Going Gradeless

I’ve talked to quite a few people who agree that high school students focus too much on grades and too little on the actual learning — that students aim to improve their numbers, not their understanding. A good example would be the high school students who take vast numbers of college-level classes not because they care about the material, but because the classes may help their GPA or just look impressive. As an even better example, in the state of Texas, the top 10% of each graduating class (usually ranked by GPA) gets automatic admission into state universities, no questions asked. Students vying for top places add and drop classes to gain extra points and move up in rankings. Surely education shouldn’t be a competition where the person with the most points wins. School is about education and learning, not strategy — right?

Ideally. I generally agree with the anti-grade crowd. I’m more pro-learning. But what can be done?

I was talking with a friend about this on Saturday, and she suggested a rather creative solution.

Ditch grades altogether.

This isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t grade students’ work and that students could never fail a class because there’d never be a measure of “failing.” What I mean is that students would still take tests, and teachers would still grade them, but the student’s feedback would no longer be “You got a 74. Try harder.” It would be “You need to work more on your antiderivatives.” Numeric grades would be kept hidden away in a computer somewhere.

But before I go into the details, let’s take a closer look a the problem.

The Grade Delusion

High schools (or at least the ones I’ve seen) are incredibly grade-oriented. Most students (but not all) worry about their grades, always striving to keep grades above a certain threshold so their parents don’t apply whatever punishments parents apply these days. (Some kids, and parents, don’t care at all, of course, but that’s a separate problem.) I’ve watched students get exceptionally frustrated because they received an 89.9% average in a class instead of a 90% — the difference between a B and an A.

But why should they care about that tenth of a percent? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with learning stuff?

The trouble, as I see it, is that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that grades are indeed a measure of learning, and thus that high grades mean lots of learning. (Unless learning isn’t the actual goal of school.) That is not necessarily the case. Most high school teachers give grades for various worksheets, projects, and even for “class participation,” rather than just for test performance. The final grade is then an average containing test performance (perhaps the best measure of learning we have), various worksheets that measure learning in different amounts, projects that may just measure how well one can insert information from Google into a PowerPoint, and how much the student is willing to talk in class.

Extra credit points (like teachers who give out points for students who donate books or take their textbooks to faraway locations) often don’t reflect learning at all — more often extra credit assignments are just extra work — and I think the whole idea sucks anyway.

Life Without Grades

So suppose we decide we want to encourage learning rather than grade-mongering. The two don’t always go hand-in-hand.

Step 1 on the road to learning: Remove grades from the picture.

If grades are removed from students’ view, students should no longer feel an obsessive need to get the highest grades possible — simply because they won’t get feedback. Exam grades should still be recorded, I think, but the student should receive subjective results (“you need to work on concept x”) rather than numeric ones. Those would be saved for later.

Where does the motivation to perform go?

Grades would still be released as part of transcripts to colleges, so colleges would know how well a student has learned in particular subjects. (Without grades, there’s no longer an inclination to add worksheets and funky projects into the grading system. One might say this would encourage students to not do them altogether, but I think a bit of freedom is good for teenagers anyway.) This means that a student would be inclined to do well on tests, but not obsessively inclined to be absolutely perfect all the time.

(This does, of course, bring up the question of “why not just make grades exam-based but still public?” Easy. Because then kids will still focus on their grades rather than learning. The thrust of the point here is that we need to make students obsess about understanding everything rather than scoring every point possible by picking out the easiest classes to take. Grades, though they are secret, will become a means of seeing how successful a student is at achieving this goal. Essentially, by removing grades, we remove the desire to maximize points, allowing for students to actually understand things and choose classes they’re interested in, rather than classes that will give them the greatest GPA advantage later on.)

Report cards, then, would be different: teachers would send home notes explaining what concepts the student is good at and what the student needs to work on. Parents would punish kids if they slack off and get told they’re not understanding everything, rather than if they fail because they left their homework assignment at home accidentally.

The whole paradigm shifts. Grades go from primary importance to being a secondary measure of success. World hunger ends. Climate change stops. Birds start chirping. You get the idea.

Open Questions

  1. Will students lose motivation without direct qualitative feedback? They might. Qualitative feedback from teachers on how well the student is performing would have to be constant and detailed.
  2. Does this mean we have to resort to having teachers pick the valedictorian? (Oh noes!)
  3. Is it feasible to instill motivation to understand? This would have to be a ground-up change — start with young kids — and parents would have to evaluate qualitative report cards similarly to quantitative ones.

6 Comments

  1. I’d personally prefer alternative incentives to eliminating incentives. “Fun” easy-A classes to those who don’t care about learning (they learn anyway through the “fun”); accelerated progress to those who want to make the big bucks as soon as they can; invitation-only “deeper meaning” classes for those who want to learn; and anything else we can do.

    The grades should be secondary to the chosen form of the education. For example, those wanting to make the big bucks will try to skip as many classes as possible, however they’ll eventually reach their personal limit as their grades start dropping, and be prevented from skipping more classes. Grades then become (once again) a measure of success.

  2. “Report cards, then, would be different: teachers would send home notes explaining what concepts the student is good at and what the student needs to work on. Parents would punish kids if they slack off and get told they’re not understanding everything, rather than if they fail because they left their homework assignment at home accidentally.”

    That’s assuming the parents are engaged in their child’s education, in a way that makes parental pressure effective.

    And the main problem, I think, is that bureaucracies thrive on numbers and statistics. Beancounters need to count beans.

  3. Hi – former high school teacher, current educational researcher here. If it’s okay, could you contact me for some feedback on a project I’m helping get together? Email is in the ‘required’ box. 🙂

    1. Will students lose motivation without direct qualitative feedback?

    You cannot escape direct qualitative feedback. Even in ‘outcomes based education’, ‘alternative’ programs like the Baccalaureate system, the practice of giving feedback will remain unchanged. However, there are systems that do not use percentage grades, but they are few and far between. ‘Levels’ is one such method.
    The issue that arose in my state, Western Australia, is that the practice of portfolios, projects, assignments that had a variety of parts that required assessing… became unwieldy and was not supported by curriculum models prior to implementation. In short, the work of a teacher tripled as the work of the student doubled.
    You must also realise – people are familiar with percentages. People find it comfortable to say they’re ‘76%’ when all it really means is that they’re one up from ‘75%’ and one lower than ‘78%’. Cutoffs must happen somehow.
    What has happened for some courses however, are required practicals. Presentation of work like art portfolios and samples of work, that show skill and not just a grade. Interviews are mandatory at the university I attended. Many medical schools now require interviews to sift out who are just ‘good at hitting the books’ as opposed to ‘both a hard working student and passionately dedicated and interested in becoming a medico’.
    I think this may become the way forward for quite a few institutions, although it does add additional administration to what is usually just ‘fill a quota for a subject’. Another thing that you have to consider – people have to be paid to do the interviewing.

    2. Does this mean we have to resort to having teachers pick the valedictorian? (Oh noes!)

    In my country, we don’t really have that system… but I do recall that the ‘class prefect’ was a young woman who was not the top Chem student but the most passionate about making it part of her future career. She was responsible, passionate, sensible and worked for what she got. I, personally, would propose to whatever formal body exists at your school to have such a consideration go on before any particular student is chosen to ‘speak for’ the cohort?

    3. Is it feasible to instill motivation to understand? This would have to be a ground-up change — start with young kids — and parents would have to evaluate qualitative report cards similarly to quantitative ones.

    You might be interested in my work on this – I have a series of posts on Skeptical Books for Children that investigates early education on my site.
    As for the point about parents – you also have to realise that they have been brought up under a system that used percentages. I have had for the past ten years, parents who came into parent/teacher interviews saying ‘yeah, you said this, that and the other … but WHERE does she come in the class compared to the rest?’ Some ask for percentages. Some ask whether their child is in the ‘top ten’. You can, as I did, give practical strategies and outline where you were heading for the rest of the year with the lessons… but the ‘quant’ does have a bigger impact than the ‘qual’. This is the system that has been fostered for many, many years.

    If you’re interested in alternative methods of education, I can tell you some more – but honestly, I’d be (as a student) talking to my student representatives to bring something to the teachers in regards to how you are graded and whether more feedback can be brought to bear in report cards? Or if you think there’s not enough on the work handed back to you, encourage more class discussions on the cohort’s progress so it’s not so much ‘I’m number 7 in a class of 24’.

    Podblack.

  4. I thought you might appreciate this recent post over at Pharyngula:

    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/shhhh_dont_tell_the_students.php
    [quote]Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A . For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.[/quote]

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090206.wprof06/BNStory/National/home

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