What Do Our Grading Systems Value?

What do grades mean to us? To our students? Are we assigning grades to assess student work, or are the grades sorting the students themselves? Think, for a moment, about how grades work in a typical class. A student does a paper and gets a grade. Does another assignment, gets a grade. Repeat until the end of the semester, average these grades according to some formula, and voila—a final grade!  The students get some kind of report card; they internalize these grades to a greater or lesser extent as a measure of who they are; and everyone moves on to the next thing.

But now let’s imagine that what you want your students to get out of the class (and to take with them as they pursue whatever comes next) is less a rating for how they did with the work of the class and more a set of skills, approaches, and habits of mind that will allow them to thrive in their next work or academic challenges—and might possibly open to them new worlds of pleasure, beauty, and expression?  What if you have a student who begins the term without the kind of background that would allow them to succeed immediately with the work you are assigning, but really turns on as the course progresses and improves so much that their work is largely indistinguishable in quality from the student who came in already knowing everything—even if the already excellent student has progressed?

If the class we were teaching was, say, bicycle riding, we would probably give high marks to all of our students who became competent bicycle riders by the end of the class. If we were teaching lifeguarding, we might not care very much whether the student was able to drag a heavy object from the bottom of the pool on the first try; we would award certification if the student learned the technique that allowed them to lift the object successfully. When practitioners of martial arts earn the right to wear a black belt, no one worries too much about how long it took them to pass each of the tests along the way; the point is that over time the practitioner has mastered all of the required steps to earn the honor.

Typical grading systems in literature classes work in precisely the opposite way, assigning grades to students before they have had a chance to practice the skills and habits of mind we are trying to teach.  Students who are already successful will succeed at each moment of assessment, early or late in the term. But the students who have the most to learn will be penalized early on for their lack of mastery, and these early assessments will linger on until the final grade is tallied. No matter how far these students come, their early struggles will continue to define them as they progress, at least in terms of the final grade.

For a student actively trying to learn and grow, how frustrating to have those early attempts factor in to your final assessment—to be judged for the person you have been, not for who you may become. Thus the typical system of grades accrues into an assessment that not only measures something different from, but actively undermines, the kind of learning most of us want.