As a student and as a teaching assistant, the question of “is this on the exam?” was and continues to always be on my mind in a classroom setting. I find myself zoning in on minuscule, insignificant details as a student for fear that small piece of information may appear on an exam or assessment. I am guilty of memorizing concepts, prioritizing easier tasks (a shorter book, a familiar topic), and skimming books at one point– all the reasons concluded in Kohn’s article about the effect of grades. I have been taught the ins and outs of how I can succeed at “being a great student” by performing well on an exam or paper.

I wonder what it would have been like to go through schooling in an environment where grades were replaced be measures of progression and learning itself. I felt like I would have learned more rather than be forced to think in a way to do well on an exam. I see both sides of the argument for grading. Efficiency and ease cannot be beat and would be argued by some as the reason for staying with grading. I see a system where grades can be utilized to an extent but be done with more meaning rather than be a simple “ranking”. Maybe grades that represent an overall period rather than just a single performance time/date like an exam.

My reflection on my current educational career so far and this weeks’ readings have sparked a curiosity on correct usage of grades and alternatives. I am curious about how to incorporate these ideas into a classroom where you are not the main instructor. I love the idea of portfolios and evaluation-free zones but wonder how I would discuss these concepts with a professor in hopes of adding/trying it in their class for which I TA for.

There have been many critiques on the grade-based evaluations among the resources of this week. Alfie Kohn summarizes some negative side effects, and introduces few alternatives– such as replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation. Although these scenarios seems like “utopian fantasy” at first glance, I will be explaining a case study which proved to me it is possible to get the most out of students’ potentials without threatening them by grades!

I had a graduate level course last year, with around sixty other graduate fellows from several departments at Virginia Tech including statistics, civil engineering, industrial engineering, physics and computer science. Apparently, this was extremely challenging for the instructor to evaluate the students with these broad background in a fair manner. What he did, was to define quite easy homework assignments to involve everyone in the class and guarantee a big chunk of total grade. The final project, though, was open-end and huge. In groups of five, we were required to have many meetings to brainstorm, design algorithms, code and analyze our results. The professor created groups of people from different majors, and organized many “lighthouse sessions” to answer our questions at high level. More interestingly, he collaborated with a sponsor company which provided free food (!) during a lighthouse session, and also considered monetary gifts for the top three groups. Last but not least, the professor invited Virginia Tech faculties and the experts form the sponsor company during the lighthouse sessions to answer our questions. After a while, what happened was that students were not just working on the project to get a good grade. We were competing to do our bests, as we observed how well the professor did to provide everything for us during the semester. We were all so excited and determined. I remember that the last week we barely slept, and worked extremely hard. Our group was not among the top three, but we all were happy at the end because we truly did our bests during a productive friendly teamwork.

In a nutshell, I highlight the role of teachers in deleting or diluting the grade-based system and replace it with more effective alternatives.