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My world is largely subjective. The performing arts thrives in ambiguity. It feeds off of intrinsic value in a way that many of the hard sciences does not. We often measure success in the performing arts through emotional connection, talent and ability of actors and musicians, visually compelling sets and design. Administratively we measure success in the number of tickets sold for a performance, the volume of community engagement, the amount of dollars contributed because of an artist or opportunity.

The point is success means different things for different people. The definition varies depending on individual viewpoints of the individuals involved. Success may be something different if you’re an artist, if you’re an administrator, of if you’re an audience member. The important thing is deciding what is your personal definition of success and how it influences your day-to-day decisions in achieving your goals.

The reason I bring this up centers around our current model of assessment within higher education. Now given that I am an artist, I tend to be biased towards the ideas that the arts have this ability to solve everything, including the way we approach assessment. Assessment is really nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments. Incentive is given to students who perform specific tasks in a specific way that ultimately results in a binary judgment of the results. You’re either right or wrong, this is good or bad, it’s positive or negative. The intrinsic nature of the arts has the ability to remove the reward system from the equation which changes the binary system of judgment so suddenly work isn’t good or bad, it just is.

This aligns with what Dan Pink explains in his Ted Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, which highlights the opposition of using rewards as a form of motivation for cognitive workers. The research in this area indicates that using rewards as a form of motivation causes an inverse reaction to employees who work in the knowledge economy. Essentially, the greater the reward, the poorer the performance. Pink explains when creativity is incentivized it actually narrows focus rather than broadening the range of possibilities. As a result, growth in the knowledge sector is often stifled by a system of rewards rather than expanded as a result of freedom, autonomy, and self direction. If the system of incentive is counter intuitive towards creativity within the knowledge economy, it means that assessment is also counter intuitive since assessment is really another form of incentive.

Bringing it back to the arts world, how do you appropriately assess work that is largely subjective? How do you grade a monologue or a cello solo in a non-subjective way? How do you determine appropriate assessment of a ballet solo or a documentary student film? Is it counter intuitive to do so considering learning in the arts is a series of applied technical skills mixed with the development of raw talent and determination? This is an interesting topic and one that forces me to wonder, what if we allowed students to award themselves with the grade they think they deserve and then require them to live up to their own expectations? As always feel free to leave your comments below. Feel free to discuss how you define success in your field.

Hello. My name is Cody, and I survived being graded.

Not only did I survive grades, but I have come to appreciate them. Apostasy in contemporary pedagogy circles, I know. Before you click away, I will remind my readers that my posts so far regularly feature my admission of a sickly, broken education system, both K-12 and in higher ed. I, too, want to see reformation happen, but my end goals are different than what we have read and watched in class so far. So much of what we have covered seems to be coated with sensationalism and revolution, yet, I daresay, there is a lot of momentum to be captured and altered. Instead of thinking about our efforts linearly, in which progress can only be made via a sharp departure from the status quo, we should think radially, in which varying degrees of change can be made without losing ground and with vastly different trajectories.

If people like Alfie Kohn were to have their way, it seems the slate would be wiped clean; a system failed and forgotten. Because there is much wrong with our current grading schemes, we must get rid of it. May I encourage us to instead rethink the purpose of grades and how we evaluate students using a grading system?

Grades are merely one part of a students greater portfolio. One part. I have yet to experience or hear of an instance in my circles in which GPA has been the guiding factor for an individual’s success in the job market. However, I am all too familiar with the role it plays in evaluated potential employees or incoming graduate students. Again, it is one part.

As an example, my undergraduate degree is in Animal Sciences. My final GPA at graduation was deplorable. If I was to be solely evaluated according to my GPA, I would never have gotten into graduate school. It turns out that working in the horticulture department and making connections with the faculty made much more of a difference than my grades ever could. The professors I worked with knew my work ethic and my knowledge in the field. I had no issue getting into the program because I had many references vouching for me.

This brings me to my next point: Grades help to guide. Or at least they should. In my case, it was abundantly clear that animal sciences were not my passion, nor did I have aptitude for chemistry (organic, biochem, etc) and genetics, as reflected by my performance. Instead of kicking against the goads, I took class feedback, i.e. grades, to heart. The classes that I performed well in and understood on a deeper level are responsible for me successfully choosing my master’s program and now PhD program. My master’s GPA was much closer to 4.0, and my PhD GPA is higher still. I take these as indicators that I am on the right path. My aptitudes and desires are aligned with my professional path. Grades can be good.

I am in full agreement that our grading system needs revamping (in large part because of grade inflation and its current ineffectiveness), but stop short of calling for its removal altogether. Grades are one part of evaluation, both of oneself and by a potential employer. School performance helps others understand your ability to rise to a task and achieve goals. Again, grades are just one part of a diverse portfolio.

Before leaving this post, I do want to comment on something that irks me in some of our readings. Speaking of Alfie Kohn again, much of the contemporary pedagogy rhetoric aims to belittle those that are not onboard the progressive train. Case in point, in “The Case Against Grades,” Kohn uses such statements as: “Why tests are not a particularly useful way to assess student learning (at least the kind that matters), and what thoughtful educators do instead, are questions that must wait for another day.”¹ Or elsewhere alluding to “responsible” educators as those that agree with his viewpoints or the “best” teachers as those who don’t give tests. It is counterproductive to insult or insinuate against those that you are trying to persuade.

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¹Kohn, A. 2011. The Case Against Grades. Effective Grading Practices 69(3):28-33

So many thoughts keep talking to each other after watching Dan Pink’s TED talk on motivation, reading Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades” and Liu and Noppe-Brandon’s “Imagination First”, I want to make a simpler but hopefully more interesting post that could help me release some of the tension of thinking, and also perhaps can add some thoughts, too (still being contradictory, can’t stop…).

Well, I am going to tell a story of a Straight A sleepwalker. He was a stockbroker, making good amount of money in London. He had a beautiful and considerate wife, raising two adorable children, a son and a girl. They lived happily together all the time and will live happily ever after…

No. I know you are expecting something different. Here it goes. After a summer vacation with the family, the man wrote a letter to his wife saying that he decided  to abandon them and would never come back. Then he moved to Paris with little money, found a stinky and shabby hotel and started to paint. Well, nobody liked his paintings and he fell prey to hunger and illness every now and then. Yet, he finally, for the first time in life, started to feel real happiness.

You may have caught me. That’s a stolen story from the novel “The Moon and Sixpence” written by W. Somerset Maugham in 1919 and it is believed to be based on the real life story of Gauguin, a great French artist.

While the story is trying to explore the relationship between arts and livelihood and is way more complicated than what I told in the above, I  saw it another way right now:

Sixpence is the grades and the Moon is our intrinsic motivation, our imagination, our urge to direct our own lives and the desire to get better and better at something that ourselves think matters.

Although there is a long way to go to delete the system of grades, and there are still a lot of issues related to this revolution (some of my thoughts are shouting: grading is more efficient; pure subjective comments can lead to corruption; etc.), I am fully supportive of DELETING GRADES or DILUTING GRADES. I believe those issues can be solved eventually.

Finally, to echo my favorite Zen master example in “The Case Against Grades”, where the master says “If you have one eye on how close you are to achieving your goal, that leaves only one eye for your task”, I want to cite Maugham here:

“If you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don’t look up, and so miss the moon.”

I have a confession. I am very competitive. I want to be the best at everything I do. And in school, I care about my grades. A lot.

I am trying to focus more on learning and expanding my horizons. But grades still loom over me. Judging me. An indication that I could do better, that I should do better.

I keep having to remind myself that grades are not the end-all, be-all, that grades do not indicate my value. But the number is there, proof that I did something wrong. And I strive for perfection.

But I don’t try to be perfect in other things that I do outside of school, such as learning a sport, an instrument, or a new language. I know I am not perfect, and I don’t strive for perfection. I just want to be able to learn and explore and do new, cool things. So why the difference between how I learn in school and how I learn things outside of school?

Let’s do a simple comparison.

In addition to the big differences in the learning environment and my personal goals, a few differences jumped out at me. When playing soccer, I was willing to take a risk and try new things. In classes, I tried to make sure I didn’t make a mistake.

Another difference was that I reflected on my performance and assessed myself more in fun activities than I ever did in school. And while I often had feedback from someone else (my soccer coach yelling at me for not shooting on frame, for example), I would take that feedback and reflect on my performance, what went well, and what didn’t go so well. And I would work to do better next time. Whenever I got a grade back in school, on the other hand, I was embarrassed at the mistakes I made and quickly put my test away never to look at it again. There was no room for errors. There was no reflection. Learning in school usually consisted of me trying to do something and being evaluated by an external source (usually the professor). I didn’t really think about what I was doing or why. I didn’t evaluate myself. I waited to be evaluated by someone else.

A powerful form of assessment is self-assessment. I use it naturally in everyday life. But it is not always present in the classroom. However, self-assessment and metacognition (thinking about your thinking) can encourage people to think about their current understanding of a subject and what aspects of a topic are confusing. They can help students compare where they are to where they previously were in their understanding. Self-assessment and metacognition can help people understand their strengths and weaknesses, how to improve, how to expand their abilities, and how to learn.

Alphie Kohn’s post “Why the Best Teachers Don’t Give Tests” struck a chord with me. In his post he particularly talks about how some educators are so vehemently opposed to standardized testing yet adopt other practices (such as grading rubrics) that share common features with such testing. The author argues against not just standardized testing, but against testing in general (one key point he failed to mention is take-home exams and/or in-class open-book tests, which I will talk about later). This interesting post counters the authors claims and argues for more testing instead of less testing! So which way should we go as educators? Is testing making students Comfortably Numb?

As a student that has experienced varied kind of testing environments, here is my take on what worked for me:

1. Take Home Exams – these were typically fairly hard and required me to go beyond what I had learnt in the class and/or from the books. The really good take-home exams, gave me ample time to finish the task and challenged me to apply my knowledge. Many take-home type final exams have been project based which has helped in the learning process.
2. In-class Exams w/ Open Books and Notes – These are probably just as good as take home exams, but I was still expected to solve the problems in a limited amount of time. However, some students just aren’t good test takers in such a high pressure environment.
3. Repeated Testing – Some may disagree with me here, but my personal experience has been particularly good. An engineering course I took in my final year of undergraduate studies was designed to repeatedly test students on the material i.e. there were a total of 8-10 tests in the semester (No Homeworks!). However this meant that we were tested every other week on the new material we had learnt. This sort of an arrangement really kept me on my toes and made me pay attention in class (it helped that the teacher was outstanding). I can say that I got a lot more out of this course that other courses where there were only mid-terms and/or finals.

I want to shift gears a little here and talk about my experience from the flip side i.e. my experience as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA). As a GTA I have not only taught courses, but have also evaluated student work (based on grading rubrics). Rubrics seem to serve a good purpose, but also have severe limitations. Some advantages are fairly obvious, for instance they:

1. Provide clear expectations of what is expected of the students.
2. Standardize grading practices across different teachers/teaching assistants that maybe evaluating different sections of the same course
3. Make it easy to communicate student performance.
4. Decrease ambiguity in grading practices.

I feel like these advantages are mostly from an educators perspective. Rubrics allow for standardized grading procedures, which are simple to follow both for the student and the teacher, but give minimal feedback in the amount of time available. Rubrics cheat the student of the detailed feedback that they deserve. Here are some limitations of using grading rubrics:

1. Rubrics are typically designed to measure things that are easy to quantify and thereby maybe inherently biased.
2. Makes students turn in work by following rules. I have often found several inferior assignments that touched everything on the rubric and received a decent grade and several other good assignments that were thought provoking and showed me the ability of the student to think outside the box, but received a poorer grade because the work did not adhere to the rubric or presented guidelines.
3. It often leaves less room for the teacher to be an authentic evaluator of the student’s work.
4. While it decreases the time needed to assess the student’s work, it doesn’t allow much room for authentic communication – such as providing extensive feedback consisting of questions and follow up comments.
5. Overall rubrics/points do not seem to represent student learning/progress or competence of the student in the subject matter.

Do you use rubrics for your grading? What has been your experience with them?

In the “Case Against Grades,” Alfie Kohn quotes a teacher who has de-graded his classroom stating that some of his high-achieving students did not like the system without grades, because “they viewed school as work and their peers as competitors.” After reading about the case against grades and reflecting on how it has felt to be a student most of my life, I can understand why students would feel this way about school. This is, in many ways, how it is structured- complete tasks, turn in products, have these products assessed. The system isn’t really designed for learning, it’s designed for this cycle to recur.

Another part from that article strikes me as well- Kohn cites the results of a study (Butler, 1992) that indicate that when students are asked to think about their scores on a task, they become interested in the scores of other students, but when they are just allowed to do the task, they become are more interested in what the other students created. If you think about the broader implications of this, it is remarkable how grades could inhibit collaboration and promote competition. I know that in our society, we are supposed to think competition is a good thing, but it seems to me like there is much  to be gained from collaboration. Perhaps, if grades are emphasized less heavily in the classroom, students will stop seeing their peers as competitors and start seeing the potential for collaboration.

“Authentic Assessment” as described by Marilyn Lombardi in her article “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning” may be key to making school be more about actual learning, since assessment does still need to be done. By giving students the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills, it will both better prepare them for the workforce and be more enjoyable and meaningful to them. It seems like a win-win, although there is so much opposition to changing the status-quo. At the K-12 levels, teachers may face tight constraints on how they can structure their classes and grading systems, and college faculty may be too overworked to deal with it. I am hopeful that change will come, since there is an increasing need for it, but fear that it will be very slow. I think that a crucial first step is for everyone: teachers, policy-makers, university administrators, etc., to acknowledge that the purpose of education should be learning. Perhaps teacher constraints and faculty demands could diminish if there was a greater emphasis on real learning. Then other things, like better methods of assessment, could begin to fall into place.

One of the challenges we face when trying to improve education is that opinions often greatly diverge as to the best course of action. This disagreement is evident in both informal discussions among colleagues as well as conflicting scientific studies on the topic. Alfie Kohn decries the culture of testing in schools in “The Case Against Grades.” According to Kohn, “frequent temperature-taking” in the form of tests is unnecessary and, furthermore, inadequate to evaluate student learning and progress. Kohn goes on to argue that grades produce anxiety among students that detract from learning and decrease creativity. I can identify with the feeling that tests sometimes do a poor job of asking students to show what they know. I have led a few lectures for my advisor in his undergraduate hydrology class, and he asked me afterwards to write a few exam questions on the material I covered. His tests are a combination of multiple choice, short answer, discussion, and calculation problems. I always found the short answer, discussion, and calculation problems fairly easy to write, and I think they can be crafted in a way that tests the knowledge of the student pretty well. However, I had a lot more trouble with the multiple choice questions. Maybe creating multiple choice problems gets easier with practice, or it might be somewhat of an art, but I remember thinking that no matter how I phrase the question or what answer options I provide, the questions just seem inadequate and either really easy or sneakily obscure. Kohn insists that tests should be a rarity, and Marilyn Lombardi talks about other options for demonstrating learning, such as portfolios.

To complicate matters, other pedagogical studies talk about how tests are one of the most effective learning tools and that we should test more, not less, often. Preposterous, you say? Perhaps. What I am referring to is called “the testing effect” and is discussed in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Apparently copious research shows that, if you want your students to remember something, you should test them on it. A test does not necessarily have to take the form of a high-stakes, anxiety producing, multiple choice final exam. The authors include any form of information recall that students do without looking at their notes, such as using flash cards or quizzing each other. Any time that you have to work to remember something, your brain makes a stronger connection to find that information, so it is easier to do so the next time around. The authors also warn readers up front, “your students won’t like this.” However, they also give advice on how to incorporate the testing effect without terrorizing your students. Namely, giving frequent, low-stakes quizzes that do not really impact the grade that much, which also helps to decrease the negative connotation of tests. I was a big convert to the testing effect after reading this book, but I do have reservations about the frequent quizzing, which would become a form of taking attendance. I think Kohn is pretty extreme in his arguments, but I do not think that traditional tests are the best method of student evaluation in many circumstances. Portfolios, papers, and projects are often far superior options, but I think that tests do also have their place. For example, I tagged along during a dendrology field lab last week to observe the professor, and dendrology is definitely a class that requires substantial memorization. The professor did a great job of interweaving stories and context to the different trees and also gave students tips about how to organize their tree descriptions to see connections among species. He also quizzed the students four or five times during the class on trees they learned the previous weeks. I think this sort of class (anatomy would be another one) is a good candidate for frequent testing, which the dendrology professor is already doing. I guess I would caution that tests do serve a purpose in some cases, so do not completely overlook their potential

Similarly to tests, scholars disagree on the value of rubrics. Kohn thinks that rubrics discourage creativity by telling students what to expect and delimiting boundaries on the project. On the other hand, Lombardi promotes rubrics. The rubrics I have seen as a student are usually pretty general and do not seem to greatly constrain the project, especially if the professor includes something along the lines of “other project formats are acceptable but must be cleared by the professor to make sure it is appropriate.” I honestly think rubrics are kind of annoying, but I also believe they can be good to guide the assignment with a general set of expectations. In another book I read, How Learning Works: Seven Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching, the authors describe and then problem-shoot a common complaint of professors that students come into a class unable to carry over previous knowledge from former classes. The authors attribute this inability to a lack of “deep learning,” which may be the issue more often than not, but I also feel that sometimes students simply suffer from tunnel vision and do not think to apply knowledge they already possess in a new environment. Small prompts on assignment instructions or rubrics might go a long way in helping students tap into these other resources they possess. Thus, though counterintuitive, maybe such guidance can actually increase creativity? Rubrics are also good for transparency in grading to decrease resentment among students and help them to understand what they did and did not do well. I had a T.A. last semester who deducted points for nit picky and really just random and unfair reasons that made no sense or were flat-out wrong: we could do no right on our assignments, according to him. In the words of my friend in the class with me, “I have never felt personally attacked by a graded assignment in my entire life until now.” We never debated the grades with him to avoid being “those people” that quibble over points, but he would have avoided considerable resentment if there was a rubric at least suggesting some of the logic behind the strange deductions. It’s like, “if you wanted it that way, why didn’t you just say so?”.

I am a firm believer that grades do not accurately reflect the knowledge of a student regarding a certain subject. They certainly do not tell the whole story.

BUT, grades are an indicator of the level of the student. Just like when the doctor is looking at the test result of a patient, the blood sugar level is not the only indicator of good or bad health but rather one of many others.

Grades serve the exact same function. When assessing the “health” of a student in a certain subject, grades should be accompanied with a thorough assessment from the teacher. A combination of both those indicators could be closer to assessing a student’s ability, but not one without the other. This will make the teacher’s life harder but, in the long run, produce better quality learning and teaching.