Grades.
What do grades really tell us about student learning?
Students are motivated by grades. In a past life I worked as a mentor in student residences, and when students would talk to me about wanting to improve their grades, I told them about a simple trick: decide what grade you want in a course, then write it out in big numbers on the first page of your notebook or binder for that course. They would see it whenever they studied for that course and be reminded of their goal. At the end of the term students would happily report back that they had achieved that grade.
Students are discouraged by grades. In that same past life, I can’t recall how many times I saw students whose lower grades convinced them that they didn’t have much chance of success in life, or even that they would never achieve the necessary grades to pass a course or to get into grad school or stay in a program.
Student attitudes towards grades can seem inconsistent or counter-intuitive. Good students are often much more concerned about grades than they rationally need to be; maybe that’s why they’re good students. Some struggling students don’t seem concerned enough, perhaps because they’ve given up trying, which frustrates people trying to help them.
The research literature on grades as a factor in student motivation and success is enormous, but I don’t want to discuss that here. What I want to reflect on is how I view grades and grading now, after some 30+ years of teaching in higher education. I’ve come to some personal conclusions about grades, namely:
I don’t like how thinking about grades often dominates my time when I’m setting up a course. I can spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how much each assignment should be worth, and it messes up my whole design process. It annoys me how I let it divert me from designing the actual course.
Everyone - students, admissions officers, parents, instructors, student success coaches - focuses way, way too much on grades. I especially hate seeing what this does to students. You know how sometimes during term you get the sense that student attention is waning, that they’re kind of drifting away from a course as the term draws to a close and the stress begins to mount? Enter a wrong grade into the online gradebook, and then wait to see how long till the emails start coming from panicked students alerting you to the issue. They’re paying attention in the course, or at least to the course grades. And there is nothing so disheartening at the end of term, after you’ve turned in your grades, to get a message from a student asking you to raise their grade or else they won’t be able to get into grad/medical/law school. It’s especially disheartening when they’ve already received a good grade.
I get frustrated that students think grades are an accurate measure of their abilities, and as such the only measure of their performance. They’re useful in helping instructors identify where students are generally situated on the spectrum of ability and knowledge. But they are just one measure, and they are by no means that exact. And they can be misleading, too. I know a student who is very happy and proud that she got over 90% in a course last term. When I asked her why it made her so happy, she looked at me a bit quizzically and said, “Well, it shows I know a lot about the topic.” But what she doesn’t know is that all 40 students in that course got over 90% - the instructor regularly gives high grades to all students. Do all of them possess superior knowledge of that subject? Yeah, no. But that’s how grade inflation can warp perception and understanding.
I also get frustrated by how we as instructors and programs convince students that grades are an accurate measure of performance. That’s why the students in the examples above behave the way they do: we’ve socialized them into this thinking. We pump up the competitiveness to get into our universities so that students come to us already primed to focus on grades. We set up student success offices, and what is the general measure of success at university? Not knowledge, but grades. We create grade benchmarks for honours specializations and honours lists and scholarships. We encourage instructors to design their courses so that students get grades back earlier in the term so that they can be aware of their progress — a good idea, but the downside is that it causes students to focus even more on grades.
Can we get away from grades? Yes, we can, but it isn’t easy. More about that in the next post.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 48/60.