Many generations of young Americans have learned in school under the grading system. We took tests in subjects and would find out how well we had done when the instructor returned them, often with red marks to show where we’d made mistakes. The instructor would go over the tests, often spending extra time on the questions that had given students the most trouble. Then we would move on to new material, followed by another test. At the end of the class, we’d receive an overall grade to indicate how well we had done—an A for excellent work, a B for good work, a C for average work and an F for failing to learn enough to pass and move ahead to the next class.
According to Professor Joshua Eyler of the University of Mississippi, that’s a bad system.
Eyler has been immersed in the “progressive” educational idea that students must always feel good about themselves.Eyler’s book Failing Our Future: How Grading Harms Students, and What We Can Do About It argues that the nation’s future is at risk unless we abandon the grading system. He states that we have a “grade obsessed culture” that wreaks damage on students by “harming their ability to learn and thrive.” That’s quite a charge, but before we throw out the grading system in favor of something else, let’s take a look at Eyler’s case against it.
He tells us that grading is pernicious because it “perpetuates the idea that school is a place for competition rather than discovery.” Eyler dislikes competition because it can hurt those who don’t win, but that is just the way life is. People have to compete in many aspects of life—for friends, in sports, for jobs—and they shrug off their defeats and go on. What is harmful about competing in school? Another student may be a whiz at algebra while you struggle just to pass. Learning where your strengths and weaknesses lie is useful, not harmful.
Eyler has been immersed in the “progressive” educational idea that students must always feel good about themselves, which is not surprising since he is a professor of education.
Another of his arguments is that grading contributes to our national epidemic of stress. He points to surveys indicating that many young Americans now experience elevated levels of stress, then asserts that grading is probably a leading cause of that. But if there is a stress crisis, a notion that may be mostly an artifact of heightened media attention and the need for scary stories, why assume that grading is a component? Has grading become more severe in recent years? Actually, it is much less so, with many teachers and professors eager to keep students happy with high grades in return for minimal work.
What else is wrong with grading? Eyler attacks it on the ground that it can give erroneous impressions about students. He points out that just because a student got a low grade on a test, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she didn’t learn the material, since everyone has a bad day from time to time. True enough, but students almost always have the opportunity to make up for bad days over the course of a semester. A low grade for a semester almost always accurately indicates low comprehension of the material.
Conversely, Eyler also contends that high grades do not necessarily indicate “deep learning.” Why? He supports his claim by referencing an instance where all the students in a college course were given A grades because the student assistants were on strike and the school simply gave everyone an A. All right, but that’s not much evidence to support the argument that high grades can be misleading. Almost all the time, high grades reliably indicate better learning than do low ones. They aren’t useless information.
Almost all the time, high grades indicate better learning than do low ones.How about incentives? Eyler contends that grading provides the wrong kind of incentives for students, replacing their natural curiosity and desire to learn with fear. Moreover, grades tend to put an upper limit on students, who will just do what it takes to get the grade they want, rather than going further into the subject. The problem with this Rousseauian view of students is that many do not have much natural inclination to learn school subjects, and those who do can usually find adults who will eagerly teach them more than is in the textbook if that’s what they want.
Furthermore, Eyler condemns grading for its supposed role in controlling students and shaping them to societal norms—for example, using grades to punish late submission of assignments or papers that come up short on expected word counts. That, however, is not a flaw; it’s a way of conditioning young people for the adult world where there are penalties for lateness, inadequate work, and so on. It’s better for people to learn to expect that when they’re young than to shield them in a cocoon until the inevitable day of reckoning arrives.
Eyler also pads his book with tangential arguments meant to appeal to “progressive” readers. He decries the “punishment gap” in schools, meaning that a far higher percentage of black students are given severe punishments than are students of other races. First, there are good reasons for that “gap,” which reflects a much higher rate of serious misbehavior by black students. It doesn’t indicate racism, any more than the fact that male students are disciplined at a higher rate than are female students is an indicator of sexism. And in any event, it’s hard to see any reason to believe that this problem would be reduced if schools didn’t have grades.
Another “gap” problem Eyler has with grades is that minority students often enter college with weaknesses in academic preparation, which means that they need to take several “developmental” courses intended to bring them up to speed for college writing and math. The problem is that those courses don’t count toward graduation and become further obstacles for minority students, heightening what Eyler sees as unfair white domination. The solution to that, however, is to upgrade the schools that minority students attend (which already have high spending but indifferent, unionized teachers), not to abolish grades.
If grading is so harmful and useless, what are the alternatives?
First, Eyler states that students do much better if they receive verbal or written feedback from their instructors rather than merely a grade. Such feedback is surely a good thing, but instructors are almost always quite happy to sit down with students to individually go over their work if the student thinks it would be beneficial.
Very few teachers and professors are apt to abandon grading and experiment with one of Eyler’s alternatives.Second, he approves of portfolios, where students accumulate their work over a semester and are evaluated on their portfolios at the end. That might work out with art and writing but not so well with mathematics or economics. And in the end, students will still receive some sort of feedback, which they might find depressing. It’s almost impossible to completely evade any kind of assessment of a student’s learning.
Eyler is also fond of “collaborative grading,” where the student and the instructor get together to come up with a mutually satisfactory grade. It seems obvious that students who have not done well will hold out for a high grade, probably saying “I tried my hardest.” The result of the collaboration will usually be no less than a C. Students will realize that they can coast by in such courses.
Proof that collaborative grading works, Eyler concedes, is lacking. He writes, “While we do not yet have a lot of quantitative research demonstrating that collaborative grading leads to a greater depth of understanding and higher levels of achievement, we do have data showing that such models can enhance student autonomy, motivation, core beliefs, and dispositions about learning.” Perhaps so, and if that’s the case, we might see more professors adopting this approach. How best to assess student learning is, after all, a matter of trial and error. What is not warranted, however, is the idea that instructors should be pressured into “collaborative grading” or any of Eyler’s other alternatives.
I’m not concerned that this book is going to cause the grading system to collapse. Very few teachers and professors are apt to abandon grading and experiment with one of Eyler’s alternatives. But where I fear the book might have some impact is in education schools, where ill-considered ideas often take root, spread, and weaken our education system from top to bottom.
George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.