I agree, but I think there is a logic hen the grading system was designed. To me, and it is to me, most of the grades help me for self assessment of my acquired knowledge vs the expected acquired knowledge. I know that sometimes the grades are not well designed, so, I include that in me self-reflection, but in general, grades do not dictate who I am but help me guide my studying path and efforts.

No, but I have noticed it in my personal life. Competition between my lab-mates and myself certainly improves productivity, up to a point. Past that point, I have a tenancy to just give up and go back to my normal work flow. Which begs the question: Is it the responsibility of the advisor to optimize stress? I guess for productivity’s sake, yes, but I’d feel very odd if I knew my job description included “stress out your subordinates”…

Great post!
I must admit, as an undergraduate, I often succumbed to the temptation of doing the minimum amount of work necessary. Happy to read that it wasn’t entirely my own idleness to blame! I think the grade culture does indeed foster that ‘just enough to pass’ mentality.
I would like to add however, that the reverse is also true; hard-working students can become obsessed with maintaining a 4.0 GPA or whatever when so much emphasis is placed on letter grades. I would further argue that desperately trying to get all A+s is as detrimental to the student’s learning as the ‘bare minimum’ mindset.

Your post brings a lot of reflections to me. I understand with your perspective, and I agree with it. However, I also think that criticism to the grades system can be taken to the extreme, and it may demean its value. To me, the grades are very useful as a self-assessment tool. In my case, I see my grades and I reflect to see if I needed to study more, or if my level of knowledge is as expected by the class design. Thanks for sharing ?

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I like your comments about how you as a student feel about receiving grades. I guess this whole time I’ve more so been reflecting about how this applies with myself as the instructor. I have to agree with you in the fact that I enjoy getting grades. I tend to have a bit of a type A personality and therefore I feel almost lost when I have nothing assessment-based to work off of. It is just the WORST when you’re asked to complete a reoccurring assignment that entails a grade and you don’t receive feedback until you’re five weeks into the class. You could have used that feedback to do something different on the previous four assignments. When grading (in my opinion) should be used as a form of assessment to provide students with feedback throughout the duration of the course, grades oftentimes just hit us at the very end of the course. At that point there isn’t much a student can do about it.

It’s hard to image a class with 1500 students. I think the interactions between teacher and students are vital to improve the learning process. A smaller class could definitely help with that. Smaller class would make the students more involved in the studying and get the feedback from teachers.

Man that’s terrible. Sorry to hear that. I was also a mediocre student as an undergrad. To this day, I wonder if I improved, or if grad-school grade inflation just makes it appear to be so.

I believe interdisciplinary work should be more encouraged in academia and research. I am currently in the Communication Department, but my research contains psychology and human development as well. Even though I think this will really bring something new to this area of research, the COMM department wants everyone to stay focused on COMM journals and COMM researchers. Why should I limit myself just to COMM researchers and journals? Isn’t expanding the research the most important part?

Thank you for sharing this point of view about education and empowering.
A lot of the times, professors, or instructors in general, think that by imparting/sharing/giving their knowledge into the students, they are empowering the students. This seems interesting because while the idea of more educated people (or more knowledge) takes barriers down and opens opportunities to decide your own choices; at the same time, not allowing students to discover the learning process, to be able to disagree, to make mistkes, to decide their own path within the learning context…. then, it is not empowering.

I agree with you that it is a big challenge to learn how to apply all the ideas and techniques we are learning. Putting them into action, in real life actions is a challenge, and a lot of the times, this challenge can become a barrier because we may feel that it is too time consuming, and we won’t have the time to figure it out the path. Perhaps we can keep talking in the class so we bring the discussion into the “how” to apply what we are learning.

Thank you for sharing this viewpoint!

Agreed on all points. I ended up reading an NSF R01 grant a few days ago, and for once thinking “I could probably do most of this”. The same with an advisor who needs help sometimes – realizing that the older profs aren’t able to work magic is very empowering. As for the grades, I’d argue that is mostly the point of college, as far as the employer is concerned. They don’t expect you to be so well prepared that you can jump into the job. They just want the most persistent, most compliant, reasonably intelligent worker they can get. Grades are a great way of showing all of those qualities. The employer might miss the genius slacker, but to be honest, they’d probably rather have persistence and work ethic than genius. For this reason, I can’t imagine we ever really get rid of student “ranking”, even if they replace grades with something less tangible.