This is always difficult to evaluate a group project. I remember a class where I failed to get good assessment because of my group mates. Since they were less committed to doing good in the class, my effort wasn’t sufficient. I like the idea of giving the group members a chance to evaluate the fellow group mates and involving that evaluation in the grading process.

You succeeded to make me read the whole, hence you deserve a mindful A+. I like the idea of evaluation for engineering and medical students to ensure that they have learned sufficient knowledge. However, for other disciplines, the alternative to grading seems a difficult task.

I enjoy reading your post! Coming from China, my life before 18 is full of tests and exams. In my senior year at high school, I had 4 exams every three days, and a rank would be given based on these 4 exams and revealed to whole class (every three days!). You can imagine how much I hate quantitative assessment at that time. Too many assessments definitely inhibit imagination and passion for learning, and critical thinking skills are not fully developed via tests. But right now, as I look back ten years later, I can actually understand the assessment-centered education system. We had 3000 students in the same grade with me (class of 2007, just in our school) and 0.5 million students in our province. Only 5-6% of students will go to a decent university every year. So how can you select this 5% student without a fair assessment? Without these assessments (tests and exams), I may still live in a rural place out of no where in China. I feel so grateful that I survived so many tests and definitely will not let my child go through these in the future.

Ranking associated with grading system can definitely be scary to lots of students. It promotes competition between peers and hinders efficient learning. We need to come up with a better evaluation system in higher education rather than a simple GPA. With multiple assessment approaches, we can know one specific student from all aspects. The journey is long, but I know lots of universities are actually trying different ways to assess all students. That’s some progress.

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When I saw the title of your post I couldn’t help but click! Since we’re talking about the sorting hat, I’d like to point out that the sorting hat, like you said, makes mistakes, and it also determines a kid’s potential too early (when he/she is only 10 years old!). At such a young age, the kid is already sorted, sending the message that development should take place in a particular way, inadvertently hindering development in other aspects. So how does this relate to grades? Well, I wonder if getting bad grades early on demotivates a child, especially if that’s the only kind of “assessment” received. Grades could give out the message that he/she is not cut out for school, that the intelligence isn’t there, even though grades only really reflect what’s being tested. It could be especially damaging if the teacher doesn’t like the kid, and assesses with bias (I noticed this happening in some elementary and high school classrooms). I agree with you that using a combination of various assessments is probably more fair and representative. But I think, like the TED video mentioned, we need to hold teachers to higher professional standards, pay them adequately, because they have an important job and should invest more time evaluating student development.

I agree that there is something amiss with our emphasis and pressure on making good enough grades. I also agree that critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and other cognitive buzz words are certainly gaining consensus as the more important traits, rather than memorization and regurgitation, in most contexts, and I think these can be assessed through alternative evaluation methods. But, to play devil’s advocate, I do think there is a time and place for instilling and evaluating fundamental facts, at least to create a strong enough foundation on which to build critical thinking etc. skills.

This grading system sounds like the motivation to do well is to avoid receiving negative feedback, which seems to be the opposite of what truly motivates us on a human level. I can see how this system serves a purpose in terms of efficiency, but I wonder if changing the mindframe to a series of milestones that encourage positive feelings and incentives could be more motivating than studying to prevent the bad grade.

I also agree with you in that some subjects just don’t lend themselves to be graded in terms of correct vs. incorrect. Some subjects have more to do with opinions and creating a strong argument. In that case, what should be evaluated is not the “correctness” of your opinion, but the rhetorical strengths, and how convincing your case may be. Whether your opinion aligns with the teacher’s should be irrelevant, and rather how compelling your case is should be what determines your grade, or assessment.

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“Feedback (both positive and negative) is essential to progressing and developing one’s craft. Few humans exist and work simply for the benefit of themselves. Effective feedback can be liberating for the perfectionist and the individual who is stuck in an unproductive process: it can be the catalyst for new perspective that leads to original insight.”

Yes!! I totally agree. I really think students appreciate feedback on assignments. I know I do. I like to know what worked, what specifically didn’t work, and how I can improve on the next assignment (or even the current assignment if that’s allowed). Like you suggests, giving feedback also reiterates to the student that there was an audience for the assignment, and they weren’t putting all this work and effort simply for a personal grade.

You’ve made a really good point about how this applies to teaching, that I hadn’t really explicitly come to terms with myself. A personal memory that relates to this is the first time I took a neuroscience course. I didn’t have an existing template or prototype for most of what I was learning at the time, and it all felt very novel to me. Our professor was mindful and definitely had these thoughts in mind when she designed the course though, and eventually it became easier for us to draw connections between this new material and that which we grew up learning about from the fundamental biology and chemistry classes. When those connections can be made readily visible by the instructor, it makes the transition easier for the learner.

Yes- exactly! Thanks for the comment- I think you articulated it better than I did!