The case against grades and grading has been so clearly made that it is time to turn the tables. Why – in 2019 – with all the evidence available – Why are institutions and individuals still clinging to this pernicious practice?
Why do educators persist in wasting time discussing such irrelevancies as grading standards, grading formulas, grade inflation and what constitutes an A?
Why? What is the educational justification?
The case against grades is clear and long-standing.
Here’s Professor J.McKeen Cattell of Columbia University in Examinations, Grades and Credits from 1905:
It is quite possible that the assigning of grades to school children and college students as a kind of reward or punishment is useless or worse…
Since then the case against grades has been well-documented. Grades don’t do anything useful for learners. They don’t provide actionable feedback or information. They don’t motivate or inspire learning. In terms of learning they are irrelevant, unnecessary, redundant, counter-productive, de-motivating, destructive, degrading and generally not good.
And these days there are clear alternatives and plenty of examples of schools and educators choosing not to. And some of those schools have been around a long time.
Many k-8th grade schools – and a handful of high schools – took the road less travelled back in the day and never adopted letters and numbers to measure learning in the first place. It’s time for the rest of the school world to catch up
OK – so for those who think education is a matter of rote learning and memorization and bubble filling there’s a certain logic to grades, grading, ranking and GPAs. But I don’t consider such people educators.
Grades, grading, testing and exams were a simple way to sort out who would continue to receive the benefits of further education. It was a method falsely believed by many to be fair and equitable.
There’s been a social revolution driven by technology that has forever transformed the way the world communicates, connects and does business. Ubiquitous access to information and the power of digital tools cracked open the access to knowledge and potentially the world of learning.
The more schools leapt at these new opportunities to create authentic and meaningful learning the clearer the obstacles loomed. Just as new discoveries in chemistry were the handmaiden to some of the worst atrocities of the first world war, technology could also be harnessed to the drill-skill-and-kill of the so-called personalized learning of the testing machine. In addition to that reality, two big questions loomed: What about college? And how on earth do you grade, measure, assess, evaluate this kind of learning?
Schools that are worthy of the name – even the most traditional and “successful” – are striving to reinvent, re-think, reimagine and re-create themselves as institutions of value and purpose in a rapidly evolving world. Do a quick search and see what the “best” of them are saying about the needs of children, innovation, curriculum development and values.
Schools are prioritizing: Imagination, character, community, openness, purpose, collaboration, creativity, caring, risk-taking, belonging, inclusivity, innovation, “failure”, empathy, resilience and all the rest of those admirable and urgently needed qualities and abilities.
Read what schools are saying. Read anything on the need for school transformation, innovation and the urgent need for schools to focus on the real needs of students. It’s everywhere from the World Economic Forum to the mission statement of the school down the road.
Education – so this mantra goes – means something bigger and more meaningful than getting to the top of the existing antheap.
It means all the stuff that can’t be measured in traditional ways. And assessing and grading students alongside these worthy aims will ensure they will not actually, or fully, happen.
So schools these days find themselves in a bit of a bind. There’s a gap between what they say they want to do and what they actually do. And the more schools focus on doing the right thing about embracing the future of learning for all students the wider the abyss between rhetoric and reality becomes. The justification for grades gets harder and harder as they as they pretzel themselves in defending the indefensible. The cracks were always there. Now they threaten to collapse the system under the weight of contradiction.
Intellectual risk taking is essential for growth and learning is about trial and error. Grades obscure and interfere with such learning. We know this.
But grades have a death-grip on our system and collective psyches. And for all the arguments lined up to oppose them they march on forward with a life of their own unmoored from educational meaning or necessity.
But for how long?
It’s very encouraging to see the grading walls crumble. Take a look for example at the Mastery Transcript Consortium. It goes right the heart of the issue – the high school transcript and college admissions. Congratulations to all involved and to all those actively working toward alternatives.
Traditional schools, particularly large-scale high schools, are organized for efficiency. And consistency. We need another organizing principle. How about joy?
Traditional schools crank it out. Students show up. They pay attention. They behave. they do lots of homework. They get grades and awards to measure success.
The problem with this pattern is that as you approach the top rung – the unicorn, the Holy Grail, the asymptote – of maximum efficiency, there’s not a lot of room left for improvement. Making another 4.0 GPA student, offering another AP class or teacher-proof curriculum isn’t going to boost learning a whole lot.
Worse, the education will be inherently un-remarkable. If you fear individuality and cognitive diversity; if you teach students like cogs and grade them like eggs; if you have to put it all in a hand book and a grade book, then the chances of an amazing education are close to zero.
Such schools have students who are stressed out with a raft of school-induced mental disorders. The world for our children is anxiety laden enough. We don’t need school to layer it on with obsolete nonsense about scarcity and competition as represented by grades. Such schools have students who try to cut corners and cheat. They are unhealthy places. They may be orderly and efficient but they are not conducive to learning and human development.
We all know that schools are contributing to the epidemic levels of stress and mental illness in young people.
The obsession with achievement, competition and evaluation in our education system is damaging. Valuing children and learning on the basis of test scores, grades, GPAs and college acceptance letters is destructive for those who do well and for those who do not.
The incessant chatter about out-performing others and racing to the top is counter-productive. It’s driving out the joy and purpose of learning.
Children are more than their test scores and tests are not the measure of a child’s worth. Education is more than the drive to outscore others.
We need to educate kids to have a healthy appreciation of themselves and others and to be smart as learners, dreamers and problem solvers. This means taking learning beyond the multiple-choice bubble test to real-world assessment of: Will it work? Is it ethical? Does it help solve a problem? Assessment can’t be confined to grades and numbers. If you’re a straight A student there is only one way to go and that’s down.
We need to educate for the world that could be and should be rather than the world we have. This means presenting students with authentic problems to solve not material to master.
Joy of learning and doing something that has personal meaning and purpose? Joy of knowing yourself well and knowing you belong to a community committed to respecting the diversity of life.
How about being a school that promotes independence and the freedom and expectation to connect, care, create and delight! How about organizing school and the work of school around that?
Such a school would embrace students who make a difference, as opposed to searching for grades to assign or rules in the handbook that were violated.
Getting rid of grades once they are ingrained in a school culture is tough. The mental model in the head, the fear of being unmoored from scores and being seen as having no standards – these have a powerful and enduring grip.
Old notions of progressive as permissive, lowering the bar, playing tennis with the net down – keep those vampire grades rising from the dead. Even though all reason, research and common sense tell you grades are meaningless, counterproductive to motivation and actively harmful – there they are again. Put a stake of logic through their heart but still they rise. Yes – we know all that, but …
But a slew of new resources and thinkers and unstoppable new realities challenged the traditional system and walls began to crumble. As the new wave of curriculum change sweeps into schools it’s clear that the old methods of reporting on progress and assessing are not adequate to the task.
The future is VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Let’s grow resilient, thoughtful, caring people who can adapt to the unexpected and to disruption. Let’s cherish our diversity; create the sense of belonging; nurture curiosity; understand learning as trial and error; and strengthen the personal sense of purpose, presence and place in a connected world.
Schools have to be there for students. All of them. Our outdated notions about selection, sorting and assessment – about who and what matters most – can’t be allowed to get in the way of an education.
The grades and grading of traditional assessment are irrelevant. At best they distract, restrict and undercut. At worst they completely derail and destroy making a mockery of the the high sounding rhetoric of educational good intentions.
So if you and your school are not actively thinking about assessment in new ways … why not?
If you are not thinking about how to limit and preferably eradicate the pernicious, anti-intellectual practice of grading …why not?
How do you make the case for grades?
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I prepared for a group seminar back in my training year that I came upon accidentally a few years ago in which I questioned the individualist approach and advocated more group learning because actually as a species we work best in teams and for many years as a classroom teacher I frequently experimented with re-arranging desks to create a different dynamic and tried to get collaborative work into my teaching,,,.But in fact I did take the approach that our mutual exploration should be enjoyable and that learning should be fun, and for me it was the best possible “disciplinary weapon” because having created “vandal proof” lessons that stopped those whose chief pleasure in life seemed to be in sabotaging lessons, I would just point out to them as they sat sulky and miserable that they were excluding themselves from enjoying what the rest of the class were enjoying.. But the question of grades comes down essentially to why “the system” pays for schools– It puts some kind of brand label on the product, and actually lots of parents are no more interested than that, and some governments too that want to sell education as a way for individuals to earn lots of money.
There is no case for grades. Alfie Kohn pointed that out years ago. Grades are just another means of social control. They have nothing to do with learning.
You asked why business is still doing it. I presume you have performance appraisals there. They used to be to give feedback to both manager and employee.
But in a world that is going to sack most humans for robots and AI, which is already happening, performance appraisals take on a more sinister meaning. Who will go first? You know time and motion studies are back, those who have not yet been replaced in Amazon and others, are lucky to get sufficient toilet breaks. It will force people out, “natural attrition”.
I love the thrust of your argument and would like to add a 'new' term to the lexicon of anti-grading: coercion. The sole purpose of grading (as opposed to assessment or evaluation) is to coerce students into participating in a process of schooling that they would never choose on their own. I've been deeply interested in the role of coercion in schooling since reading Ivan Ilich's Deschooling Society. Ultimately, we will need to see grading in the context of a coercive system of schooling/certification that extends through the university.
Command and control, contain and coerce. Grades are a source of power and that is part of their enduring stranglehold.
This IS no justification for traditional grades EXCEPT on the basis of making things easy for the bureaucracy.
They are nothing but soul destroyers in the classroom. And they are just as bad for the "A" student as for the kid who never seems to "make the grade".
Grades are the junk food of education. And you can't grade effort. No one actually knows how hard a kid has really worked. And you just can't grade all the things that we really want to have kids learn. yes we can measure how accurately they spell (big deal) but we can't grade how much they care to make the world a better place.
And college? Grades make it easier for college. But that is NOT our job. Colleges need to get their act together and figure out another way to sort how they want to accept the kids they want.
What I would like to see is examples of schools reducing and eliminating grades altogether and the story of how they are doing that.
And by schools I mean of course teachers . Too much autonomy has been taken from teachers. Time to assert ethical authority when it comes to what we know best - the kids in their classrooms and do the right thing by them.
Reminds me of a paper I prepared for a group seminar back in my training year that I came upon accidentally a few years ago in which I questioned the individualist approach and advocated more group learning because actually as a species we work best in teams and for many years as a classroom teacher I frequently experimented with re-arranging desks to create a different dynamic and tried to get collaborative work into my teaching,,,.But in fact I did take the approach that our mutual exploration should be enjoyable and that learning should be fun, and for me it was the best possible "disciplinary weapon" because having created "vandal proof" lessons that stopped those whose chief pleasure in life seemed to be in sabotaging lessons, I would just point out to them as they sat sulky and miserable that they were excluding themselves from enjoying what the rest of the class were enjoying.. But the question of grades comes down essentially to why "the system" pays for schools-- It puts some kind of brand label on the product, and actually lots of parents are no more interested than that, and some governments too that want to sell education as a way for individuals to earn lots of money.
And for some reasons you bring to mind two DSS girls - both Green House - who always sat in the back corner of the classroom cheerfully eating sweets and tossing the wrappers into the hoods of their duffel coats that they never seemed to ever take off and who were totally impervious to all my best efforts to coax or coerce them into doing any work. I think of them off and on because I was always rather impressed by their happy refusal to do anything while always being perfectly benign. They were sitting out the required years of education - or at least my class - patiently waiting for their lives to begin when they reached leaving age. They always seemed bemused by my foolish efforts as if they could not imagine someone to be so silly as to try and engage them. All perfectly friendly. And what ever I tried they just went on with their routines which sometimes did involve rummaging in a bag for a pencil or putting the date at the top of the page or turning the book upside down and finding such things irresistibly giggle-worthy. But mostly it was eating sweets and blowing impressive bubbles. I admired them in a way.
I met one of them later when she was working in a hairdresser's on Streatham High Road. "Hello miss," and she seemed quite pleased to see me. For no good reason as I could have been nothing but an annoyance to her at school.
Hilarious! Been there, done that.
Great post. Here in the UK, children are measured from the early years by national high stakes tests, and teacher performance is judged according to the results of these. Teacher recruitment, retention and morale are increasingly low, and young children suffer performance anxiety. The great thing about Joy is that it is the ultimate Intrinsic motivation. And what would life be like if more people demonstrated joy rather than the negative emotions associated with the current social, economic and political situation?
I don't know if it's worse there or here where New York State requires students to take state tests to graduate, and the APPR scores for teachers are dependent on those tests. (APPR = Annual Professional Performance Review). The APPR ratings are based on student tests making for a closed circle of hell. So many teachers persist in spite of all that and continue to do their best to bring a sense of joy to the classroom. We need to advocate for change on the state level.
Oppression is possibly more total here because of a long standing tradition of national testing that now extends K-12 (in US terminology). The government aim was to benchmark student attainment at age 7 and then to determine whether students (& their teachers) were producing comparable age-related outcomes as measured by national tests at age 11, 14, 16 & 18. The legislative machinery isn’t quite in place, but the circles of hell have been drawn and imprison children and teachers in endless performance anxiety.
Something from the good bad old days:
"Examination produce a new sense of what English is. Their
power, their concern for the markable is a chief reason
for the continuance of that other version of "English"
whose constituent parts are grammar, precis, spelling,
comprehension, exercises, etc. It. soon builds up into a
self-sufficient subject with its own mechanical drive--its
own techniques, texts, attendants, and its own minds,
endorsed by and endorsing it. (Brian Jackson, English
versus Examinations) 1965
Thanks ! They’re also a way of grading pupils’ English ‘skills’ by reference to ideal forms rather than to actual utterance. This is exemplified by the grammar, punctuation & spelling tests taken by young children over here. I’m writing about these, having mortified myself by marking 500 of them !
Absolutely! And what nonsense it all is.
As Denys Thompson wrote in 1965:
"English has no content; there are virtually no facts to transmit.
But for examination purposes a false content has been invented." This was in his Working Paper for the Dartmouth Conference. "Knowledge and Proficiency in English."
Commiserations on the marking!
All rather depressing. But it was good to read the English in Education blog post on the upcoming "Writing" issue. Good to be reminded of a different and more hopeful time in English teaching. And of some outstanding teachers. I have to get a copy of that when it comes out.