These initial questions...yes! Having gone to a college that was founded without grades (and has never had them since), I've been asking myself about various grading practices for the entirety of my career. Working within grade inflation in systems that have imagined that the grades are 'real' has been frustrating, to say the least. But I work in a discipline that contains no life or death needs for mastery and understanding. If someone never learns a concept or process in my field, there's no obvious consequence. Maybe I would feel differently about grading if I taught, for example, medical sciences or aeronautics?
Thanks for this! I see what you’re saying, and it’s possible I would talk about these things differently if I was coming from a different disciplinary background. But I’m a little resistant to this framing—probably because people in the fields you mention (and business, for some reason?) keep responding to my ideas about grading with comments like, “I’m glad you don’t teach something that matters!”
Beyond the fact that this is frustrating for me as a teacher of writing, I think it also misses the point about why we want to minimize grades in the first place. It’s not (or not only) because we want to make students happy and don’t want to fail anyone; it’s because we want everybody to learn at a high level, and grades are in the way of that. If we really believe that grades inhibit learning, then we should be *even more* invested in grade reform for disciplines where learning is life-or-death.
When people sarcastically ask me if I would want my surgeon to have gone through school with no grades, I would say yes, absolutely. Because the assumption that underlies this question is wrong. The question assumes that without grades there would be no way to motivate students to learn the material and no way to determine, certify, or communicate that they *have* learned the material. In fact, there are plenty of ways to do all those things without grades—we just have to be creative.
My response to “Would you want your surgeon to be ungraded?” is “Would you want your surgeon to have spent all their time in medical school trying to game the system to maintain their GPA—or would you want them to have focused their energies on actually gaining the knowledge and skills they would need to excel in their field?” Because that is, in part, what I’m trying to accomplish by minimizing grades.
These initial questions...yes! Having gone to a college that was founded without grades (and has never had them since), I've been asking myself about various grading practices for the entirety of my career. Working within grade inflation in systems that have imagined that the grades are 'real' has been frustrating, to say the least. But I work in a discipline that contains no life or death needs for mastery and understanding. If someone never learns a concept or process in my field, there's no obvious consequence. Maybe I would feel differently about grading if I taught, for example, medical sciences or aeronautics?
Thanks for this! I see what you’re saying, and it’s possible I would talk about these things differently if I was coming from a different disciplinary background. But I’m a little resistant to this framing—probably because people in the fields you mention (and business, for some reason?) keep responding to my ideas about grading with comments like, “I’m glad you don’t teach something that matters!”
Beyond the fact that this is frustrating for me as a teacher of writing, I think it also misses the point about why we want to minimize grades in the first place. It’s not (or not only) because we want to make students happy and don’t want to fail anyone; it’s because we want everybody to learn at a high level, and grades are in the way of that. If we really believe that grades inhibit learning, then we should be *even more* invested in grade reform for disciplines where learning is life-or-death.
When people sarcastically ask me if I would want my surgeon to have gone through school with no grades, I would say yes, absolutely. Because the assumption that underlies this question is wrong. The question assumes that without grades there would be no way to motivate students to learn the material and no way to determine, certify, or communicate that they *have* learned the material. In fact, there are plenty of ways to do all those things without grades—we just have to be creative.
My response to “Would you want your surgeon to be ungraded?” is “Would you want your surgeon to have spent all their time in medical school trying to game the system to maintain their GPA—or would you want them to have focused their energies on actually gaining the knowledge and skills they would need to excel in their field?” Because that is, in part, what I’m trying to accomplish by minimizing grades.