To Grade or Not to Grade? Lessons from a Pandemic

Grading still remains an aspect of school
that is clothed in myth, mystery, and magic.
—Ken O’Connor

If we’re grading now, we’re grading privilege.
—Sheldon Eakins

One of my regular readers happens to be a close personal friend whose daughter was in the inaugural class of the STEM Institute I helped found, and so it was with great parental pride that she recently shared with me the virtual presentation her daughter had to give in order to fulfill the final requirements for earning her degree in engineering this past month at Villanova.  It was professional, well-executed, articulate…and by the time I was done watching it, what struck me most was the thought:  how could a professor possibly assign this a grade? Short of missing actual content that I don’t have the expertise to know about, my friend’s daughter and her colleagues had clearly demonstrated that they knew how to design the specifications for constructing the assigned building, and having demonstrated this mastery, how could grading it be meaningful? Mastery is mastery; does it even make sense to speak of an “A-” or “B+” level when it comes to mastery? Hadn’t what I had just watched made the concept of an “A” effectively meaningless?

These are the sorts of questions that got me thinking, and it made me realize that just as I had not addressed my thoughts about the ultimate purpose of education in the main chapters of this project (see my post “Cultivating Wisdom”), I likewise have never really discussed the topic of grading—which feels embarrassingly negligent given the centrality grades and the act of grading have in our educational systems (as well as how problematic assessment of any kind has been during the pandemic).  Thus, I think it’s time to explore what it means to grade the learning process, to ask ourselves whether that is even a meaningful idea in the first place and, if it is, to examine what authentically engaged grading might look like.

Grading’s Traditional Purpose

To understand why grades and grading have been a long-standing part of the teaching and learning process, we must first recognize the historical role that schools and education have played in maintaining and stabilizing the status quo of pre-existing socio-economic structures.  All societys have a variety of social and economic roles in their “opportunity structures” that require filling and that we must socialize individuals to do if that society is to function at all.  Furthermore, “it follows [logically] that some individuals must be socialized to occupy high-status positions, while others must be socialized or adapted to fill low-status positions” (Spener, p. 61), and that means every society needs a mechanism for achieving this end, a mechanism that is almost always controlled by those privileged in that society in order to preserve said privilege.

In the Industrial world, schools became this mechanism.  In the move away from the agrarian 19^th Century individuated one-room model for educating people to the modern assembly-line approach, schools became the dominant tool for sorting people into their socio-economic roles through academic tracking mechanisms, gateway testing, and various other methods for assigning status identity.  Basically, you went to school to be told (more or less) who you were going to be as an adult, and we still use schools for this purpose to this day. 

I say “more or less” because there are always cracks in every system that isolated individuals manage to squeeze through.  But the overwhelming data shows that your socio-economic status at birth is likely to predict your socio-economic status in adulthood, and in some societies, the sorting and socializing schools do to achieve this has an almost caste-like quality to it.  I will never forget the look of surprise on my Japanese colleagues in Tokyo when they learned that their American counterparts in the exchange had chosen to be teachers.  Asked about their surprise, they simply informed us that the educational system had identified them as most appropriate for fulfilling the role of teacher and so that is what they had become.

However, regardless of how tightly or loosely schools socialize children for their eventual place in the “opportunity structure,” any such sorting requires that “the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and personal attributes that determine a low-status position in society must be differentiated from those suitable for a high-status position” (Spener, p. 61), and that’s where grading comes into the picture.  As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the status quo needs a method for assigning value to individual people in order to preserve itself, and what better way to do that than using grades to rank everyone on the basis of what Ted Dintersmith argues are “inconsequential proficiencies, in ways that provide outsized advantage to the affluent” (p. 126).  Yet even within a given status level, high or low, grading is still used to rank potential even further, and that is why behavioral metrics such as completing homework, class participation, attendance, cheating, etc. are regularly folded into grades when they have absolutely nothing to do with the degree of mastery of a child’s learning—allegedly what the grading is supposed to be determining in the first place.

The bottom line is that grading as it is has regularly been employed in schools is about social engineering, not teaching and learning, and in fact, as Ken O’Connor and Kara Newhouse point out, the vast majority of grading practices actually harm the educational process.  They are susceptible to implicit biases.  They cannot accurately reflect comparisons of student learning due to disparities in student resources.  They lack precision and consistency because any two teachers could have entirely different grading policies for the exact same course.  They serve as extrinsic motivators at best, with the consequent disengagement from the learning process that comes with that, and they encourage the kind of mediocre thinking and cookbook curricula that are easy and cheap to test and measure.  In short, grading as commonly practiced inhibits good teaching and learning.

Authentically Engaged Grading

But what if grading wasn’t about social engineering? What if it was part of the learning process instead? What if, as educational reformer O’Connor puts it, grading’s “primary purpose [is] communication about achievement” (p. 7) with respect to mastery of a given skill, topic, or discipline? What if we graded to help students acquire that mastery?

O’Connor himself defines “achievement” as how students perform on summative assessments measured according to published standards and learning outcomes.  He believes that only this understanding of learning success will produce grades that are accurate, meaningful, consistent and can support learning. 

However, while I like the precision of O’Connor’s views, I think his understanding of how to measure academic achievement still risks trapping us in the current status quo of Dintersmith’s “inconsequential proficiencies” and low-tier standards that are readily measured using multiple choice assessments.  What children learn “should not be determined by how easy or difficult various outcomes are to measure” (Fadel, et al, p. 104), and it is too easy to use O’Connor’s understanding of grading to measure mastery of data and information rather than mastery of understanding and expertise.  As Dintersmith demands, “our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for you to test” (p. xix), and as Fadel, et al argue, much of what is important to learn are character qualities such as empathy and cognitive abilities such as meta-learning, none of which lend themselves readily to measurement.

How, then, do we grade the kind of deeper learning that I and my fellow educational reform advocates such as Dintersmith and Fadel (and even O’Connor) are arguing is vital for our society’s future? How does an authentically engaged educator understand the grading process and its purpose?  The answer, I think, lies in how such teachers understand the teaching and learning process in the first place.  If good teaching (as I have argued in Chapter 4) is about creating and modeling the conditions for students to “do” what they are learning and good learning (as I have argued in Chapter 5) is about mastering this “doing,” then grading becomes part of the instructional process itself, an on-going feedback to each child of how close they have gotten to mastery of what they are studying.

When you grade this way, though, you collapse the traditional distinction between formative and summative assessment.  We usually think of formative assessments as tools for monitoring student progress; while summative assessments are final reports on what a child has learned.  But when grading becomes part of the instructional process, each formative assessment has to be treated “as if” it were summative so that the student knows how close or far away from mastery she, he, or they currently are.  And each summative assessment has to be treated “as if” it were formative so that students maintain the growth mindset that grasps that true mastery of anything is never fully accomplished, that there is always room to grow.

To illustrate what I mean allow me to share some practices from my own classroom, where it is a mantra from the very first day of class that “we learn from our mistakes.”  First, I regularly “flip” the traditional role of homework, doing the actual active practice of new material during class time when I can be present to coach and guide my students’ learning, making the homework, then, a small-scale graded assessment for them to show me how well they mastered the day’s work.  Second, I provide the opportunity for my students to correct all graded assessments—from the homework ones to the big unit tests—in order to have them revisit the material and enable them to demonstrate improving mastery for an improving grade.  Third, but by no means finally, on large scale projects, I allow nearly unlimited drafting.  Thus, for example, with the various sections of their report on their soil ecology project (a 5-week investigation that serves as the course exam), I tell them at the beginning that I will grade each group’s draft that they submit “as if” it were their final submission, with feedback on how to improve, and they can keep resubmitting until they are satisfied with the grade it ultimately earns.

Which brings me back to where this started:  my friend’s daughter’s presentation demonstrated mastery just as my students correct and draft until they have done likewise; so how meaningful is it to assign work some final letter grade? A grading scale is useful as a feedback mechanism, but once you use it to get students to where you want them to be, the notion that one individual’s mastery is somehow different or superior from another’s doesn’t make sense.  Again, mastery is mastery: if my friend’s daughter can spec a building, then she can spec a building; if my students can design a properly controlled experiment, then they can design a properly controlled experiment.

Granted, not every student achieves mastery of a given topic, and mastery will look different at different stages in a child’s development.  But one student having a “B” on a transcript for a course while another has a “C” for it simply tells us how far from mastery each student was; it tells us nothing meaningful about the two students and their capacity to learn.  At most, such a distinction might tell us something about how intrigued, bored, or motivated each student was about said course.  But that’s all the two grades can do, and therefore, to use them to rank or compare my two hypothetical students is either an exercise in futility or—worse—the fraudulent method for social engineering discussed earlier.

Interestingly, right now with the forced move to on-line learning, a lot of schools and districts have taken a “pass” versus “incomplete” approach to final assessments for courses rather than assigning letter or percentage grades.  They’re doing so, of course, because of the enormous difficulties encountered with this abrupt move as well as the glaring inequities it has revealed.  But what if we took a lesson from this moment and used this new approach to fundamentally alter how we understand grading moving forward? What if we make “pass” equal mastery (however we decided to define that) and anything less is simply “incomplete?” Grading then becomes a tool to show students how close to “pass” they are, and report cards become tools for sharing this information with parents.  But on a transcript, there would just be a “P” or an “I.”  Or better yet, transcripts would simply contain a list of courses where “P” was accomplished.

Such an approach would certainly be closer to the realities of adult life, for which school is allegedly preparing students and where evaluation looks nothing like our grading systems in schools.  You either qualify for the license, certification, etc. or you don’t.  You either meet the performance goals or not.  Resumes don’t included transcripts, and beyond the most entry level positions, GPAs cease to matter because it is the quality of the work you perform that determines your path in a given job or career. 

Which is not to say that we do not rank work performance in adulthood.  We do, and differences in the quality of the work of different individuals is used for everything from promotions to terminations.  But from low-status to high-status positions, as long as a worker meets the basic standards for a specific position (i.e. “pass), he, she, or they will likely keep that position as long as the position itself is not impacted by other circumstances (e.g. an economic downturn).  In that sense, there are no “grades” in adulthood.

But there currently are grades in childhood, and all too frequently (and a cynic would say “always”), these grades are used to determine who gets the low-status and high-status positions even though, as I stated earlier, the grades say nothing about the capacity to learn or be successful at a given task.  For example, my same friend at the start of this post has an older son who performed quite poorly in terms of grades simply because he could see no point to the behavioral hoops needed to earn good ones, and it took a tremendous amount of parental investment to get him through the conclusion of college.  Yet upon entering a graduate program in a subject he cared about, his grades skyrocketed, and she tells of him even being upset by a “B” in one course because now he was invested in achieving mastery.  Again, all those years of earlier grades said nothing about him as a learner.

However, they say a lot about our broken educational system, and frankly, if not for my friend’s son’s white privilege to protect him from his earlier poor performance, he might not now have the high-status position he does today.  But the topic of white privilege is for another post, and for now, I simply want to end by challenging all of us to recognize what the current grading system in our schools is really saying about our students, what it is really doing to them, and how we might fix it in the future.

References

Dintersmith, T. (2018) What School Could Be.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Fadel, C., et al (2015) Four-Dimensional Education.  Boston: The Center for Curriculum Redesign.

Newhouse, K. (May 11, 2020). Why Grading Policies for Equity Matter More Than Ever. Mindshift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/55889/why-grading-policies-for-equity-matter-more-than-ever?fbclid=IwAR2Wz2sXs_xdS0rLh9Oxhrgrfx0NP5oHjSfz6Z4SSK7dY2e3zz248-L9ilM.

O’Connor, K. (2011) A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades.  New York:  Pearson.

Spener, D. (1996) Transitional Bilingual Education and the Socialization of Immigrants. Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, ed. By P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom.  Boston:  Harvard Educational Review.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed.  Boston:  Mariner Books.