How many points do I need to get an A?

I would say that I was highly motivated by grades throughout my middle school and high school career. My mom would always “jokingly” say that she never had to push me to do my work or make sure that I was doing well in my classes because I always put more pressure on myself than she ever would. I think my main drive to get good grades came from the belief that a good GPA would help me to get into college. This is why I was devastated when I got a B in pre-calculus my junior year of high school. This grade sticks out to me not just because it was the first time I didn’t receive an A but because of how close I was to the A. I remember I had a 93.4 something in the class and to get an A I needed a 93.5, if I had just done slightly better on one assignment or gotten one more answer correct on a test I would not be typing this story today. I feel like I learned all the concepts that I needed to learn in the course and was still able to be successful in my calculus class the next year, but that grade will always stick out to me because I felt it didn’t reflect the effort that I put into the class. While this grade did not prevent me from getting into the college I wanted to get into, it did seem like the end of the world at the time. This is one of the many reasons that I feel that grading students on a letter grade scale is not the best way to measure their knowledge and does not create the best environments for students to learn.

As an undergrad I was still extremely concerned about my grades. I had an excel sheet for each course, where I could calculate what grade I needed to get on my test in order to get an A. My need for an A got so bad that during tests I wasn’t feeling confident about, I spent an unnecessary amount of time calculating how many questions I needed to get right to get enough points to maintain my grade. Time that would have been better spent working through the questions themselves. Looking back at this now it seems ridiculous, but at the time I was so focused on my grades that I couldn’t see the bigger picture.

One of the first things I was told when I started graduate school was that “grades don’t matter anymore,” and while I do agree that grades aren’t the most important aspect of my education, they do still matter. I still need to keep a certain GPA to have good academic standing and to keep my assistantship. So while I was slightly relieved to hear that “grades don’t matter anymore” when it comes down to it, I think I stress about my grades just as much now as I did in undergrad. I still have my excel sheets with all the possible grades that I need for each assignment/test, but now I sometimes am just striving for a B rather than an A.

Alfie Kohn mentioned a study that found that “the elimination of grades (in favor of a pass/fail system) produces substantial benefits with no apparent disadvantages in medical school (White and Fantone, 2010).” After reading this I thought that maybe this could work in any graduate program, because there are enough other aspect of learning that classroom grades really aren’t as important. After discussing this with my sister I am not so sure that this would actually work…

Why I originally thought this pass/fail system would be good:

I just completed my qualifying exam which I felt was a great way to test my knowledge and critical thinking skills. For this exam we had to choose one of two articles given to us and write a critique within one week and then do an oral presentation to defend the critique. After the oral presentation the committee asked questions about concepts from courses that I have taken that were also related to the article. This exam was pass/fail and I felt it was a great way to determine if I comprehended what I learned in graduate school so far.

 

Why I am now questioning this system:

After I told my sister (who is also a grad student) that I though a pass/fail system would work, her response was: “well then I would just do the minimum amount of work necessary to pass.” I guess this just shows the difference in our work ethic and really highlights that there really isn’t one system that can work for everyone. For me if a pass/fail system was implemented I would want to do the best that I could to ensure that I passes but would (hopefully) not be quite as stressed. For her it would mean not needing to do as much work because it would only matter if you passed or failed not how well you passed.


Student Self-Assessment

James H. McMillan and Jessica Hearn defined student self-assessment as a process by which (1) students themselves monitor and judge the quality of their own performance and their learning habits. Also (2) students themselves identify gaps in their understanding and skills and propose ways to fill those gaps. If doing properly, student self-assessment is important not only in an assessment process but also in a learning process. Why is that?

  • Students know best about their own weakness and their knowledge and skill gaps.
  • Students know best about their capability to set up realistic goals.
  • Students know best about their learning style and habit, therefore they can best manage their time, speed, and method to complete their targets.
  • Students can best track their learning progress.

Fig.1 of James H. McMillan and Jessica Hearn showed the cycle of student self-assessment process. They are more responsible for setting their learning targets, working to achieve the targets, monitoring their progress, modifying their strategies, and finally adjusting their original targets or setting up new targets.

I think the self-assessment method gives students all factors (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) according to Dan Pink leading to better performance and personal satisfaction.

In order to facilitate self-assessment in an effective way, teachers play an important role. In particular, teachers should set up clear expectations, provide assessment criteria, show students how to judge their performance based on provided criteria, provide them feedbacks, and give them the chance to practice self-assessment.

By doing it properly, student self-assessment can enhance student motivation and achievement. More important, it is a critical skill that students can use beyond the classroom scale as a life-long learner.

Reference:

McMillan, J.H. and J. Hearn. (2008). Student self-assessment: the key to stronger student motivation and higher achievement. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ815370.pdf.

Increase in quantity at the expense of decrease in quality

I was also unaware of the changes proposed by ABET on their accreditation assessments of engineering programs. The essay titled “We Assess What We Value” successfully captures, in my opinion, the detrimental consequences that such changes would undoubtedly bring to the educational experience of engineers. If anything, I always thought that requirements that included a “global and social context, engineering ethics, and lifelong learning” as part of the engineering curriculum needed to be strengthened. Actually as I write this I’m thinking maybe not always thought because I don’t recall feeling this strongly about it when I was an undergraduate student myself but certainly during my time in graduate school and the more I contemplate the subject.

There is definitely a pervasive thinking that the more ‘technical’ a degree’s curriculum is, the farther removed it is to people and the less attention needs to be given to the ‘human’ element in all its forms. This trend can be seen even within the different branches of engineering where more emphasis on “ethics” as established coursework is assigned for the biomedical field (where it is easy for most people to see a direct connection between their work and its impact on humans) than some of the other engineering disciplines.

Another negative result that can be attributed to this “outcome-based education” system that focuses on quantifying and rewarding accordingly, is the information overload in the scientific literature. It seems that academia is currently working in a system that rewards quantity over quality. Scientists are graded (by colleagues, peers, and superiors) by the number of citations they have under their name which–much like individuals attribute their ‘value’ or ‘relevance’ based on the number of ‘likes’ they get on any social media platform–can be unfairly skewed based on the size of the audience it reaches and the nature of these relationships. This assessment method can drive a system that undercuts the quality and depth of research in exchange for fast results that increase the number of publications, and might encourage other forms of unethical behavior. And similarly to the effect it has on students’ satisfaction and intrinsic motivation to learn, they can result in loss of enjoyment for the profession.

Contemporary Assessment in Authentic Learning

When I read this from Marilyn M. Lombardi, “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning”:

“If we want learners to engage with ambiguous and complex problems, including those drawn from real life, then we need new forms of assessment that document the higher-order thinking and problem solving that students demonstrate.”

I just want to say: “RIGHT!” As a student, I am really tired of those standardized tests and meaningless exams. With the flood of new knowledge and technology, we do need new forms of assessment that can reflect our students’ authentic learning and mastery. Memorization and repetition turn out to severely impede students’ desire of deep and extensive learning. Most of the students are able to repeat/recite what they have learned when they at school. However, when they graduated, what else can they remember and for how much can those memories be useful. I heard a lot that graduated students are complaining about the sophisticated education system and how badly they realize that what they’ve learned and tested are, in fact, made little use for their future career.  When working as newcomers, they are panicked as they seem to be used to follow instructions for routine tasks and have no idea how to address real-life unknown challenges. Such a tragedy of education.

If we want students to fully involved into the learning environment and actively push themselves to master and develop the innovative knowledge, we need to appropriately incentivize them both extrinsically and intrinsically.  Traditional assessment of student performance is apparently outdated from the contemporary learning environment. It is still important, though, as a supplementary tool for assessing students’ mastery of course required knowledge. Part of the reason for me to reconsider the importance of traditional assessment is that, it is a fairly standardized tool to give the lecturers a peer-evaluation of students’ performance compared with others. However, more creative assessment in inquiry-based learning is, without no doubt, increasingly pivotal to be called for the contemporary education system. We have spent lots of time discussing how to incentivize students for creative and critical thinking. But if we are fail to process authentic assessment in their authentic learning achievements, the revolution of education can never reach its ultimate goal.

 

 


I Want an Educational System…

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”                                                                                                    — The Wave in the Mind by Ursula Le Guin (2004, p. 220)

 

 

What would a world without oppression look like? What would a world with out gender look like? How about a world without governments, anarchism? How about a world in which women hold positions of power and political rule?

These questions, and more, have been addressed historically, and sometimes only, within the realm of science fiction. Repeatedly, we see questions of dominance, subordination, and alternative possibilities created, destroyed, worked, and rewritten in a genre that isn’t just fiction, but a fiction far removed from the realities and constraints of this world and universe. A fiction in which time travel is possible, dragons fly in space, and tribbles spell trouble.

In science fiction, we find impossibilities and, sometimes, those impossibilities eventually become tangible realities. Some of the notions below will, like science fiction, be engaging in a conversation that may at times be unimaginable for at least some of us. As such, I want to extend an invitation: if the concepts I present, the questions I ask, and the customs I question seem too absurd, then imagine that this too is a piece of science fiction. Start there, and then at the end we can try to re-imagine it once more.

When we think about grading and assessment within the US a common narrative may emerge for many folks educated within this system. As Alfie Kohn points out in “The Case Against Grades” we have a system of assessment that does a very good job at one thing; testing your ability to take a test. I frame Kohn’s paper in this manner as to gesture at the complexity of what is, and is not, tested for within this system and what is, or is not, encouraged among peers.

Pertaining to the testing, it historically is claimed to serve as a fair means of evaluation among and between different individuals; a way to figure out who is the best and most likely to be successful at x, y, or z. It tests, in other ways, how well you have learned the script that is expected of you and compares you to how well other folks have learned the script. Concerning what it encourages, with stakes on the line cheating increases, students truncate their time as to do the work required, and within this framework they are encouraged to memorize what they need to know. They are, more problematically to my thinking, encouraged to be individualistic competitors fighting over a scare resource of jobs, school, and access.

What then doesn’t it test for or encourage? Is doesn’t test resilience in applying what has been learned across disciplines or with respect to problems not included in the curricula. It doesn’t encourage collaboration, to work with and learn from one another, as the norm but rather as the exception.

When we look at goals illustrated, for example, by Donna M. Riley’s piece “We Assess What We Value: “Evidence-based” Logic and the Abandonment of “Non-assessable” Learning Outcomes” (Feb. 2016), it is clear that the assessment based system is not setting people up for success even within the system. Rather, it is setting them up for eventual failure. If, as in engineering and the sciences, elements of collaboration are important for working and living in the “post-schooling” world, what happens when a person who has been raised in an “it’s me against everyone else” world has to suddenly work with people as opposed to against them? What happens when this person is asked to be creative and work outside of the constraints in which they have been taught?

Yes, folks are forced to do group work every once in a while and, as such, may receive some education in collaboration. But note what happens when we step back and look at the interactions inter-group as opposed to intra-group: competition to be the best group. Up additional levels: competition to be the best class, cohort, college, or university. The problem I am gesturing at here is not just with individual lessons, inclusions, or exclusions. It is with the entire system.

Now, by now some readers are wondering “when is it going to go back to the science fiction stuff…that was more entertaining”. Well, I’m getting there, but I had to paint the picture of the world we are about to destroy first.

With the previous (current) world in mind: what would a world without grades and traditional assessments look like?

In keeping with what Marilyn Lombardi says in “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning,” let us imagine a world of the following sort as a first step:

  • Instructors use rubrics created in tandem with those they instruct to evaluate progress and improvement concerning problems, questions, or issues as opposed to self-created (or externally dictated) metrics.
  • Students work in groups on assignments and in addition to being evaluated by their instructor they evaluate one another.
  • Students compile portfolios that serve as a space for reflection on the intersections, changes, and improvements in their work for a project.

 

Now, let’s add a few other points from Kohn:

  • Rather than receiving grades, students receive feedback and comments on their work.
  • If needed, grades are determined collaboratively with the instructor and the student.

 

This world is probably still imaginable so let’s get a little more heretical:

  • Get rid of the instructors and replace them with facilitators whose are trained to work with and guide students in the process of investigating various problems, questions, or issues.
  • Most work is now done as group work and peers are responsible for giving feedback to one another about not only their participation in the process but also the outcomes of the process.
  • Facilitators give both group and individual feedback and are on hand to facilitate conversations should tensions arise within the groups.
  • Progress is “evaluated” collaboratively with facilitators and students using continuously revised goals, and hopes, that the student proposed to guide their own improvement.
  • The school day, for at least non-secondary education, includes portions in which older students are responsible for facilitating groups of younger students and in which students of like ages/peer groups are responsible for facilitating conversations and lessons with one another. [1]

Imagine that this is another world: Is it a possibility?

Imagine that it is this world: Is it no longer possible?

If your answer to the second question is “no” then what is it about this world that seems so unimaginable? Is it the lack of explicit authority? Is it the lack of seemingly “assessable” (and comparable) outcomes?

If it’s hard to figure out the “what” underlying the apprehension then let’s approach it through a different, and, political lens. Consider the following poem:

“I Want A President” by Zoe Leonard

In the above poem Leonard asks us to imagine imagine a person, a president, who is very different than any president we have ever seen or, plausibly, imagined before. What is it about our current world that makes imagining a president with the above histories and experiences nay impossible? Might the limitation on *that* imaginatory possibility be similar to the one that whispers “that educational system would never work”?

My reason for this roundabout approach is two fold. On the one hand, as Riley pointed out there are political elements that we cannot forget in these conversations and this is a political poem just as the question of education is a political one. On the other hand,  it can leave us with a starting point:

I want an educational system…

In writing the rest of this poem, let’s imagine the currently unfathomable and attain it.


[1] This approach was proposed by Dr. Naomi Zack (University of Oregon) in conversation with Dr.Matheis.

Deconstructing the Grading System

In Alfie Kohn’s article , The Case Against Grades, the author deconstructs the traditional grading system. The author opens up a big wound, pours salt in it and offers lukewarm examples as the balm. While I agree that teaching towards the grade is not the best learning strategy, I am also aware that the traditional grading system is subject to larger systems and bigger issues. For example, if the school system, as a whole, does not agree to change how we evaluate learning, then the individual teacher that elects for a “non-grade” learning environment runs the risk of being terminated or they might jeopardize their school’s position. Now, there is a larger way of being and doing that modern society participates in…and that is risk culture.

Risk culture is fueled by fear. Fear of losing one’s job, fear of failing school, fear of disappointing one’s parents, fear of lawsuits, fear of not getting into college. The list of fears is neverending, and risk culture is what drives us closer to quantifying success with a rigid grading system. So if we are going to deconstruct the grading system, we should consciously take steps to deconstruct the larger systems that will eventually undermine any advances taken at the sub-system level.

This article left me wondering what was occurring at the higher levels of society—like the school board and the college systems that review the applications of the students participating in a non-grade environment.

Questions to Ponder: What type colleges were willing to accept narrative summaries instead of grades? Did the non-grade teachers have the support of their leadership?

Assessment: Providing Answers or Just More Questions?

Assessment has always and continues to play such an integral role in education. To educate is to not only disseminate information, but to ascertain if that knowledge has been absorbed and understood. I mean…what’s the point of teaching anything if it isn’t retained and used later? The present assessment system in place is the traditional grading scale. Students are given grades based off of their ability to “jump” through academic hoops (homework, quizzes, tests, etc.). Is this system truly effective? Does it give educators a full picture of that students academic comprehension?

In Alfie Kohn’s The Case Against Grades, the argument is made that grading is inherently problematic. Rather than motivating students to learn, it tends to have the opposite effect and can be rather discouraging. Kohn furthur argues that grading accurately quantify the quality of a student’s learning, nor does it reflect their true ability to achieve. To some extent, I agree with this. Not all students are the same, and the educational methods used to teach them aren’t equally effective for everyone. Some students will naturally do worse than other, which will be reflected in their grading assessment. Receiving a bad grade can prove very discouraging to students, especially for those whom this becomes a “norm”. However, a poor grade should not be treated as a point of shame. Rather, it can be a useful tool serving as a signal to educators that their teaching methods aren’t reaching particular students; educators can then reassess their approach and attempt to reach the student. Additionally, I will agree that grades are not reflective of achievement. Plenty of students are intelligent enough and capable of learning, but often that isn’t reflected by their grades. I recently went through a battery of tests to substantiate my ADHD diagnosis, and many of them were designed to assess my ability to achieve in certain areas (math, reading & language comprehension, writing, etc.). These tests revealed I was more than capable of achieving well in these areas, but by actual performance ability didn’t always match up.  I believe grades are the same way, a useful measurement of performance but a poor reflection of  achievement.

I want to go back to discussing  the topic of motivation. I loved the animated video The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink and how it illustrated motivation. The part I found most fascinating from this video was the depiction of the traditional motivational system- the tiered system where the largest rewards go to the top performers and the the lowest performers are not or minimally rewarded. Though studies have shown this system works when solely mechanical skills were involved in performance, it had the exact opposite effect when rudimentary cognitive skills were involved. Academic performance consists of the combination of mechanical and cognitive abilities. Based off Pink’s logic, a traditional tiered motivational system where the highest performers are rewarded and the lowest are not (i.e. grading) is not a wholly effective motivational system for student academic performance. Academic performance is not a simple straight-forward task; it’s incredibly complex and high-stakes rewards don’t effectively motivate the highest level of performance.

Now, do I have an answer on how to best motivate students to perform better academically? No, I do not. Will there ever be a conclusive answer to my previous question? I highly doubt it. What can we do to better assess academic performance and motivation to learn? My best guess would be to constantly investigation and  reassess motivation as it evolves with the evolution of studentkind.


Childhood is a journey, not a race…. Lessons from my daughter

Alfie Kohn’s article The Case Against Grades reminded me of a moment from about a decade ago, when I received one of the loudest “wake-up” calls in my life from my then-10-year-old daughter. At the time, I had been an absentee parent for six years due to work responsibilities, and was getting “re-acquainted” with the responsibilities of parenthood – including monitoring how my kid is doing at school.

Like most parents, I am particularly fond and very proud of my daughter. Even as a little girl, I found her to be sharp and articulate, and she could certainly hold her own even when engaging in conversations with adults. In short, I firmly believed that my daughter is one of the most intelligent kids in the world (don’t we all?). So I was very surprised when, after my first parent-teacher meeting, I found out that she was behind in Math and Science. I sat there in disbelief for quite some time that it overshadowed the fact that her teacher also told me that she was capable of handling more advanced course work in English and Literature.

I am an engineer. While I did not particularly care for Math and Science (wait, so why am I an engineer? That’s a whole other post in itself), I had always done pretty well in these courses, and I expected my daughter to do the same. When we got home, silly me launched into a tirade that began with “When I was your age… I could do this, and this, and this…” (I was not yet teaching at this point, so maybe I did not know any better?) After I finished my “speech,” my daughter looked me and said: But Mama, childhood is a journey, not a race.

Boom. I had no comeback. Granting that the phrase she just told me is the mantra that her school believed in (she’s smart, but no, she did not come up with that on her own), hearing it from her got me thinking about my own experience with school and learning, and whether that was really the kind of learning experience that I would also like her to have. Did it really matter whether my 10-year-old could do exactly what 10-year-old me could do?

Growing up, my most memorable things about school were the “accolades” that were up for grabs at the end of the school year. I always made sure I got a hefty slice of that pie, which my parents dutifully enshrined on a wall in our house for everyone to admire. I picked up a number of things along the way, sure (such as rattling off the multiplication table at the drop of a hat), but at the time they did not seem as important as the shiny things with my name on them hanging on the wall. During the academic year, I fixated on being able to get certain things and maintain certain grades, so much so that when I am unable to achieve a goal or two, the frustration can overshadow everything else.

In contrast, my daughter did not need to concern herself with such matters. When she was 7 years old, I was temporarily assigned to Phoenix, Arizona, and she spent part of that academic year with me. Since the academic year in the Philippines followed a different schedule, she was unable to enroll in the same school that I went to as a child upon our return, as they had strict guidelines regarding admission and she had missed so much. Instead, my parents found a small school that could accommodate her. This school had a “non-traditional” philosophy and approach to education; instruction and assessment were carried out differently. Even their classrooms did not look like the stereotypical classroom with rows of armchairs; children sat in round tables that allowed them to interact and work together. At the end of the school year, there was no program to honor a select few who achieved certain feats over others, but a general celebration of what each student has found meaningful to them. They did not show off the shiny things with their names on them that parents pinned on shirts (and that I loved so much growing up), but portfolios of the work that they have done and what these meant to them.

Over the years (after that first wake-up call ten years ago) my narrative for “When I was your age…” changed. Interestingly enough, they aligned with some of Kohn’s conclusions about grades. I saw that my daughter was truly passionate and interested in learning certain things (Math, unfortunately, was always a hopeless case and was not pursued with the same passion as Theater and Literature). When I was her age, I, on the other hand, worked so hard on making sure that I got excellent grades in everything that I had no time to really focus on what I loved and was interested in. She was more attuned to her strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and exercised a higher level of discernment in making decisions, such as those she made when she prepared for college. In contrast, my decision-making process mostly consisted of the prestige that I could get. In college, that meant reveling in the admiration of those who held my courage and persistence as the only female electrical engineering student in my class in high regard.

I do realize, though, that the question of grades and assessment is more complicated than “to grade, or not to grade,” and that not everyone who shared my experience went through life and made decisions the way I did. I do not trivialize the significance of grading and assessment and the roles that these can play in education. While there are a number of things that made my daughter’s learning experience more meaningful than mine, there are also pitfalls that I will not get into now, or this post will never get done. There are many things to consider, complexities that need to be navigated around. For me, though, an important step to take is to consider learning as a journey – one that is to be taken at a pace that makes sense to one’s unique circumstances, and to be enjoyed to the fullest extent that it can be, allowing for the development of passions, exploration of interests, and even committing mistakes that can be turned into valuable opportunities for growth. It should not be a race that one competes in against peers, or standards, or those who came before you (a.k.a. your mom). Because at the end of the day, what do these letters and numbers mean? Can these really define who we are as individuals, serve as evidence of how much we know and how competent we are, and how valuable our contributions to society can be?

It has been said that “kids say the darndest things.” Mine told me to chill-ax and let her learn and grow up in her own way, at her own time. With that one statement, she inadvertently encouraged me to look beyond letters and numbers and report cards, and appreciate who she is through way she carries herself and relates to others, and how she handles the joys and challenges that she encounters. She will be 21 in a few months, and I have to say, I am glad she stood up for herself and journeyed through life, not harried through it. It might not work the same way for everyone, but at least in our case – I’m glad I listened.

It’s not about Grades; it’s how we think about Grades

As an Instructor of Research and Writing in International Studies, I am more concerned about the overall progress of my students in class rather than their grades. Grades, beyond a method of “quantifying” the performance of students in a set of assignments, are criticized by authors like Alfie Kohn for three main reasons. First, grading tends to diminish students’ interest in whatever they are learning. Students are therefore more concerned and motivated about grades than the process of learning. Second, Grades create a preference for the easiest task. Students become concerned about choosing the most straightforward task in order to maximize their chances of getting a good grade. The latter hinders their motivation to take up new challenges because the message they understand is that success matters more than learning. Last but not least, Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking because they sustain the rote culture that consists of relying heavily on memorization without engaging in critical thinking. While I don’t think that the grading system can be completely amended, I believe that professors can change the way they think about grading and therefore help their students approach them differently as well. From my experience teaching, I find it very useful to expose my students to my grading philosophy from the very first days of teaching. As a new instructor, I tell my students that I care much more about their progress and learning curve than their grades. However, I understand that the reality of the system imposes me to give them grades and that the majority of them perceive grades to be important. The following suggestions demonstrate how I implement my grading philosophy:
  • I emphasize the importance of comments rather than merely the grade. I also usually write lengthy feedback on each of my student’s assignments to explain where they are at and how they can improve in the future.
  • I dedicate some sessions to peer-review so that they do not solely have my feedback, but they can also provide feedback to their peers and vice versa.
  • I also have my students grade some of their own work. While they are very surprised at the beginning, this helps them demystify the process of grading and be critical of their work, without relying on another person to do so.
  • After half of the semester, I open my office hours for students who would like to discuss their learning progress and identify their strengths and challenges.
Through the following, I challenge the way my students think about their grade, in a way that it does not become their priority in my class. I want my students to realize that nobody will remember their GPAs in the future (not even themselves). However, what is there to last are their efforts to become better writers and researchers. Grades should never be the end goal of learning. To conclude, I genuinely think that Grades as a system of assessment are not necessarily the problem, the problem prevails in how we think about grades, including how the educational system shapes students perception of grading.

Grades…are they really an issue?

So after reading through these articles and watching the YouTube videos for this week it made me really think about grades and assessments. Is there really something wrong with using an A-F scale? Do teachers need to move away from giving grades and instead just give feedback and comments? Is focusing on removing grades a mask for addressing what the real issue is?

Did Craig just ask if discussion about the grading method may be masking a different issue? Yes, yes I did. I think that grades wouldn’t be such an issue if teachers were able to focus more on teaching to educate rather than teaching to get a score on an exam. Students have gotten into the habit of studying for only what is on an exam in hopes of getting the grade they want. If you take the testing mentality out of the curriculum and base grades on how much a student actually learns then I think grades wouldn’t be as big of an issue.

A second thing that I feel needs to be changed is the mentality of what grades mean. If students weren’t graded on how well they took an exam or two, but instead on how well they mastered a subject I think this notion of a C or lower is essentially failing could disappear. Instead think about grading as if  it was karate (I’m hoping I don’t butcher this analogy since I’ve never done karate in my life). In karate when the master feels you proven yourself and mastered something he gives you a different belt and this process repeats and repeats until you get a belt you desire. If you lose track or give up then you will be stuck with whatever color you’ve achieved so far, but if you stick with it and dig dip then maybe you will achieve the highest honor and get that black belt. Now imagine if grades were done the same way. By showing mastery in certain topics you get higher and higher and if you give up then you get whatever grade you are currently at. But, if you stick with it and really work than you can get that holy grail of grades, the A.

The reason I pose this method is because grades are an easy way for assessing, throughout a semester and after a course is complete, how well a student actually knows the information that was taught in the class. In addition, grades are useful for illustrating to people how well the student knows a subject without having to make sure a person writing a letter of recommendation mentions it.

Grades are an easy way for assessing how well a student actually knows the information that was taught in the class. In addition, grades are useful for illustrating to people how well you know a subject without needing a teach or a professor to write a letter of recommendation. Grades don’t come without their flaws, but I think if the mentality students have towards grades can be changed and teachers can focus on teaching to education students rather than teaching to an exam then I think the A-F scale continue to work.

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