I always wonder about this claim. Do you feel that school sports teams also should not have MVPs awarded or no lettering their sports? We always seem perfectly fine picking out the best athletes at school and are troubled by picking out those who are best at academics.
Yet you started your OP by mentioning K-12 education. So now you’re saying you’re not talking about K-12??
But is that the fault of the grades, or is it the fault of the people who are saying that the grades are “all important”?
Top student athletes get in the paper, top academic students rarely do. It’s more like pulling the kid into a dark alley and saying “psst - you’re a National Merit Finalist.”
I’ve got no problem with testing and grading, but the real problem is repetitive high-stakes summative testing, which determine not only whether students advance or fail, but also whether teachers and administrators get additional school funding and pay raises. The result is that so much time is spent on testing and less on teaching and intellectual development.
My gripe with homework is that every teacher seems to imagine that they are the only source of homework for students. If they are going to give homework, make it something light and short. Six teachers each assigning something short and simple still adds up to something considerable.
*snip. But isn’t getting the A an indication that the student has been taught and mastered the skills? That a B means the student has been taught and shows above average proficiency in the skill, etc.?
If your objection is that there is a gaming of the system, then the system should be improved, not eliminated.
When I was teaching, we had a principal who wanted to abolish grades. It didn’t fly for a number of reasons, including these:
- Grades are the currency on which students operate. You think students want to abolish grades? Think again. Knowing they “mastered a skill” is insufficient and unsatisfying to them.
“How’d I do on the essay?”
“Well, as I said in my remarks, it was well-written, with minimal errors in grammar, mechanics, and syntax, but you need better support for your thesis.”
“Yeah, but how’d I do?”
“You did well in some areas, but there are others in which you could improve, such as thesis support and organization.”
“Yeah, but how’d I do?”
“If you’d like to give it another crack, you’re welcome to do so. I can help you understand how to support your thesis if you didn’t understand it when we covered it.”
“Nah, I understood it. I don’t want to bother rewriting it unless it’ll improve my grade.”
“Well, you can do better on the next essay.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I’ll do the next essay. I mean, I will if I have to to pass the class, but to be honest, I won’t put much work into it.”
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Abolishing grades in high school makes for a mess in the admissions process at colleges and technical schools. You can’t just go on test scores for this. Some kids are poor test -takers for a variety of reasons, such as test anxiety. Can a kid see a project through from start to finish? Does she come up with a novel approach to problem-solving? How’s his work ethic?
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Students crave specific grades. The state where I taught had mandated “performance assessments.” These were scored 1-4, with 4 as the top score. Students soon figured out that a “3” was the equivalent of a C- to a B+. Why try for a B+ if you can do less work and still get a 3?
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Students aren’t always “stuck with that grade.” Sometimes teachers will let them re-do or re-take. Sometimes when they are “stuck with the grade,” it tells them they need to work harder or come in for extra help.
Grades aren’t a bad thing. It’s a bad thing when some parents focus on the grades alone and don’t give a rip about learning or curiosity or work ethic. That, in my book is a bigger and far more common issues.
Our school district had guidelines for homework for this very reason. And some parents complained to the teachers that their kids weren’t getting enough.
Excellent point.
The importance of grades isn’t a parental delusion, grades impact what college accepts you, what scholarships are available to you, what classes you are eligible to take, which employers are looking at you for your first job.
My objection isn’t so much that the system is gamed, it’s that we use places of learning to competitively differentiate children, and never ask the question “Are you doing a good job differentiating children?” Or even “Should the government be differentiating children?”
School is not just about learning, but is a modern extension of the extended family and the concept of village/community. The concept is basically a take on a children’s creche. A place where the young are placed together to help them be raised in many aspects, subject learning is just a part.
As for grades, that is also just a part. learning to connect for favoritism or help, or cheat are other ways to overcome the grade aspect, but those skills also carry over to other aspects of schooling. As with many other things the kids are learning how to accomplish a task, which is a useful skill.
So what should impact what college accepts you, what scholarships are available to you, what classes you are eligible to take, which employers are looking at you for your first job?
Colleges and employers should have their own entrance exams that reflect their goals and needs. Gaming the SSAT scores is an industry that defeats the purpose of the test.
The Semiconductor company I worked for did a survey of the product groups to develop a profile of their top performers. The result was:
- College drop out after <2 years
- Poor student - esaily bored
- 3-4 years experience as low level technician or military service prior to joining company
- Takes selected courses in house or at local college
- Hobbyist, fanatically interested in the technology
Grading systems tend to eliminate these people. We also found that hiring from the middle third of the class produced better results than the top third. I was amazed at how many folks with high GPA and an engineering degree knew nothing about engineering. I was also amazed at the answers I got in discussions “I belonged to a frat and we had all the tests” and “I was on a sports scholarship and they had somebody attend my classes for me”.
So, grading is OK but I do not believe it always achieves the desired result. I do believe there are other things that are more worth changing. It’s well beyond time for the US to abandoned the 19th century agricultural semester system. We need a year round quarter system. Quarters provide a finer granularity that exposes problems earlier. Rather than repeat a failed school year, a student should move on and take a remedial course (not the same course) in the following quarter. Graduation should be by written and oral exam that the student can take when ready.
I have so, so many opinions about grades. This comes from almost two decades of teaching high school in public schools in the US.
Grades are pretty much useless, as they currently exist. There are several fundamental problems.
- There’s no agreement of what they measure. Most people use them to represent some combination of mastery, compliance, improvement, and effort. Often kids with the same grade in a class may have displayed very different amounts of those four things. There’s almost never any sort of theory to what is assigned what weight; there might be some idea of tests counting X% and projects Y% or something, but the number of assignments in each category is rarely thought out. We don’t get any training in any of this. We just grade shit, follow some district grading policy that doesn’t mean much (because nothing is really defined, because there are so many special cases) and hope for the best.
Because of this, they aren’t very useful for students for feedback. Your grade came up. Did you achieve mastery? Were you more compliant? Was there simply a more favorable ratio between effort assignments and mastery assignments this term? Did the teacher grade more easily because they suddenly had to watch 40 hours of compliance videos and so there were more completion grades? Who can say?
- Children cheat. So, so much. The most important grades become, the most out of control it gets. Many of them, the high performing ones, know it’s wrong but they cheat anyway, for the same reason a starving person steals food–they think they have to, or they will die. Others just don’t care, don’t see the point. They are so good at it. Cell phones and the internet and such make it utterly trivial to get the answers to things and distribute them widely. It’s to the point where it’s like doping and sports–top students almost have to cheat to be there at all, because they are competing against super smart super hard working peers who are also cheating to get that final leg up.
This means teachers get turned into Grade Cops more than teachers. They develop an adversarial relationships with their students where they are more concerned with catching/preventing cheating than anything else. They abandon or avoid approaches and activities that would be the best pedagogy because if they teach that way, it makes cheating easier or harder to detect. It also makes the kids feel better about cheating–if the teacher’s main job is to catch them, and they can be more clever enough to get away with it, it’s like winning a game.
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It dries up internal motivation. The grade becomes everything. You can’t have a conversation about anything without kids interrupting you to ask which parts of this will be a grade. It makes school feel like a series of transactions: you do these “assignments” and then I grade them, and then you’re done. People will have the weirdest idea that as long as you “make up assignments”, you’ve completed the course. Kids don’t look at feedback, actual meaningful feedback–they just glance at the grade.
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It creates perverse incentives. Kids don’t take band or join newspaper and take AP Art History instead to bump up rank, even when they are passionate about the former and disinterested in the later.
I could go on and on. I probably will later, but I need to go put some feedback on some essays before kids come back from lunch. In my own class, I basically zero out the whole impact of grades by inflating the shit out of them–almost everyone makes an A, and the only way not to is to refuse to do almost any work at all–and then I refuse to entertain conversations about it. I get kids to do their work by nagging the shit out of them if they don’t, giving them lots of feedback, and endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, reminding them that the goal here is to be ready for college, not to get a number on the paper. It doesn’t work perfectly by any means, but it works better than grades ever did. I get better results on the SAT and AP tests than my colleagues who accuse me of being too slack with grades. Most of my kids do most of their work.
If you absolutely had to have grades, they would need to be represented as a bar-and-whisker style graph. The greatest sin of all is that we take these incredibly crude approximations and then calculate GPA out to 2 decimal places.
I am 51 years old and have a PhD and a JD from extremely reputable schools. I have been practicing in my area of law for more than twenty years. When I was applying for jobs in the past year, law firms still wanted a copy of my transcript from undergrad before they would consider me. My transcript is fine, but the fact that I still need to produce it sucks.
What is the purpose of education? It is twofold, one is to pass along information, but this can be done for most people in much less time than we use now. The second is to signal to who is smart and hardworking because in general those are the people who make the best employees. Probably half of high school and 80% of college is signaling the rest is actual knowledge transfer.
The only alternative would be for companies to do the filtering themselves and that would be massively expensive. The kids need to be in school to get the basic useful education, why not accomplish the signalling at the same time?
This is a very important question, I just am not satisfied that school grades is the answer to it.
Note Manda JO’s post, teachers are not trained to provide this service to colleges, employers, and scholarship providers, they are trained to teach. No school focuses on high quality testing of student achievement. It’s at best a by-product of the need to know whether or not students are learning, repurposed for something that is fairly important, and twisted to become the sole focus of many high performing students.
Because the signals are not accurate, or at least not to the precision they are used. You cannot use the difference between a GPA of 87.5 and 92.25 within a school. Much larger differences in in GPA are meaningless if you are comparing between schools. Likewise rank: at a strong school, a student ranked below the top quartile might be a stronger student than the kid ranked in the top 5 at a weaker school, or even in a weaker class year. And that doesn’t even get into the distortion caused by persistent academic dishonesty. But distinctions like this–distinctions much finer than this–are used to decide who gets hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship money, who gets admitted into the prestigious programs, who gets internships and opportunities.
Ideology aside, it’s bad data. Yes, the kid with a report card full of Cs probably lacks something that the kid with straight As has. The difference between the two is some combination of work ethic, intelligence, improvement, and compliance. But that’s about all you can say: a difference exists, in something, of some magnitude. Probably.
Teachers assigning grades are like a guy in a lumber yard using a machete to cut boards, and then people come around with laser calipers and decide every distance they can detect is meaningful.
Long time ago I heard a discussion of US pre-college schools vs the rest of the “civilized” world. IIRC West Germany fixed the problem of teachers passing students just to get rid of them by assigning teachers to the same elementary and secondary students over time. Whichever slugs you (teacher) had in 6th grade are still there in 7th - you can’t lose them. So you had best make sure they’re up to speed.
Another difference was that grading was of teams, not individuals. For a team to score well, everyone on it had to be adequate or better. Thus it was in team members’ interest to mentor (prod) the slow. Modern employment reality has us working in groups, not as singletons. If the “smartest” student can’t work with others, what good are they?
Finland is basically acting as a whole-country study for things like drastically reducing homework and not emphasising grades or competitiveness, higher teacher professionalism and valuing non-academic study as highly as academic subjects.
Results so far seem quite promising.
Another, more benign reason some companies prefer to hire B-C students over A students is that the former have probably known what it’s like to work at the top of their abilities; A students are (often) smart enough to have breezed through everything without working very hard, and may find it difficult to do so when it becomes necessary.
Also, undergrad engineering is often about feeding back material. Graduate study (and actual work) requires more original thinking and problem solving. Undergrad GPA can overstate one’s skills at this.
As an engineering student who struggled to pull Bs, I found this astounding–I thought all the people outdoing me could simply crank up the effort and continue to outdo me. (Some did, but not all of them).
As one of my profs stated, the A students write the textbooks, the B students teach the classes, and the C students do most of the work.