Anyone who has spent time in the classroom has probably given a lot of thought to what a grade represents and anguished over the grading process. Yesterday I wrote about failing in the remote learning context, and briefly discussed grades and grading as part of that. Today I figured I’d go a little deeper into what I’ve learned about student views on grades and grading over the years, and to try to represent how student views of grades and grading impact classroom learning.
Teachers have divergent views on grading, but coming at the question of grading from a student perspective is useful to think about the impact of grading and grades on learning. Naturally, students also have a lot of divergent views on grades, and in my seven years of teaching, students have expressed a range of views on grading from a desire that everything tuned in be graded to a desire not to be graded at all. Of course, the broad strokes I am going to outline don’t capture every student, but some of the main views hold true.
For many students, grades are the primary reason to do anything school-related. From the perspective of many of these students, if there’s not a grade associated with an assignment, what’s the point of doing it? Those students tend to take grades very seriously, and they take anything less than an on assignment “A” as a symbol of failure. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have had many students whose primary goal is simply to pass. They don’t care much about grades on individual assignments, but basically have the goal of getting credit for the class. There are plenty of students in the middle, whose primary goal in a class is to overall achieve a particular grade either for their parents, or as part of an overall goal to achieve a specific grade point average. Grading is so ingrained in our system of school that only on a couple of occasions have students independently shared about considering the possibility of school without grades.
The central issue with these perspectives on grades is that these students have internalized a view of learning, promoted by a system based on grades, where grades have become a replacement for learning itself. Grade-motivated students learn on the way to achieving their grade goal, but instead of learning being about satisfying curiosity and exploring ideas, grades become not only the goal but also the fundamental basis on which learning is measured. That’s not to say that these students are not intellectually curious or motivated by learning, but that their primary motivations in school have become extrinsic (a grade) instead of intrinsic (a desire to learn/grow). It is theoretically possible to achieve a balance between the two – and I believe most teachers try to create classroom environments where students are intrinsically motived to learn, but often “the grade” is what students are (very reasonably) most concerned about.
A consequence of this is that instead of pursuing learning in a broad inquiring sense, many students focus on the specific grade, or on indicators of specific grades contained within rubrics, rather than simply learning. Rubrics are useful as an evaluative and feedback tool, as well as making expectations clear to students, but they also often serve to circumscribe learning in a limited way to the point that most students can’t imagine school without grades. “What would be the point?” some of them have wondered.
And the reality is that school, as it is constructed in most public schools, would be impossible without grades to sort and order students. With 120-140 students and no grades, it would be impossible to track student progress, identify struggling students and those in need of more of a challenge. And on top of that, grades are the most useful predictor of college success that we have (and college is also mostly based on grades). Grades are fundamentally imperfect but necessary in our system as it exists. So the real question is not whether we have grades or not, but how we work to ensure grades reflect student ability and proficiency as accurately as possible.
Grades have often been used by teachers to punish students for submitting late work, or to pressure students to submit or do well on a particular assignment (“this is worth a big grade”), but this process leads to grades being deeper internalized by students as a form of extrinsic motivation. Instead, we should be asking ourselves, “What did students learn? How can they demonstrate that? And if they failed to demonstrate it, what’s another possible way for them to demonstrate learning? How can they improve? And how can we reward, support, and further develop student learning for the sake of learning?” If we do this, we will be moving towards an end goal of developing a life-long passion for learning independent of grades.