generous response to this. Let's say that it may be true of a person that they feel as if they are grading less intensely, or that they've lessened their standards. That would still be one data point among many, many, many thousands across just our country alone. But I think what's underneath of this is that—let's say, you know, in the 1970s, let's take Intro to Biology, right? At one institution, we really have no idea how people were grading biology assignments in Intro Biology in 1972. We don't have their exams anymore. We don't know what criteria they were using. And I think most of the evidence we have about teaching and learning is that we know so much more about effective teaching and learning now, that it is a really safe bet that many of those assignments were not more attuned to learning than assignments that we have now in Intro to Biology, that people know a lot more about effective teaching than they used to know. And so, not only do we not know information, but the information we do have suggests that things would be better for learning now than they were back then.
Liz: Yeah, I just want to jump in and say, it may be the case, and I could even say this about myself, that we are attempting—and I'm going to use a phrase here that makes my skin crawl—it may be that we are attempting to cover less material. But that doesn't mean that we are reducing the rigor of the course, because we know that we can generate much more learning by going deeper on fewer topics than trying to cram in two dozen topics in a single semester where students don't actually grab onto any of that information and retain it.
Josh: Where's my little celebration emoji? To celebrate across the screen here, on Liz's response, there!
Emily: Yeah. And to your point about, you know, kind of comparison over time. I mean, I feel like I can't even compare my teaching to the teaching I did last semester or whatever, because my teaching changes so much. Like, I am experimenting all the time, I'm doing new things all the time, I hope I'm improving all the time. So, you know, I hope other people are as well.
Liz: Well, and I think it's important to say this out loud: we never teach the same class twice. Because teaching requires a sensitivity to the learners and to ourselves, and we are never the same person two semesters in a row. So, we are going to teach a different class, and to compare one to another, even within the span of a single semester, may not be appropriate.
Emily: Okay. So I think it's time now for my big grievance about grades this year, this semester, for all time, whatever. And my big grievance is that I'm feeling now more than ever that grades and, like, the culture of grading is really undermining the purpose of education and the reason that we're here. And this is a problem that AI is exacerbating quite a bit. And I think it's something we really need to pay attention to. If you have talked to me for more than five minutes about teaching writing, you know that I am the biggest fan of John Warner, and one of the things he talks about a lot is Campbell's law. And Campbell's law is, I'm going to read it verbatim: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. So, that's a mouthful. But like, I think the typical example might be standardized testing, that's intended to measure learning but then kind of becomes the goal in and of itself. So, you know, students are being taught to succeed on standardized tests. And so when that happens, it kind of loses its usefulness as a measure of learning. And I feel like a very similar thing happens with grades which are, I mean—arguably, grades have never, ever been good indicators of learning. I think grades have never been good indicators of learning. But at some point, right, getting the grade becomes the goal rather than the grade being used to indicate or illustrate learning, right, and as soon as the grade becomes the goal, it becomes a kind of useless measure of learning. And, moreover, you know, students attempting to get that grade is really in the way of their learning. They can't do the learning because they're trying to get the grade, and I think everybody's seen this happen in various ways in their classes. But I feel like AI has made this problem way worse, because now there's a pretty easy way for a lot of students to get a grade without doing the learning, and it's very hard when it becomes this transactional thing where it's just, like, everybody's in it to get the grade and there's this easy way to do it—you just lose the purpose. I mean, what are any of us doing here, right? Like, why are the students here? Why are we here other than just to, like, hand out grades? And that that feels—I mean, it feels like a waste of everyone's time, really. And so I think the only way out of this, the only way to kind of restore the sense of purpose is to really rethink at a fundamental level, like, what's the purpose of what we're doing, and, you know, how are grades getting in the way of that? I don't know. That's a really a big grievance, but that's the thing that I've been thinking about the most for this entire year.
Josh: Well, we're going big or going home today. So, would you say that there's ever any instance where a grade is reflective of learning or an element of learning?
Emily: I don’t really know. You know, I have like conversations with students sometimes where they they say that they feel like the grade reflects their learning. I just, I feel like grades contain so little information, right? Insofar as an A means something to a teacher, and it means the same thing to a student, and we both agree that you've reached the A level—I guess that may be representative. But for anybody else, right, who's looking at that grade, they don't know what it means. Half the time, students and teachers don't agree about what it means, right? I just think, you know, when I have discussions with my students about what they've learned, it's so much richer as an indicator of learning than any kind of mark or quantitative assessment could be.
Liz: Okay, so, as I've been listening to the two of you talk, I'm gonna make an analogy that has never occurred to me before, and it may not work. But we're going big or going home, so I trust you'll be honest with me.
Emily: Go for it.
Liz: I'm just thinking about, Emily, what you just said in combination with what you and Josh were talking about. And it's kind of like—so, I'm a political scientist, and I often think about how a vote is a very poor way to understand the spread of public opinion in the United States or any other country, right? So, to look at, you know, what percentage of people voted for Candidate X versus Candidate Y doesn't tell us much about what their underlying political beliefs are. It just kind of tells us who they thought was the least worst, right, or to try to put them into two buckets or three buckets of categories. And in the same way, you know—so, that has corrupted the election process in that candidates are more interested in getting numbers than in creating policies that speak to the people that would inspire a vote, right? And so this is where disinformation, misinformation becomes an effective strategy to win the votes, because you're not actually—you don't actually care about the underlying policy beliefs. And in the same way, as you said, the grade itself has become the thing of value. So, the learning that it's supposed to represent has kind of lost its value for a lot of students. And I think that's why we see so many of our students or many of our colleagues talking about their students in ways that suggest that students are just kind of disengaged in the learning process. Because we made them that way, right? Kevin Gannon talks about this in his book, that we have taught them that the only thing that matters is your grade, and then we get angry at them when the only thing they want to talk about is their grade. We have created this world through our reduction of everything to this one data point. And that one data point has kind of lost its value. Alright, does that analogy work? I'm not sure.
Emily: I kind of love it, I mean, I have to think more about it. I feel like I need to think about this for another, like, week now. But yeah, I mean, I also love how we're tracing, you know all these problems with grades—actually, this is like a whole societal problem, right? Like this is happening on so many different levels. And maybe it's all, like, coming from similar places, right?
Josh: Yeah, I like it, too, Liz. I think, in the sense that if you're trying to reduce something deeply complex to a single metric, you're always going to lose that complexity. And votes are interesting, because in some cases they would reflect accurately someone's political beliefs, and in other cases they would reflect only a strategic decision that was made for a million different reasons. And so in that way, grades are similar. In some ways, there may be a component that reflects a student's effort, or something related to the student’s work in the course, but it misses all the complexity of the actual learning process.
Liz: It wouldn't be me if I didn't also point out that so much of what goes into a student's grade has nothing to do with learning at all. It has to do with how many days were you sitting in a chair in a room? How often did you meet these arbitrary deadlines. Because, you know, they didn't learn on on our timeline. And that has nothing to do with learning whatsoever.
Emily: Yeah. And I think, just to return to the that idea about, you know, late penalties and things: the reason that anyone has these things in the real world, right—deadlines in the real world—is because it helps us get things done in an efficient way. It's not arbitrary, as in like, you know, you're going to be punished if you don't hit it, right? It's just that there are natural consequences. So, this semester, I explained to my students when they were struggling to get stuff in at our deadlines, I was like, “Look. I devote, I sit down, put on my calendar—I devote, like three or four hours on Monday simply to giving feedback on your assignments. And the reason that I ask you to turn them in on Friday, or on Monday at the latest, is so that I can use that time that I've blocked off to give you feedback. And when you don't get it in, then it's difficult for me to give you feedback. So, if you turn it in late, that's okay. But you might not be able to hear from me about that, right?” And it seemed like a lightbulb went off, like, when you just explain like this is not arbitrary, as in, you know, a way to to punish you, right? This is just the way that the world works and the constraints that we're under. So, then I had students who made a better effort to get stuff in on time, and I also had students say when they failed to turn something in—instead of saying, “Well, I'm going to lose points on that,” they'd say things like, “Oh, I know that I wasn't able to get this in on time, so I couldn't get feedback on it. And so it's not as good as I wanted it to be,” right? Which is kind of what you want, you know.
Okay, so I think we have time for a second round of grievances, maybe a little bit more quickly we can move through. Liz, what is your second grievance with grades?
Liz: Second grievance is the practice of averaging grades across the whole semester, without any opportunity for students who improve markedly, perhaps, because of our teaching, to remedy those lower earlier grades. So, I see this all the time in a variety of different kinds of classes, where students kind of don't really know how to, for example, study for an exam in a particular class, or don't know how the instructor might grade a particular problem set. And so, because they're trying to play that game of every instructor has different expectations, their grades in the early part of the semester may be lower. And then once they kind of figure out the game in that class (because grading feels like a game), then by the end of the semester, they're doing much better, but those earlier attempts will bring them down. I think this is ludicrous. We should be looking at learning as a process and a progress, not just an average across different points in time.
Josh: I want to stand up and cheer for that. Yeah, what's most frustrating about that, as people who deeply care about learning, is that it assumes that learning happens at the same rate for every single person, and we just know that it just does not. And so that whole system runs counter to what we know about what is actually beneficial for student learning.
Emily: I feel like writing studies and writing and rhetoric, English composition, have been kind of ahead of the game here in doing—I mean, I've been doing portfolio grading basically for as long as I've been teaching writing and rhetoric, since I was in grad school. Now, we did give initial grades on those first papers, but it was usually the case that students had at least one chance to revise whatever they did and get it into a final portfolio and a chance to, you know, try again and and raise their grade in that way. And I think this is maybe more difficult—it's more difficult to imagine how that would work in other disciplines. But you know, there's been a lot of great work on standards-based and specifications grading in STEM fields, which I think—you know, it's not the kind of grading that I like to do, but I think it's been hugely helpful in that way in particular, in, like, helping students who learn at different rates.
Liz: It also undermines the fact that failure is how we learn. And we should celebrate failures when they have that component of reflection and an attempt to do it better the next time.
Emily: Okay, Josh, your turn. Second grievance.
Josh: Grading curves. That's it, that's all I'm gonna say.
Emily: Mic drop.
Josh: Yeah, this is maybe on par for me with with grade inflation. And it's connected to what Liz was just talking about, it’s sort of how people respond to poor averages of grades, essentially. But grading curves, especially norm-based grading, have their roots in a racist and eugenicist pseudoscience about intelligence from the 19th century. And there's no getting around that. It's just that a lot of people don't know that. And so any application of a model that assumes that intelligence is distributed in a normal distribution is connected directly to that racist past. So, sometimes people will do this in an effort to try and make up for poor grades that they're seeing on exams. But the students still, of course, know that they scored poorly on the exams and still don't understand the material. So, artificially raising their grades—and here's where grade inflation actually happens—artificially inflating their grades to a level that they did not demonstrate through their learning feels inauthentic to the student, and does no more to help them for exams down the line. And it also increases the competition in courses, that students are competing for scarce resources, grades in this case. And it often hides the fact that—people aren't going to like me saying this, but I've said it before, so I'll say it again. It often hides the fact that the problem is not with the student learning. The problem is with the design of the exam. That the exam was flawed, and that's why students are not doing well on it. And so again, artificially inflating the grades does not account for, or cannot correct for, the flaws in the actual design.
Liz: Now I want the celebration emoji.
Emily: You know, coming from a humanities background, I was never in classes that had curved grades. I just wasn't in classes where we took a lot of tests. I feel like, you know, people mean different things when they talk about curving. Because when I first heard you talk about this, I was like, “Curving? Like, that thing where you raise everybody's grades up to, like—take the highest person and raise them to 100, and then, like, raise everybody else up accordingly?” I wasn't thinking of the normal curve. But even that, right? Even that is like artificially—
Josh: Even that. That's just another flavor of it, right? It still has all the competition, still has all the the sort of masking of the problems that are happening in the course. So yeah. I had one really weird course in college. It was a mythology—or no, it was classics in translation. And all of the exams were just, “Here's a quote, where is it from? What's its importance?” And there were so many, and people did so poorly that she curved the exam. So, that was the only humanities curve I ever saw.
Emily: Actually, now you're making me call up memories from way back in high school, where I was the academic overachiever, and kids got mad at me a lot for this. And one of the reasons they got mad at me is because, like, if I get the highest grade in the class, if I score like 5 or 10 points above everyone else, I scored that much closer to 100—that's fewer points that they get on the curve, right? So if I get a 97 and only 3 points get added to everybody's grade, that kind of throws everybody off. So yeah, I mean, you know, I wrote about this before on the blog as well, that, like, me being an academic overachiever in high school, and the competition for valedictorian really brought out the worst in me and everybody else, like all the other students. And I'm just thinking, “Why do we do this to children?” Right? Why are we making children compete against each other like this? It's really horrible, when you think about it.
Liz: I don't know if you're familiar with this new book that just came out called Failing our Future. But you could read that to find out more about why we're doing this to our children. Just an idea.
Josh: Your check’s in the mail, Liz—thanks for that! But I agree, Emily. You're placing them into an academic equivalent of a gladiatorial arena. Right? And there's no reason that learning should ever be connected to that level of intense competition.
Emily: Okay, so my last grievance before we move on to the more optimistic portion of our conversation today, my grievance is emerging directly out of the conferences that I had with students last week, which is that assigning final grades is the worst way to cap the semester for me. I don't know about the students. I really don't know that they care that much. But to be honest, you know, if you follow the blog, you know that I use collaborative grading where students and I sit down at the end of the semester to look over their work and determine their final grades together. And every time I do this I feel really bad that we have such rich conversations about what they've learned, and then in the end that has to get reduced to this letter grade that I think is not always—even like when I assign them, and we assign them in collaboration, as fairly as possible, according to standards that we all agree on, right—even then, I feel like it just fails to represent and capture so much of what students have taken away from the course. Right? Sometimes I have students come in who are so—usually it's the students who propose an A for themselves, and who, like, have done A-level work. They come in so visibly nervous about this conversation that I have to say on the front end, like, “You proposed an A, that's fair. Let's get that out of the way, and I hope that'll be the least interesting part of our conversation. You have the A. And now let's talk about what you've learned.” And they like visibly relax. We have such a better conversation once that's out of the way, right? And in other cases, when we kind of have a whole conversation about learning, and then end the conversation by saying, “Okay, yeah. I think a B+, you proposed a B+, I think that's fair. Or you proposed a B-, and I actually think you're at a B,” whatever—it just feels like the worst possible way to end, especially after we've had a really interesting conversation about learning. I don't know if you've had these experiences as well.
Josh: Yeah, I completely agree. I I feel the exact same way, every semester I teach.
Liz: Much as we were talking about before, you know, kind of reducing this rich context into a single data point gets rid of all the beauty right, all of the mess and all of the beauty of learning, and it does feel like a particularly unsatisfying and sometimes really demoralizing way to try to put a bow around a semester.
Emily: I think this transitions really well, though, to the 3rd round, which is where we share our Festivus miracles, because the Festivus miracle that I want to share is related to my student reflections. In fact, it just is my student reflections. They are miraculous every time. Every time I hear from students about what they've learned in the class, especially, you know, I have them do a self assessment form, and then we sit down to talk about it. And I always learn things about what my students learned that I never would have guessed. This year, I wrote about on the blog that students learn things like, “I learned that there's a lot more to writing than I thought. Like, it's not just grammar.” Or, “I learned that I don't need to be scared to, like, speak up in class.” Or, “I learned that I can improve my work with feedback, and that I work really well, you know, going through multiple drafts.” Or, “I learned that every writer has a different process, and however I write, that's okay. Like, as long as it's working for me, it's working,” right? And almost none of these things are on the learning goals, right? None of them are things that I set out to teach students, but they're all so important, right? And they're not kind of included in the grade breakdown. None of these things are taken into account when we assign A's, B's and C's, or whatever, because they're not part of the learning goals, but it always feels like a miracle every time students talk about these, especially when I've been feeling demoralized at the end of the semester, reading through their work and being like, “Did anybody learn anything? I really don't know.” But then, when you talk to them, actually, yes, they learned a lot, they really did, and that always feels like a miracle to me.
Liz, what is your miracle?
Liz: I just changed my miracle. Because there's so many miracles, is the thing. Like, I wasn't having trouble coming up with one. I just didn't know which one was the right one. But here's my miracle. So this fall I taught a math class, the elementary statistics course on our campus. And I have wanted to do this for a very long time, because I have long believed—and this started 15 years ago, when I was teaching ACT and SAT classes for Kaplan—that teaching math as a non-mathematician allows me to help students who are math-phobic see that they, too, can understand these concepts. And it was a blast to teach this course this fall. But I think the the miracle is that a non-trivial number of my students who were self-proclaimed math-phobic students, and were in some cases taking the class for the second time, that every single one of them that stuck around and kept working passed the class. And I am very proud of that, and I am even more proud of the fact that multiple students told me, “I actually kind of like math now.” And it's the use of the word “actually” that is the Festivus miracle.
Emily: I love that. I also love how the miracle comes down to diction and word choice. It's my favorite. Teaching writing you get a lot of that, too, right? You get a lot of students who are like, “I'm not a good writer,” but who end the class by saying, “You know, actually, like, I can write some things,” right? Like, it's not just about comma splices.
Liz: My partner and I have this ongoing running joke that students will often give me the backhanded compliment of saying, “This class was actually not that bad,” right? And that word “actually” communicates something about their very low expectations at the outset, and how little I had to do to exceed them, right? So, I always laugh when a student gives me a compliment that includes the word, “actually.” Yes.
Emily: It reminds me of, earlier in the semester I got an email from a student who had to miss class for a fairly frivolous reason, and she emailed me. And she said, “Professor Donahoe, I'm going to tell you why I missed class, because you do deserve the truth,” as if this is, like, the end of a long conversation with herself about whether or not, in fact, I did deserve the truth.
Liz: Unlike all those other instructors, you have earned the right to the truth.
Emily: It was the “do” that got me: “You do deserve the truth.”
Alright, Josh, what is your Festivus miracle?
Josh: I'm still laughing about that last one. You—not anyone else but you, Emily—deserve the truth about this.
Emily: I was very flattered, honestly! I mean, it was a silly reason to miss class, but I was happy that she let me know.
Josh: No, this is a great conversation to have. My Festivus miracle is the miracle that keeps me optimistic about all the things that we're talking about, and that is, every semester, the number of instances of grading reform that I am seeing kind of across the country in K12 and higher ed. More and more instructors every semester are trying out alternative models, more and more school districts switch to standards-based grading, we even have some institutional initiatives in colleges. And so that to me—I mean, if you told me 10 years ago that that at some point we were going to be having this depth of conversation and this widespread nature of the change, I probably wouldn't have believed it. So that in itself is a kind of miracle, but I think it speaks to a really bright future.
Emily: This is making me think, too—I mean, I chose the idea of a Festivus miracle, because in Seinfeld, you know, they say throughout the episode multiple times, “It's a Festivus miracle!” But I mean, this is making me think that “miracle” is probably the wrong term, right, because this implies some divine intervention when really, like, a lot of people have been working on this very hard, right? And it almost—it doesn't feel like a miracle, but it does feel like a silver lining of, you know—I feel like a lot of this came out of the pandemic, right, that people started to see how grades just weren't working for them in that context and started to experiment with new things. And then that spread. I'm hoping that in 2025, AI will maybe be the same way. I don't know. I mean the connection between the problems that we're seeing with AI and the problems that we have with grading seem very clear to me. But I think maybe it's less clear in general for other people. It's something I wonder about. But I hope that that we see more of that in…2025. It’s 2025, right? What year is it?
Josh: Yeah, I agree. I hope we see more developments in that area.
Emily: Well, I think that's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Liz and Josh, for joining me for this audio experiment of Unmaking the Grade, and I wish everybody a happy Festivus. And if you don't celebrate Festivus, happy holidays. Thanks so much!
Liz: Thank you, Emily.
Josh: Thanks. Feats of strength are next!
Liz: That’s right.
Emily: Absolutely!
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