I see grades as a tool for motivating my students, and so, the students get the grade that I believe will get them to work harder. You could argue that that’s giving them a grade, but you could also argue it’s altogether a different perspective on grades than is assumed in the OP.
The kids in my classes earn their grades unless I am forced to give a kid a grade he or she did not earn. I once worked at a school that made me change a kid’s failing grade to a passing grade, which I was not happy about doing. I have heard of school districts that don’t allow teachers to give students less than a 50% on any assignment of assessment, which I think is terrible.
I hate grades. The attempt to reduce a person’s performance in a class to one number is ridiculous: even under ideal conditions, a person who half-mastered all the material and a person who completely mastered half the material would have the same grade, and how can that be a meaningful metric?
I will say this: the longer I teach, the easier my course has gotten. In terms of motivation, I have found the super challenge a lousy device: for every kid who responds to the challenge by stretching to new heights, ten others slink out the back and give it up as hopeless. The handful that would have strove for the all-but-impossible B+ will also strive for the All-but-impossible A++, and that leaves the B range open for solid kids doing solid work, and the C range open for “more or less met expectations, most of the time, and learned enough to be capable of going on”. And you know what? I get much better results from a much wider variety of kids than I did when I was really focused on making the grade the tough thing, when I was as focused on the grade as they were.
So a kid that made an 85 my first years teaching would make a 95 in my course now, I have no doubt. Does that mean I am “giving” away ten points?
The cult of the grade is also why teaching is so rampant. Kids forget that the grade doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a number. It’s not the point. When they get a good grade through cheating, they know their method is wrong, but they think the end has been achieved. They don’t see that the number is meaningless without the knowledge behind it. It’s really important for a good teacher not to join in on the delusion that the grade is the output.
While I can’t speak for the majority of students, but I think at least a good number of students understand that the valuable stuff is the knowledge, but also realize the unfortunate reality of grades. I’m a computer science major – I’ve written what is objectively really, really shitty, unmaintainable, hard to read, poorly designed, uncommented code for projects that only cared if it ended up doing the correct thing because I was several end-of-year deadlines. Writing better code would have allowed me to reuse parts of the program, and I probably would have understood what we were supposed to implement it better had I done it the right way, but I decided I could do it the right way LATER. Because while I needed to know the material eventually, the reality was that at the pace I’d go if I did it the right way, I’d get a lower grade and thus worse prospects for my future.
Here’s the thing, I love learning stuff. I take my classes seriously, I try to get as much as I can out of the material. To a certain degree grad schools (or even undergrad colleges, private high schools etc) will give you leeway if you have a lower GPA but it’s because you were trying to learn the material or missed a few tests because you were busy solving the P NP problem. However, they still matter. It’s going to be very hard to be a C student who understands the material really, really well but does it on his own time.
Sometimes you have to take the quick and dirty way, or the way that bypasses the learning and jumps to getting the right grade because I can always ask for clarification on the material later, but the grade is something I need a correct answer for by midnight.
There is a certain arbitrariness to grading that cannot be avoided. Any grade will be a combination of given and earned.
I disagree. Maybe in a perfect world, the grade wouldn’t be the output, but in the real world, where college admissions in the case of high school, and better grad schools and higher paying jobs after college are the end goals, the grades are absolutely the output.
It’s a smarter play overall to get an A and lack a lot of the knowledge that it implies you know, than to make a C and know it backwards and forwards.
It’s a variant on forgiveness instead of permission; if you get the high paying job, you can always learn what you need to know, but if you get the shit job, it doesn’t always matter what you do know.
are we talking athletes or the other students?
I’ve gotten both, all through high school and college. I think my C’s in PE were given, because I miserably failed almost every physical test (I suck at volleyball, basketball, and most track and field). I did aced all the theory testing and I did extra written reports, so there’s that. But I think the teacher gave me a C instead of the D I deserved. BTW, I’m much more physically active now than then. Stupid class.
I did earn my C in biology (and now I’m in a biology-related field). I refused to do what I thought was stupid work for the class (it was work that was supposed to boost the non-sciency students GPA, but it hurt this sciency student’s GPA). I’m ok with what I earned. I earned similar lower grades in other classes due to my refusal to do what I considered non-essential work. None of the teachers gave me a better grade, and for that, I’m grateful.
In vet school they did curve classes, and tried to not fail students, but they were adamant in the few cases they did flunk students. Even clinics was not pass/fail (like at UGA), but given grades. I got a C in a block, and almost had to repeat it. In this case, I did not like the grades because they were basing the evaluations in a rubric that was very subjective. I had harder and more difficult rotations and ended up with better grades, which leads me to think the evaluation was very subjective and based on personality. I hated that.
Now I have to “grade” students, but I do it in the frame of pass/fail. If students get less than a 3, they fail. A 1 in any part of the rubric is also automatic failing. OTOH, my evaluation is combined and averaged amongst other faculty and residents, so even if I failed a student, the student passes because everyone else gives him/her a higher grade.
I like the pros because it takes the pressure off of “getting the letter grade for the high GPA”. Sadly, there are many otherwise competitive students that, since it is not letter grade, decide to do nothing except showing up and breathe, knowing they’ll likely still pass the rotation. Those students make me twitchy (and I handle knives, twitchy with a knife is bad!).
I think this is a false dichotomy: the choice is rarely between learning and getting a C on one hand and not learning and getting an A on the other. Kids who say “I will copy this homework because I have to, to get the grade, but I will go back and learn it later” never (or very rarely do). They say “Well, better to cheat than to get a zero”, as if that’s the choice, but it’s not: the reason they didn’t have time to do their home work is because they knew they’d let themselves take the easy way out if they “had to”. If they didn’t compromise themselves, ever, they would plan their lives around that, and they’d end up with just as good of grades and more learning.
I also disagree that it’s all about getting the job. Once you get that first job/get into grad school/get into college, the grades never matter again: after that, it’s 100% what you can do. In all these situations, there is an early assessment period where the people around you lump you as “Meh”, “ok”, or “rock star” based on what you seem capable of. Be it in undergrad, grad school, or a career, being seen as an up-and-comer in those early years–being seen as competent and capable of even greater competence–can have tremendous implications for your entire professional life. It’s the rock stars that get mentored, get promotions they aren’t really qualified for, get sent for added training, get picked to go to conferences, get put on good research teams, etc. The mehs, the oks, the good-enoughs, the coming-alongs? They maybe don’t get fired, but they are less likely to be tremendously successful.
Hi Opal!
Yeah, but you’re also excluding a lot of things aside from “cheating”. I agree that if we’re going to talk about cheating then you’re better served getting the damned C. But there’s a lot of things you can do aside from cheating that can negatively impact your learning. Like I said, I’ve done homework, all by myself (or in a group if it’s a group project), but done it in ways that probably aren’t the best for learning, i.e. the quick and dirty way rather than the way I probably should do it. This really isn’t an uncommon problem for me since my computer science courses often regularly have me pulling all-nighters once to twice a week.
It’s not a dichotomy between learn/not-learn and grade/no-grade, but there is a continuum where sometimes something that impacts your learning helps your grade or vice versa, and sometimes a huge potential increase in your grade is worth a small hit to your learning. If I wanted to use some of my graphics projects now as a reference, I’m screwed. I’m going to have to rewrite them if I ever want to repurpose them*, it also means I lost a reference if I ever forget how to do something. I learned a great deal, but I lost a resource that could help me learn more. But the A I got instead of the F I probably would have gotten if I didn’t force myself to ignore maintainability, comments, and reusability in favor of getting something that actually worked.
- Except the last one I did because I actually had some free time that week, and thus could take the time to clean everything up.
Retired science teacher here. My student’s grades were earned. To get an A, you needed to achieve at least 90% of the points possible during the semester.
Whatever makes you think that science or premed courses are graded on the curve? Not in my department. Curve grading was found in the Social Science and English departments.
That doesn’t really mean anything, though, without knowing how you graded or the way your tests and assignments were structured. I can make a class where you need 90% of the points possible purely graded on some subjective “participation and effort in class discussions” and the grades would very well be “given.”
Curves don’t really mean shit about whether or not a course has given grades. I’ve had really, really shitty courses where the grades were more or less “given” and the class was almost purely effort that required >=90% for an A, and insanely difficult, challenging, thorough courses with fair, logical grading where the instructor determined the threshold for an A based on natural gaps in the grading distribution. I’ve even had good courses with “fuzzy grading” where you needed a 92% or grader to be guaranteed an A, but you may get an A if you show understanding of the material and your grade falls in 88%-92%. Obviously I’ve also had crappy courses with curves and good courses with a strict 90% policy, but I don’t think the mere presence of a curve necessarily means anything when determining if grades are “given” or not.
But it is about the grade, at least initially. Getting into college is a numbers game, almost completely. Getting a good job out of college has a lot to do with your GPA, at least in undergrad.
Once you’re out though (in my experience), your personality, networking and connections make about 60-65% of what gets you labeled as a “Rock Star” vs “Meh”, or “ok”. Basically, you have to have some modicum of competence, but what gets you promoted and successful isn’t often extraordinary competence, but soft skills.
And even if you are labeled a “Rock Star”, the Michael Jacksons are sorted from the Fred Dursts by virtue of their soft skills.
So ultimately, grades are that foot in the door that lets you apply the rest of your talents and/or be set up to learn what you don’t know, and in the long run, it’s worth it to game the system to make an A and learn a little less, than to learn it completely and make a B or C.
Career wise, for me, I’d have been better off going MIS and breezing through making As and Bs rather than going the computer science route and making As, Bs and Cs, even though I’m a lot more knowledgeable.
But if enough people think this way, won’t employers know this, and look at your A and think “Here’s a system-gamer”?
Sure, but there’s incomplete enough information, with all the various schools, curricula and professors that it would be hard to tell, even if a lot of people did this.
As it stands, it’s a smart strategy to take every shortcut to getting a good grade that you can (without outright cheating) that you can.
The saying goes, “I don’t give out grades; YOU EARN THEM!”
Yes? We’re arguing the general validity of that saying,
I think grades are given by many teachers by setting low criteria. Technically, you meet the teacher’s standards, they are just so low that it’s hard not to.
Also, grades often do not reflect actual knowledge learned, just ones diligence in doing busy work.
For example, I have had classes that had 5 open book, 25 point quizzes per one 100 point test. The busy work pads the grade so it doesn’t matter if you get a 50% on the test.
I hated teachers who gave out grade quotas. They ruin your merit-based scholarships, since those always have a grade requirement thrown in.
I also hated any teachers who graded homework. Homework is to get you familiar with the material, to make sure you understand it, or, in the case of more math based classes, to make sure you can do it on time. It does not in any way test your knowledge. It just wastes the time of the people who get it.