I no longer grade my students’ work, and I wish I had stopped sooner | Hacker News Reader

I no longer grade my students’ work, and I wish I had stopped sooner

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> For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material.

I'm not sure this is the worst flaw with grading (the equity issues may be worse), but it's certainly the dumbest flaw. A scoring system for scholastic ability that disadvantages those that start off with little knowledge, even when they do well by the end of the course, is ridiculous on its face.

How so? If someone already knows the material or has a very solid framework to fit the extra knowledge into and needs zero catching up, of course they'll know the material better at the end of the course and/or will be able to apply it better. How should that not translate into a better grade? The only alternative I see is to let those less-prior-experienced students take a longer time and only then determine the final grade.

Or you could grade for mastery of material, instead of the individual steps taken to get there.

That presumes people learn at equal rates. People don't learn at equal rates though.

Because the grading system _encourages_ students who already know the material, and _discourages_ students who don’t know the material.

If someone is discouraged from a subject, they are less likely to put in the effort to succeed in the subject. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle, which ideally education would fix.

Similarly, this sets students up for a false idea of their “good subjects”, when instead those are familiar subjects. A student who could be a polymath gets discouraged from pursuing multiple subjects because they’re already far ahead of the game in math, so they pigeon-hole themselves to the subject where they receive positive reinforcement.

Essentially, grades as a feedback system are less than ideal, and we can do better.

> Similarly, this sets students up for a false idea of their “good subjects”, when instead those are familiar subjects. A student who could be a polymath gets discouraged from pursuing multiple subjects

I had never considered it that way, interesting perspective. Not yet sure how this will work in the grander scheme, I'm thinking of the impact on the value of a diploma when it's based on learning ability or broader knowledge as compared to being specialized in one thing. Something I'll be thinking about in the future.

Consider thinking of early exams and assignments as requirements for participation and good faith effort. Doing poorly on them would result in a PIP(performance improvement plan) but poor performance in early tasks shouldn't doom you.

I recall some classes in Uni that would have, say, three major exams. And if you had adequate participation and grades in smaller assignments, the score of the lowest exam would be replaced with the 2nd lowest, in order to smooth out a negative deviation. I think it achieves what is being discussed here: Either you did really well through the course but had a bad final, or you didn't grasp the material early on but ended up getting it in the end.

Let's push it to the extreme. Let's say there are 100 students in a class, and one of them is an absolute ace due to knowing the material or having a very solid framework. Should the other 99 people in the class get relatively bad scores at the end of the term? Is that a working system?

The underlying problem here is that people of different skill levels are being graded on the same criteria. They're in the same class.

Classes should be far more granular and far shorter (e.g. two weeks) so that people of the same skill level can be so-grouped.

How does it disadvantage people that start from scratch though? Tests should be written in a way that everyone can pass them, with the knowledge thought in the course.

If people that already have some related knowledge have an easier time studying, that's just life. How does it unfairly disadvantage you, if somebody else is already more skilled than you?

>How does it disadvantage people that start from scratch though?

In the same way that not being a genius is a disadvantage. Cant change it unless we handicap the smart people.

“ In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.”

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

> earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average

They get graded from the very beginning, not from a single final exam

So? Each small test should be written in a way that you can ace with what you learned so far in the course. If you are not willing to study that, that's your personal problem.

They are talking about assignments, not tests. It applies more to skill-based courses than knowledge-based ones. If you're writing C papers at the beginning and A papers at the end, should you get an A or B?

Why would you be writing C papers though? Either the tasks are badly designed, in a way that you can't properly solve them with what you have been thought so far... or you have all the possibility to write As in the beginning, even if you don't have prior knowledge.

The argument is that giving weight to the grades earned throughout the course may under-value students who made significant improvements. For example, take two students:

Student A comes in barely meeting the prerequisites and struggles with low grades on initial tests and projects. They come to office hours, put in substantial effort, and eventually ace the final projects and tests.

Student B comes in with substantial background experience and gets decent but not stellar grades on all tests and projects.

Depending on how much weight is given to the final tests/projects student B may still end up with a higher grade despite the fact that they probably do not have as strong an understanding of the material as student A.

I've had both kinds of students the handful of times I taught graduate-level seminars and it's one reason I weighted the final projects more heavily than initial projects. (Though I found grades on initial projects were still useful for other reasons.)

Imagine a course as teaching the content along a linear function from 0 to N understanding. With traditional grading we are effectively determining the area under the line for the given class, even though the goal of the class is to leave with a mastery of the content.

Consider two students, one whose education path in the course is exponential and the other whose path is logarithmic where both paths intersect at the end of the course. According to traditional grading the logarithmic student would score far better in the course despite their knowledge being equal to the other student by the end.

Which student would you rather be? who has more potential?

Should the body of a course be treated like a series of 100m sprints or a marathon, and what is the net positive outcome through each approach?

I think his point is that if Student A started with 50% knowledge and Student B started with 80% knowledge and by the end they both have 95% knowledge, Student A's grade for the course is penalized for the slow start even AFTER reaching mastery by the end.

If Student A ends up only at 80% then so be it, but if they end up matched then they should end up with a similar grade.

This very year, my sister started college after 5 years as a chef. Her math was shit, especially since it was already not her strongest subject in highschool, 5 years prior. She started very low and ended up average (she's going into biology). With help from me and Wolfram alpha (sry about that advertisement but it helped a lot). She was graded below average even though she showed more progress than at least half her class (since she started almost at the bottom and ended up in the middle). She doesn't care, but still think she is bad at math, when she just had poor teachers in HS and showed learning abilities at 23.

How far should we strech this? there are students who come into courses with superior memory or iq and get a head start from that.

Not sure what your getting at here? The person you are commenting on wasn't talking about punishing people for having a head start they were saying that people's final grade should be based on what they are capable of at the end of the class, not at the start of it.

Why not, there will be for sure students who have the ability to grasp a course fast and effectily to compete with those with prior knowledge, why not grade and reward that ability.

If you grade improvement rather than mastery, you incentivize feigning incompetence at the start of the course to game the system.

The closest thing I ever saw to this was my high school weightlifting class. Your bench press single rep max was a high percentage of your overall grade, and was tested several times over the course of the semester. You were graded on improvement. The teacher made sure not to mention this before the first test, to keep people from cheating, but a few kids were in the know and faked a low max.

From a philosophical/values point of view- what is more important for education- incentivize all students to try to achieve the mastery level expected, or incentivize all students that as long as it looks like they're making progress, that is enough? I'd go with mastery. The appearance of progress is too easy to game, too subjective, and not easily applicable to varying courseloads.

It is rewarded, simply by the fact that they then have to put less effort into the class.

Why should it be graded? The point of the class is not to learn quickly and effortlessly, but to learn the material completely. If by the time the class is over the student has learned it well, they should get a grade that reflects that learning.

I mean, by your logic, should we give extra credit to the students who never show up to office hours in college, since clearly they're learning it 'faster and (more) effectily(sic)'?

I don't understand your point. If a genius takes the class, then they'll get a good grade in any grading system. I'm talking about a student who starts off poorly and does badly on some early assignments, then improves dramatically during the course. Even if they get to the same level of knowledge as the genius, under the traditional grading system, the early poor grades will stand. That will influence their final average/GPA even though those early grades are no longer relevant.

They don't even need to be at the same level of mastery as the "genius." Everyone in the class needs to get to a pre-defined level of mastery of the subject. The genius isn't rewarded (in terms of grade for this class) for being 10x beyond that -- everyone who gets over the bar of mastery gets the same grade.

The argument is not that we need to neutralize a student's head start.

The argument is that students should be evaluated based on their mastery of the content at the end of the course.

Giving too much weight to early grades and tests results in disproportionately penalizing those students who enter the course with the least prior knowledge. Those students are already going to have to work harder than their classmates to catch up. Averaging in their initial low grades just serves to penalize them further.

Even if every studen have zero prior knowledge in a course, there will be those who will perform better early on being able to understand the course faster than others, of course you should grade that ability.

Why? Isn’t the point mastery? Are we grading students ability to learn, now, too? I really don’t understand what you’re getting at.

Mastery obviously isn’t the only point. Engineering firms probably to want people who Learn the material in 4-5 years not 10

Grades don’t capture the difference in learning ability you use as an absurd example. Furthermore, this “observation” is sufficiently vague so as to be a truism. “Businesses don’t want to hire stupid people” is not novel or meaningful as a supporting argument to whatever your point is.

yes it is. part of the benefit of grades and semesters is to compare students. good students want that!

Speaking as a hiring manager, how long it's taken someone to learn something in the past has only ever figured into things when there wasn't a full fit between their skills (as interviewed) and what we're needing.

I've never looked at how long someone was in college, and honestly don't care if it took them 4 years or 10. I assume there's a reason it took them 10, and that could be lighter class load, a change in major, or all manner of things. If it's because they took every class 2-3x, because the first time it didn't stick, it'll show up in the interview process that they can't pick things up quickly, and I can do what I want with that information.

But to the grandparent's point, if I gave a leetcode problem (I don't), and someone immediately coded the ideal solution effortlessly, which tells me they have seen that problem recently, I'm not going to just be like "yep, hire this person, they're clearly a great engineer!" They're great and/or lucky at test prep, which is not the skill I care about.

Universities aren't trade schools. You go there to learn, not to earn a job.

Maybe in an ideal world.

Not by the way they charge.

If this is your viewpoint, I can only conclude that you're from an elte family born into money.

The rest of us go to uni to get a higher paying job and avoid wage-slavery and/or poverty.

And if this is you, ewww https://gfmsouthwest.org/ Academics, work and "jesus" have no place together.

Tell that to the marketing departments of the universities, policymakers, and students..!

> Universities aren't trade schools. You go there to learn, not to earn a job.

This hasn't been true for probably half a century, possibly longer. The number of people who go to university simply for the learning experience is almost certainly vanishingly small.

If you look, for example, at the completion rates of non-college courses like you'd find on Udemy, etc. It's <10%.

You would also expect audit rates to be much higher for people looking 'just to learn' - auditing classes is typically significantly cheaper than paying full price for the course.

People go to school because they are looking for an edge in their long term earning potential (types of jobs, credentials leading to higher salaries, etc).

It hasn't been true since the job (and education) market adjusted to the GI Bill.

If you want to measure improvement in addition to mastery that is yet another good argument for focusing more on the final scores than in the earlier grades.

One student gets 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100% on a series of four cumulative projects throughout the semester while another student consistently gets 70% on all four.

I would argue that the former likely has greater mastery and certainly has learned more during the semester. If you want to make sure those two things (mastery and learning ability) are measured by the final grade you need to use some method that de-emphasizes the earlier grades.

It’s interesting that you focus on the positive upside of that, when really what you’re saying is you want the student with poorer initial understanding to be punished with poorer grades.

Are you seeking signal and view this change in grading style as noise? Do you really believe this style of grading captures merit? What does the grade represent? What is the point of this exercise for you? Are grades just for deciding which student to give the best spoils to?

If a student is a fast learner and can understand the material more quickly than their classmates for the first test it is reasonable to assume that the same would be true for the final test as well.

In practice I've found that many of the students who are at the top of the bell curve after the first test are the ones who have the most prior familiarity with the subject matter. Whereas the fast learners are typically the ones who are at the top of the curve at the end of the course.

In this context, equally-weighting early grades has a higher probability of penalizing the fast learners than it does of rewarding them.

But the goal isn't to catch up on knowledge that the student should've learned last year. That should've already been addressed through holding the student back, summer school, tutoring, etc. If the teacher has to not only teach this year's material but also reteach last year's, that's not fair the students who need to learn this year's material.

Grading isn't just a feedback mechanism. It also is an incentive. When you say "only the final test matters", then young students (who probably haven't totally grasped long-term planning yet) have not as much reason to care about learning the early material until it's too late.

Measuring IQ has an extremely narrow utility in general, and is rife with problems of measurement, to the point that people struggle to see correlations when we are talking about primary education.

But even disregarding that, it is philosophically problematic to think along these lines. People learn and know things in an absolute plurality of ways, and in ways that can only be measured with very limited means; there is more than one way for someone to skin the cat of learning.

In general, an absolute Platonic ideal of intelligence, which IQ enthusiasts implicitly rely on, is the thing that got us in this mess pedagogically.

I see this sub-thread is getting heated, so maybe it's a good chance to clear our differences in understanding.

First - Are you coming from a system where a student's rank in class is ordered? In that situation, grades are a zero-sum game, where you may be fighting for Valedictorian status. In the US at least, such things have been a farce for at least 20 years, when I graduated we had 13 Salutatorians in a class of 200, what a joke. The weighted GPA is what matters, even if half the student body has a GPA over 3.5. Nobody here cares what your rank was.

Second - As others have stated - the topic is about bringing the lower-graded students up, not bringing the higher-graded students down. Could you explain why you are reframing the topic?

Sounds like an intro CS class. Let's group people who played with this stuff for years with people who are here to get rich and people who have a theoretical aptitude, but never touched it.

I hated this. I literally had every advantage growing up, I'd been seriously programming since I was like 8, I took the CS AP tests on a whim without even taking the class because "eh why not." Then my freshman year I watched some of my classmates get wrecked for no reason other than they made the mistake of not having a decade of real world programming experience under their belt day 1 and all they were taught in class was basically math and pseudocode. I partnered with our CS club on campus and held workshops/hackathons aimed at actual beginners just because it made me so mad.

Shouldn't the course be designed in a way where everything on the exam has been taught in the class?

People with prior knowledge will still have an upper-hand in everything (even beyond school), so I'm not sure that it's even a solvable problem.

I guess perhaps one could give a baseline exam on day 1 to qualify prior knowledge and give a handicap to people if they're coming in blind? Though if I knew that purpose I'd game the system, so it probably still isn't fair.

> A scoring system for scholastic ability that disadvantages those that start off with little knowledge, even when they do well by the end of the course, is ridiculous on its face.

This is one reason I did poorly in school and eventually dropped out. Teachers chose (either independently or by arrangement) to weigh all grades equally, whether they were at the start of the class or the end. So if you did poorly at the start, you might as well give up, you'll never dig yourself out of that hole.

I had such a situation when I first entered college. I came from a disadvantaged background, and was not a good writer. My freshman composition class was taught by a woman who had us write synopses of what I thought of at the time as boring, long-winded New Yorker articles. She ruthlessly hammered me on grammatical errors. I ended up withdrawing from the course.

Then next semester I had a the same class but a different professor. He was much different. He had us write about our life experiences and things that interested us. You would get the grammatical corrections as feedback but you would not get blasted for them. Over that one semester I used the literary handbook I was given, and got a lot better at it. It really helped me. In my future liberal arts classes I had to take, I got good grades on my papers and they were well received.

I was required to take an art course in college, and I chose an intro level graphic design class. I’m terrible at all things art other than photography, but I thought graphic design made sense being a CS major an all.

My experience was terrible. There was no real artistic instruction. For instance, during our first or second week we were told how to use the pen tool in Illustrator and or homework was to make a logo for a made up company. I, having absolutely no art background, did a bad job. She actually projected my work in front of the class and had me stand up in front to be ridiculed. I decided to drop the class.

When I brought her the form to sign all she said was “thank you,” which I very much took to mean “thank you for dropping out of my class.”

Heaven forbid you actually need to do your job, professor.

I am sorry for your experience. Most college level art classes have a pretty strict entrance requirement where portfolios are judged pretty harshly from incoming high school students. Incoming students are basically already required to be good. This instructor was not prepared for you and treated you poorly. Another instructor might have handled it much better.

There should also be some sort of option for "art for non-majors" since they indicated that an art class was required. That's usually the way colleges handle these type of required electives.

I fulfilled my requirements with Art History. No drawing required.

Back when I was in college it was only the math and science classes that offered dubbed down dumb versions to fill the general education requirements.

as a former Graphic Designer turned Dev all I can say is how much a difference a different teacher makes. I had some design teachers who did little else than explain how to use Photoshop and others who you spent all your time and effort on and bled for their approval like some kind of unloving father figure, who at best would just nod and explain how it's acceptable instead of the usually tearing apart with critiques. This was miserable at the time but like some kind of perverse design bootcamp hammered in the fundamentals.

In contrast with your experience, I tried to take a programming class early in college and felt completely alienated by that professor who expected all of us to already know how to code and was visibly and verbally frustrated when I struggled to understand things that were completely new to to me but well known with the rest of the class. It wasn't until nearly 10 years later I finally learned it.

> For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material.

One of my strategies in college was to really study on the first exam. The logic being is it's just introductory material and therefore the easiest exam to make an A on. Subsequent exams tended to get into the nitty gritty and require a lot more information to be understood / retained. This held true on any course. In my experience, this negates the quoted point that people who had little prior knowledge would do poorly early on. Granted I went to college a long time ago. Things may have changed.

> One of my strategies in college was to really study on the first exam

Why did you really have to study if it was so easy? Right, because you didn't know it. For others who came in knowing it, they didn't have to 'really study'. And this still holds true for every successive test.

I feel like that kinda negates your negation.

To speak of specifics, I took calc 1 twice. First time was due to inconsistencies in the teacher's grading, but whatever; the second time I took it, I was very familiar with the concepts, and made an easy A. Others struggled. It's fair to say I should have gotten the A at the end because I knew the material, and it's fair to say the people who got an A on every test (those 'easy' first ones you mention being included) should receive an A, but was it fair to say others, who by the end had the same understanding I and the other A students did, should have gotten a B even if they aced a cumulative final, because they struggled with the concepts initially and did less well on the earlier tests?

> > For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material.

>For others who came in knowing it, they didn't have to 'really study'. And this still holds true for every successive test.

Ya I see your point. The first test was the easiest and the most likely to get an A assuming I didn't know it. Of course if you study for the first test and get an A because it's the easiest and someone who already knows the material doesn't study and gets an A, then one isn't lower than the other.

In other words, this gap only seems to apply if both groups (familiar and unfamiliar) don't study much or at all on the first test.

I failed Physics 101 in my first semester of college because in the first week the professor was covering everything to know about vectors, velocity, acceleration, etc. I never heard the word "vector" before, much less understood what a velocity vector is. Was I to blame for not knowing that? I certainly suffered the consequences, but it seemed like a failure on behalf of the teaching staff and curriculum.

Presumably they thought it was already covered in high school physics/math?

Yes. All college courses, even "100" (intro/freshman) level, have some expectations about what the students already know. Students who don't have that background should take remedial courses or go to junior college or just be prepared to do a lot more outside work on their own.

It should not be a university's job to "fix" unprepared students, whether due to the student's prior indifference to his education, or because that eduction was provided poorly.

Did you raise your hand after a couple of mentions and ask what a velocity vector was? Or go see the professor either right after class, or at their next office hours? Or talk to a TA about this?

Those all seem like appropriate solutions to the problem, whereas your response here, blaming the teaching staff and curriculum, seems to indicate you did not do what you should have.

Kinda off-topic, but as someone with social anxiety and (strongly suspected, but not confirmed yet) ADHD I'm a bit jealous of people for whom raising a hand to ask a question during a lecture or using professor's office hours is just a simple decision away (provided they care enough to actually do that). For me it's mostly like these options didn't exist at all even if I actually wanted to use them, for several reasons. I wonder what could be done there to better accommodate neurodiversive students.

To be fair, a huge difference between school and uni is that at the university you're not just supposed to be taught, but you're also expected to spend some significant effort on researching the topics or catching up on basics by yourself. The ECTS system even lists an approximate amount of hours students are expected to spent entirely on their own for each course.

In my math department many professors said that as long as we can do well on the final, that will be the heaviest-weighted of our grades.

It seems sensible, at least at the college level, to have 90% of the grade depend on the (cumulative!) final.

I guess the one big gotcha is that if you’re having a bad day - you’re sick or couldn’t sleep the night before - that could really affect you negatively.

While we're in the land of hypotheticals, it also seems sensible to plan for a makeup test for people who can't make the main one, and not make it require a signed affidavit from a senator, a doctor, and a notable charity to take that one.

I think this is one of the reasons why a lot of students prefer assessment models that reward 'effort over time' - taking 5 tests over 15 weeks helps reduce the downside of doing badly on a single exam/homework/etc. (Which is not to say that all students prefer this approach, but for those that do prefer it this is a common reason)

Of course, this then leads us back to the problem of assessing people early on in the term before they've had a chance to build up some momentum in their knowledge & learning.

But yeah - there's this sea-saw balancing act between a small number of higher-stakes assessment vs. spreading the assessment out & assessing earlier as well as later when designing assessments in formal education.

It's also extremely anxiety inducing (for some people)

One of my professors (a jolly fellow) joked about us having "street cred" based on our past work. So if we've been reliably good at proofs, when another proof had gaps, he said he'd assume we knew but just went too quickly, but someone with lower "street cred" would just get marks off ;)

When I took my AP World History final, it was over five separate days, with no material overlapping (so you wouldn't get a benefit from seeing previous material). He told me grades more accurately reflected both perceived effort, and the grades from the last semester. (This was his internal final, not the AP test)

Some of my Chem professors would give you the grade of your final exam if it were higher than your grade at that point in time. They figured if you pulled off a better final exam score, then you deserve that as your final grade as it's a cumulative exam. They also mentioned it rarely happens.

I'm pretty sure I had a history professor unofficially do something like this. I got B's on the midterms and needed a 100 on the final to get an A. I knew I did better on the final and couldn't think of a question I missed, but 100 still seemed unlikely. I suspect I got a ~98, and he ran with the logic that if you're demonstrating a very solid understanding of the material on the final and close to a cutoff, you earned the higher grade.

Also, history. No one was getting 98% on my physics or math exams.

That might have just been a standard bell-curve. If you got the best score, you might have been bumped up to 100%.

This was standard in the Chemistry department at my university. It also saved my ass twice.

But how do you measure progress, then? If you are already on the backfoot, don't you want some kind of concrete measurement of how you improve?

Admitted, this would require to use grades slightly differently (not as aggregation towards an end result) and it would require the teachers to repeat tests multiple times. But shouldn't that be how learning is organized?

I think most people can measure progress without grades! For me at least, getting a 90% on a test is usually the same as a 100%. That 10% difference is almost always just silly math errors or simple misunderstanding and not a fundamental issue.

I don't think that most people can do that. In fact, I think only the ones that already understand a topic can realistically give an estimate of the percentage of their understanding. Someone who "got" 25% or 45% of some material will usually not see their progress.

Fair enough! If you don't understand the material it makes sense you wouldn't be able to properly judge how well you're doing.

Thanks for the thoughtful response

I'm going to do the obligatory thing & cite the Dunning-Kruger Effect here :)

Also, from personal experience as someone who's taught computer programming (US college 1st & 2nd year courses - listed as "computer science" but really mostly computer programming): I've seen a _lot_ of people tell me some variation on "My program won't compile, I'm totally stuck, but those are just (implied minor) details - I really do understand what's going on!". Bonus points for when their code indicates that they've missed huge concepts at both the language level ("What do you mean I can't do arrayName = arrayName + 1 in Java?") and/or algorithmic level ("The variable defined by the outer loop of the bubble sort was never used so clearly that loop was useless so I removed it").

Ok, I'll stop ranting :)

My point being that you may be able to measure your own progress but not everyone is.

Plus, certification / credentializing is one of the services that education provides to the the rest of society.

Yeah I see what you're saying! However, for me specifically, I know the mistakes were not fundamental ( Just gotta trust me on this one xD ).

The other comment pointed out that if you fully understand the material its a lot easier to judge your own understanding. Now that someone said that it seems really obvious, but It wasn't something I ever thought about!

Thanks for the insight

I think something like a moving average would be much better.

Historical data without too much emphasis on the past.

Then you can also adjust the way you grade.

Grades are averaged mostly because it is an obvious operation that sort of make sense, but the core issue to me is that what a grade _is_, how it is computed, and how it is then used are all nebulous concepts beyond "higher is better".

unless you are in Germany

She said she gave lots of detailed feedback on all the assignments, and opportunities for revision.

It’s not clear from the article but it seems like students do get a final course grade which is done by students suggesting what grade they feel they deserve and the instructor rarely modifying it if they feel it’s inaccurate. They mentioned they adjust grades up as much as down.

Freshmen year of college, I was part of an experimental program that solved this exact problem.

At the beginning of the semester we were given a large binder filled with competencies we were expected to master. Every question on every test was labeled with a competency that the question assessed. Once you demonstrated knowledge of the competency you no longer needed to demonstrate it again. You marked it as complete in your binder, attached the graded test as evidence, and turned it in to your advisor.

Advanced students could go into the final, answer only the questions that tested competencies they hadn't previously mastered, then turn in their final after just a few minutes of work. Students who struggled early in the semester could rally through the last few tests, ace all the questions, and demonstrate enough of the required competencies to end the semester with a decent grade.

It was an intensely _weird_ way to be graded and required a massive amount of overhead and bookkeeping from both students and faculty. I'm not sure it was a good idea, but I did do much better that year than any of the later years. My freshmen 4.0 sustained my total GPA through some much more difficult times.

That actually sounds like the Diablo 2 skill tree. And that sounds awesome.

If the university did it for all subjects, it would look like Path of Exile's skill graph [1]. In the game, when you graduate to high-level game play, you get a "whole-nuther" graph like the first to start populating.

[1] https://poeskilltree.com/?v=3.17.0#AAAABAMAAA==

The unwritten policy in many math departments is that if you get an A on the final you get an A in the class.

It's explicitly written in basically all of my math classes. Your grade was always the better of your final or your coursework.

I get the perverse incentive of fucking off and taking the final but nobody actually does that, shits hard yo. The game is actually trying to get your grade high enough that if you bomb the final you're still good.

That is an equity issue. Those students who are disadvantaged at the start are often disadvantaged in several ways. And it perpetuates itself: those lower scores will be used to hold the same students back or otherwise decelerate learning, leaving them once again starting off disadvantaged the next term. It also shapes their perception of their ability to advance, and importantly it shapes that perception for their educators and their parents/guardians.

It's worth pointing out that the 'vision' for formal education is that you show up, the teacher teaches you what you need to know, and then the grades are supposed to assess how well you learned the material that the teacher taught you.

I'm not claiming that it always works this way; a long-term transformative process isn't going to be as simple as "show up -> get taught -> git gud". There are substantial and structural issues with how formal education works - for example, it's well known amongst people who study education in the US that the single biggest predictor of your grades is the socio-economic level of your parents.

But please let's not forget the "teaching" part of education :)

Recently someone on here suggested something like taking either the grade on the final test, or the weighted average grade of the coursework, whichever is higher.

That seems like it would work to me.

I do not know about US university customs, but on a university (in Europe) which i attend the only purpose of intermediate grades for a course (if they are used) was to assess whether a student is allowed to go for the final exam of the course, and then only the the grade from the final exam counted.

In my experience at US universities, our course grades were determined by 2-3 midterm exams and a final exam. A common weighting scheme was 3 x 20% for the midterms and 40% for the final exams. Sometimes they had 10% weight for homework, labs, projects. There were some courses where there was a final exam but the rest as projects, papers and presentations.

This is an absolutely ridiculous concept to me, and I'm surprised so many people are taking a positive stance on this article.

Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying. Maybe if this was your only class and you had unlimited time to revise and revise and revise, then this concept would work. It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters.

And it's not like this matches up to life after university any better than grades do. Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop.

The author just seems out of touch. "As for motivation, I asked them, What do you want to learn? Why are you here?" -- this is the same kind of person who asks "so why do you want to work at [minimum wage job]?" as if it has anything to do with the job and nothing to do with needing money (getting good grades).

My final year at uni, my grades didn't matter as I'd already locked down my classification (UK system). So yet not knowing and not caring, I somehow still managed to adequately triage my time across classes. I'm not sure that particular critique carries water with me - if each teacher is designing course objectives with their students, that process should factor in the student's other obligations.

In the US, your final average grade typically (though not always) follows you for your first 1-2 jobs, at least. So it's quite important.

The objective is a high grade, and learning the material is second, due to the system.

And to be clear, the objective in the author's class is also a high grade. They're not living in another system, they're just pretending it doesn't exist until the very end of the term.

And I'm certainly not saying the system or particularly good, but it is the system that they have to work with right now.

I am American, for what it's worth. Similarly in the UK, the best jobs are restricted to 2:1 or 1st Class Honours degrees and there's been a move towards more American style reporting of the average grade received rather than just the classification.

My point is mainly that I don't buy this system would negatively impact one's ability to time manage courses and extracurricular work and activities. And if grades were to suddenly disappear, companies would find other ways to weed out applicants.

| It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters.

That tracks fairly well with most every class I remember.

| Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop.

Sadly that maps pretty well with client work as well. The person getting the work done always thinks it’s the most important thing you’re doing because it is for them.

This is an English class, and the teacher is arguing it allows her to give more specific and useful feedback. This isn't some kind of "everyone gets a trophy" thing and I don't thing any one is advocating for this in the hard sciences.

In this specific case of a writing seminar it makes a lot of sense.

It seems ridiculous, but it’s not.

Grades are an invalidated assessment framework:

1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress) 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit).

I’ll zero in on “track progress” since you mention that. Start with a simple question:

What is progress in learning?

You’ll quickly uncover two things:

* progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion

Here’s another teacher’s view: https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.

Task completion is an important skill, but it is currently being taught at the expense of much more important & valuable skills.

The justification for that is that task completion is hard, difficult for children to learn.

Only it’s not.

It turns out that children generally complete many tasks when they are engaged in an open, iterative learning process. They’ll even generate & complete their own!

Can you name one student who invented homework for themselves after they already knew they are getting an A+?!

“Most likely to succeed” by Harvard professor Tony Wagner is a great introduction to the academic research behind the above.

There really is a better, child-friendly way to learn.

You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the original post: This professor is still living in the bad system you describe. They just pretend it doesn't exist until the very end.

If they were some private school that lived outside of the GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure it'd probably work well. But they don't.

So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured on: GPA.

There are private schools including home schools that live outside the GPA requirement. A few colleges remain that do not grade.

We like GPAs because they reduce evaluation to a summary statistic.

But guess what? GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education.

We fool ourselves and do our children a great disservice by creating artificial ranking mechanisms for the sake of convenience.

> GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education.

These two statements are independant

Yes, that is why they are separate sentences. Some great programmers never went to college!

> 1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress)

So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal anything about retained learning or track progress?

> 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn

No. They create incentives where none exists. The perversion is not the grade, testing, etc. The perversion is the system itself. Where kids are taken from their families to given to stranger to educate in an educational factory.

> 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit).

How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get some sort of feedback ( aka grade ). If you get a C in a test, that should indicate to the parent/student/teacher that the student needs to go over the material.

> * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion

I agree with the former. But task completion is most definitely part of learning.

> Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.

You conveniently left out "learning". Those who optimize getting tasks done and learning and therefore getting good grades. How do you get good grades? By learning the subject matter.

> So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal anything about retained learning or track progress?

Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Many of those getting an A in arithmetics will have learned "how to get an A" instead of "how to practice and use arithmetics".

In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at all levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get the grade instead of how to think. And the actual content is forgotten after a week or a month.

> Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

> Many of those getting an A in arithmetics will have learned "how to get an A" instead of "how to practice and use arithmetics".

That's just a reflection of corruption in the system and not grading itself.

> In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at all levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get the grade instead of how to think.

No school anywhere exists to teach you how to think. But that's besides the point. Does the grade reflect the student's understanding of the material?

> And the actual content is forgotten after a week or a month.

Most content is forgotten regardless of the education system.

So how do kids in romania learn to get good grades? Bribery? That doesn't show that grades are bad, but that the corruption is bad.

> It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

This is objectively false in the US education system at least. If you look at the training for standardized tests (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally necessary if you want to get into a good school) a huge amount of it has nothing to do with the material, and everything to do with how to rapidly exclude incorrect answers. All of that exclusion is based on various numeric tricks or filters with no actual understanding of why. Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time constrained, to the extent that if you do not get training in how to *quickly* answer questions, no amount of understanding the material matters.

How much time do people actually spend on this training? I am dead certain that the bulk of the time is spent on actually learning the material and not on gaming the test. This is because there are only so many tricks you can learn, and you can learn them all in a week.

> (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally necessary if you want to get into a good school

This is objectively false. Source: I went to multiple good schools and met a boatload of people who also got in without said training.

Also, that test-taking training is an overhyped and overpriced collection of cheap common sense strategies. You can learn how to do well on a multiple choice test in 20 seconds. You always pick the most likely answer. Strategies specific to things like the SATs boil down to memorizing vocab and doing a hundred practice tests. You can do this for a hundred bucks by buying a couple test prep books over Amazon. The part of the test-taking training that costs thousands of dollars is where they get a teacher with a fancy degree to babysit unmotivated children into actually doing the work.

> Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time constrained, to the extent that if you do not get training in how to quickly answer questions, no amount of understanding the material matters.

There is actual academic research studying this, and shockingly understanding correlates strongly with being able to quickly answer questions. It's unfortunate that we can't assess millions of children by having them take time-unconstrained oral exams or projects, but the effect of training is grossly overstated. Show me any intervention (other than actually learning the material) that boosts your SAT score by more than ~30 points.

> It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

Goodhart's law makes them become the end. It does not matter if the intended grades to only be a means. If they are what is measured, they will become the end. At least for some.

> That's just a reflection of corruption in the system and not grading itself.

I am not talking about cheating or bribing. I am talking about all ways to pass a test and not retain any knowledge after an hour/day/week/month.

> Most content is forgotten regardless of the education system.

It matters if that content (and especially the existance of that content) is forgotten in a hour to a month or if that content is forgotten in years. The longer the time, the higher the chance you will actually use it. And in many cases, if after years, only the knowledge about the existance of the content is retained, it is enough. You know it exists, so you know how to find it when you need it. But it is entirely possible to pass tests and remember nothing at all a short while after.

When a measure becomes a target, the measure will be optimized at the cost of the actual target if the two diverge. If the measure is close enough to the target that the easiest way to optimize the measure is to optimize the target, then you'll be fine. If the easiest way to get an A in arithmetic is to know arithmetic, then students will learn arithmetic.

There is a reason the previous poster chose arithmetic as an example. It is very difficult to pretend to know arithmetic without knowing arithmetic. Can Romanians add, subtract, multiply, and divide?

Thinking you can keep the two aligned is naive.

There absolutely are ways to learn to pass arithmetic tests without learning to use arithmetic. It all depends on the type of test.

During an oral test, 1-1 with the teacher, is close to impossible to fake knowledge.

But with written tests, there are plenty of ways.

Cheating (rampant, wide spread, by the way) in its various forms (asking a colleague, having a cheat sheet, getting the answers from someone who took the test earlier, etc.) is the most obvious and easy way but let's exclude it.

A student can just memorize the exercises because the teacher didn't bother to create exercises unique to the test and reused them. Or reused them from a previous test.

If it is a single answer multiple choice, a student might simply develop a bullshit detector and learn to spot suspect options. It is a wonderfully useful skill for test taking when the test is not antagonistic and intentionally trying to trip you up.

There are so so so many options.

all of the issues you mentioned pertain to the method of testing. It's pretty well known that you need to have some certain quality in the tests - after all, the result of an experiment is only as good as the design of the experiment, and this is true in a testing context.

But grading via a test isn't a problem here. A good test will show a correct grade, and a student who dont know the material, and cannot cheat, will not get a good grade. This grade is a proxy to the learning that took place - memorization is a part of learning. Of course, there's more to learning than _just_ memorization, such as creativity and problem solving (novel problem solving). These areas are more difficult to test (not impossible), and the metric is difficult to define for these areas, but none of that invalidates the tests that grade a student.

I see your point about the possibility for a student getting an A to have perhaps gamed the system.

Are you saying the same is true for (some of, all of) the C students? Are you saying that C students may in some cases be superior to the students who got As (including the “didn’t game the system” ones)?

First of all, I do not believe cramming for an exam and forgetting everything afterwards is "gaming the system". This is what the system encourages and the system is broken. Cheating might be called "gaming the system", but unfortunately it is equally encouraged by the system.

There are students who will find ways to get a top grade and subsequently retain none of the knowledge.

There are students who will actually learn everything and only bother to get a passing grade because the theatre of school is boring to them.

There are also sudents who will find ways to get a passing grade, without having gained any knowledge at all, and they will be content with that.

It is a mistake to lump any of these categories together. I know people in all of them, and depending on the subject, I was also in all of them.

The affinity a student has for a teacher is a major, maybe even the most important, factor in determining the ammount of motivation and interest a student will show for a certain subject. And I believe this stays true at all levels.

>How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get some sort of feedback ( aka grade ).

Did you not read the article, where the author describes how taking grades off of her own plate allowed her to "[write] meaningful comments, [suggest] improvements, [ask] questions and [enter] into a dialogue with my students that felt more productive – that felt, in short, more like an extension of the classroom."

Strange to assume GP didn’t read the article. I did, and I have these similar questions:

1. How do I, as a student receiving this teacher feedback, know how seriously to take it? How do I know when it indicates I should spend an additional revision cycle on it, versus on another assignment (possibly from another teacher)?

2. Assuming I can figure out how to evaluate severity of the feedback and the relative amount of improvement I should do, how is this better than just a grade letter telling me how much further I can (or should) go?

3. The class still culminates in a letter grade, no? So doesn’t this create a potentially super-high-stakes environment, where I need to be damned sure I understand what the cumulative feedback I’ve received means, in terms of final letter grade?

This honestly reminds me of the phenomenon of doing end-of-year self assessments on a 1-5 scale and having to turn that in to a manager before receiving the “real” 1-5 scale evaluation from them. Massively long feedback loops, massively high stakes and opportunity for misalignment. Why the heck would you not want early and frequent evaluation?

Maybe it would help for me to understand specific examples of the assignment feedback given to students. I just see way too much risk for students to hear “you’re fine; a couple rough spots, but everyone has those, no big deal” only to flunk the class at the end of the year in a massive surprise.

Pretending that there is no place for objective metrics in school is just as silly as pretending there is no place for objective metrics in society at large. Grading may not be the perfect way to measure learning, but it is far superior than no objective metric at all. The fact is that schools exist to instill certain basic minimums of competency. We must have a way to measure whether or not those basic minimums are being met.

>We must have a way to measure whether or not those basic minimums are being met.

The teacher tells them. In written feedback. Far more nuanced and helpful than just a letter grade.

Perhaps you missed the "objective" part of "objective metric". If, for example, we want to determine a student's proficiency in algebra, it is far less useful to compare feedback from teachers with different standards, different abilities and different objectives than it is to compare the results from an objective test that is given to all students in all classes. Unlike standardized tests, teachers (and their assessments) vary wildly. The goals, expectations and abilities of an algebra teacher in Scranton, Ohio may (and often do) vary wildly from the goals, expectations and abilities of an algebra teacher in Juno, Alaska. Take ten different teachers and ask them to write an assessment of the same student, based on the same coursework, and you will get ten wildly different assessments. Teacher assessments may be useful for student feedback, but they are not useful for comparing the relative grasp of course information by different students.

if (as people are claiming here) grades don't accurately measure proficiency, their being objective won't magically make them a better measure.

If grades are utterly uncorrelated with proficiency, then you are correct.

Is that your claim? Grades have zero information content, zero predictive power, over someone’s proficiency at the time the grades are given?

It is an absurd claim on its face. I don't think tests are perfect, nor have I seen anyone make the claim that they are. But, for example, when it comes to measuring the proficiency of different students in different classrooms being taught algebra by different teachers each with their own method and style of evaluation, there is simply no replacement for a standardized test.

> But, for example, when it comes to measuring the proficiency of different students in different classrooms being taught algebra by different teachers each with their own method and style of evaluation, there is simply no replacement for a standardized test.

The problem really isn't tests per se, but the approach of ranking students by their scores and rewarding them or punishing them accordingly.

The goal shouldn't be to stack rank students for some sort of pyramid reward system but rather to help as many students as possible to achieve mastery while preparing them for future success.

A competitive environment with rewards and punishments may work for some students (usually the ones who are on top) but can discourage other students (usually the ones on the bottom) and destroy their interest in learning.

> A competitive environment with rewards and punishments

competition requires that there be something scarce (otherwise, why can't everybody have the thing being competed over?)

So a GPA score is a competition for who gets the "best" college placements, or limited funds from taxation to fund higher education.

Therefore, to solve the problem, it isn't enough to remove GPA scores (or equivalent), because another, more murky metric would be used to compete. The resource being competed for must be expanded, and more of it made available. Sometimes this isn't possible, but i dont think higher education should be a limited resource - it is worth the cost paid since a more educated populous is beneficial to the whole of society.

no, my claim is that if grades are not a good measure of proficiency, it is irrelevant whether they are an objective measure or not. I have not studied the field well enough to know whether they actually are a good measure or not.

For algebra you could create standard "objective" test. Maybe. Though, I can imagine problems with such test too (think: Srinivasa Ramanujan).

For creative writing? I don't think so.

Note, all grading proponents speak about arithmetic, algebra and other such "mechanistic" subjects. Original submission speaks about writing.

To me, it like comparing 100m sprint and Figure Skating. Results at former are precisely measurable. Results at latter is subjective, really.

Colleges, rightly have a minimum GPA to graduate. You can average grades on a 4.0 scale but not written feedback. Employers may use GPA as a metric when hiring. Written feedback can supplement but not replace grades.

Does this invalidate the author's point, given that she still delivers a GPA-compatible grade at the end of the course?

If you’re given letter grades throughout the course, you can easily predict your final grade, by computing an average (perhaps a weighted average, as specified in the course’s grading rules). In this system, you don’t know which grade your collection of vague and fuzzy feedbacks corresponds to until the very end.

> Colleges, rightly have a minimum GPA to graduate.

Brown University does not have this requirement.

Brown does not calculate GPAs, and courses may generally be taken S/NC, though courses must be passed in order to count toward graduation requirements.

The other Ivies have traditional grading systems, but I'm not sure which ones have a minimum GPA requirement per se. Harvard seems to (satisfactory or B-) but Yale seems to require "successful completion" of coursework, though there is a minimum progress requirement (8 or 10 course credits per year) and you can fail out by failing three courses in two or three terms.

> Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying.

Which subjects you should be studying, but not how to improve your work, or specific areas of the subject you should be focusing on. If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B?

I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback.

There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well. For some kids a grade C is great, for other it means they've failed. What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

You talk about your job, and meeting the needs of your client. Does that mean you don't read or listen to feedback from your client? If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about? Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

That's not true, though. What's important in the current system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct correlation).

What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what they'd like them to be.

My undergraduate major was within a college (within a university) in which all of the major classes were portfolio driven and the first year core classes were a mix of portfolio and graded assignments. All of the classes regularly engaged in feedback (daily, weekly, or monthly) and in a group setting as well. Students very quickly learned the criteria for A level work, and depending on the professor or assignment it wasn't always achievable.

An important part of that system is educating students so they can identify for themselves where their work can be improved, and what they can achieve given their current abilities and available resources.

> If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B?

It depends on what the student's goals are? Did the student just take french because it's required or are they taking it because they want to be fluent? All grades do is tell you what your current level is.

> I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback.

You use extremes to justify your conclusion. Many students and parents use grades/feedback to spend more time on a subject, get help, etc.

> There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well.

So what? There will always be cultural and socioeconomic factors. People nowadays use it as a crutch.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

How will they know they've improved without a grade?

>If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about?

For many people, yes.

>Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.

For many others, this is how it works. You are compensated basic on metrics of performance.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

100% agree with this. I don’t see how it’s fundamentally incompatible with grades. If anything, a pre-post grade change, imo, would be the best indicator that they have learned how to improve.

How about this - don’t put limits on the number of times an assignment can be resubmitted. Grade each submission on the same scale. Don’t give the kids the grade right away. Give them the written feedback, talk to them about how they did, ask them if they want to do a resubmit. Once they answer, then reveal the grade. Repeat as many times as the student is motivated to do so.

I love the idea of marrying up evaluation, iteration, objectivity, and not disheartening kids early. The point about iteration and feedback is the best part of the article; I just don’t understand why it requires eliminating graded assignments.

I grew up with A, B, C, D, and F. You always knew where you stood, where you were excelling, where you were going fine, and where you needed to put in extra effort. It was simple and effective.

My daughter’s school uses this ridiculous categorization:

- M: meeting standard

- P: progressing towards standard

- T: needs more time to meet standard

- AC: area of concern

Her “grades” are usually simply all M. Totally useless as a parent. I have no idea what “M” means in terms of her competitive ranking amongst her peers, readiness for AP or advanced courses and/or trajectory for future success in college. Someone who is barely hanging on, but technically “meets the standard” and someone who is a literal genius in the subject will both get “M”. It tells me (and her) nothing.

This is classic example of what happens when system tries to make everyone feel good about themselves no matter where they actually stand. The feedback signal is now so blunt that it is fairly useless. It's like you remove all the grading in compass and how you have no idea which direction you are moving and where you have to go. As a child, grading is what motivated me to work harder and be proud of my achievement. It's the reward you get for putting in the work. It was the reason I gravitated to doing extra work instead of watching TV. This new system basically says you have to do minimal thing and there is no reward or motivation provided for going above and beyond the norms.

The argument that this will somehow help underpriviledged students is so severely misguided. I was in fact the underpriviledged student. The good grades is what allowed others to invest in me and give me opportunities. It was one thing I could own and control. I feel sorry for so many talented hardworking underpriviledged students who will have nothing more to show for than "Meets standards".

How would a letter grade change your understanding of where she ranks? And why is a competitive ranking among her peers important?

And that is perhaps the point. I believe that the intention is that you should not stress about it as long as they are doing fine. And that you should not pass that stress to the child either. The grade is only there to warn you if there is a problem. To get feedback about the areas of performance, you should talk directly to the teacher and receive more than just 3 bits of information.

Even with a much more granular grading system, as long as the grades are assigned based on task completion (correctly solving all the exercises in a test) instead of ranking, you will still have a inability to distinguish anything above top grade.

If you move to a ranking system, where grades are assigned by comparison to peers, you run into issues of fairness, because resource availability inevitably plays a role.

You seem to be implying that there is no value in a student who just barely meets the standard trying any harder or going any further. I hear you about stress. You seem to be saying though that even when stress isn’t an issue, there is no value in that student doing anything further (at that time). Am I mistaken?

Indeed you are mistaken. What I was saying is that grades are not the appropriate tool to motivate students who already meet the standard. You need other approaches for those students in order to keep them engaged. And in those same cases, grades are not the proper measurement tool. There is no distinction between a straight "M" and a straight "A" student in terms of motivation nor measurement. Students who perform should be challenged, given responsibilities relevant to their talents, encouraged to participate in competitions (these are ranked) and various other possibilities. Grades are simply not the tool to use beyond the level of "doing fine".

> Students who perform should be ... encouraged to participate in competitions (these are ranked) ...

> Grades are simply not the tool to use beyond the level of "doing fine".

I am having trouble square rooting these two seemingly opposite claims.

I think you are saying: in a school environment, use grades only to measure degree-below-standard. Outside school, use competitive ranking to measure degree-above-standard.

Close?

Close. Competitions can be organized by schools too.

These may be: competitions inside clubs, competitions between schools, olympiads, events with prises, etc.

The point is that partitipation in the ranked system is OPTIONAL and meant to encourage performance.

Grades are mandatory, are standard based, task completion based and are more a tool to detect issues.

Ranking should not be mandatory because access to resources of all kinds is absolutely a factor influencing performance, and you want to keep the educational environment fair for everyone. Every student should be able to meet the standard using just the resources provided by the system. Those who don't, should repeat the year until they do. Only one student will become a champion.

If a student is not able to meet the standard, it is a signal that a investigation is needed. Are there family issues? Does the student have a propper learning environment? Are they suffering from stress? Is there an issue with regards to comaptibility with the teacher? What can be done to improove the situation?

The same way in a good MMO adventure game you can stick to story mode and enjoy the game, but a some people will go PvP and compete for the rankings. PvP should not be mandatory, especially if microtransactions are used for items that influence the game.

And in real life, some students absolutely benefit from the equivalent of in game microtransactions, and some do not. And this is not likely to change any time soon.

Cool, I totally get it.

How do we stop higher education and employers from setting “competition rank” as the new standard?

Good question.

I believe it already happens, even if not always visibly. Reality is nor fair.

Some people will probably propose legislation in order to maintain equality of opportunity.

I do not know what the solution is.

Note: I am pro standardized tests at certain checkpoints in education. But I am against, focussing on grades in day to day school life, especially in primary and middle school. In high school, I am for frequent tests (so much so that they should not be a stress), but without those tests contributing to some ranking or having an effect at some final score. Frequent tests should be more of a feedback tool.

Sounds good. I’m not sure I know any better solution either.

I really like:

> I am for frequent tests (so much so that they should not be a stress), but without those tests contributing to some ranking or having an effect at some final score. Frequent tests should be more of a feedback tool.

Definitely would work to convey the sense of contwnt mastery to the student, and if done in a no-shame, expect-to-start-bad-and-get-better way, an excellent feedback tool.

Thank you for the dialogue!

“Doing fine” is no longer cutting it. When I was her age, doing fine in school meant you go to community college or a state university and end up in an ok middle class career in an office at best, a tough but secure job at the mill at worst. For her generation, doing just “fine” in school will likely result in a lifetime of struggling—stocking shelves and waitressing—and working class poverty.

The world is quickly bifurcating into haves and have-nots, and there are only a few seats left on the Boat To The Haves. She is in a global competitive slugfest for those seats with the approx. 50 million other kids her age worldwide. None of us like it but that’s the world cutthroat winner-take-most capitalism has left us in.

As a parent, I would expect something as basic as a report card to differentiate “achieving way beyond expectations” from “excelling” from “doing fine”.

What is more meaningful?

A letter grade with no context, or written feedback/commentary on your work? A dialog around improving your work?

Seems like a far superior concept than simple letter grading.

Also as you get better, the need to revise goes down dramatically. Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade.

Meaningful learning - after having dealt with "education" I can see why the concept puzzles you.

> Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade.

Well that's great, but it doesn't help me when I also require the good grade, because the system still works around GPAs.

> At the end of the semester, I do have to give students grades, as required by the university.

> But I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise.

I see here both tracking progress and providing a clear report on the end result of a task. This teacher seems to meet both your requirements, and probably doesn't deserve the disdain of someone that seems to hold the opinion that mindless grade chasing is the way to actually learn things.

More so, there's no indication that the answer "I am here just to get the credits and get some reading done" is unacceptable to the question of "why are you here?".

Why is it ridiculous? Especially for a subjective class like "English"

They aren't saying they're not giving completion feedback, they're saying they aren't giving explicit grades.

They also call out specific problems with the grading approach, and I'm curious what your solution to those problems is?

If grades didn't translate into real life consequences then it would be fine to use them as merely measurements. But they do affect real life, some companies ask for GPA scores, which colleges attended open doors, even car insurance companies give discounts for good GPA.

I had an uncle once joke about "Friends are temporary but GPA is forever" and as I've aged I've found it to be true in a "that's not funny" kind of way.

>After I explained the theory and the method, they peppered me with many of the questions that other ungraders have also faced. “If we ask you, will you tell us what grade we have on a paper?” No, I answered, because I really won’t have put a grade on it. “If we decide halfway through the semester that we’re done revising something, will you grade it then?” No again, because I’m grading an entire portfolio, not individual pieces. “Will you tell me where I stand?” My comments on your work, and our conferences, should give you a good sense of how you’re progressing in the class.

I think the teacher dismisses the concerns too quickly. The reality is that at the end of the semester he will have to put a numerical grade on the report card ... and in this 'ungrading', a unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by 'making up' any grade they feel like and the student has no recourse if they disagree with the grade.

This is the same situation as any in which there are leaders who set rules and followers who have no say. Structure and guidelines protect the followers. It's the same as jobs where there aren't clear guidelines on time off, working remote, etc. Lack of structure is just freedom for leaders to become dictators. When there are clear rules and guidelines, then you're able to point to a violation and demand a solution. It's the whole reason society evolved laws in the first place.

I know this is the idea, but do you know of any practical case where a bureaucracy of rules and guidelines have ever been

(a) actually clear? and

(b) not suffered from the same problems except now encoded in rules that are even more difficult to change?

I mean, this entire thing about the grades is a great case in point: it's a bad system from the start, but it got encoded into rules a long time ago and now it's difficult to change it. You're suggesting adding more rules to fix it, but that just makes it even worse!

There is a middle ground between chaos and full-on bureaucracy and it's "not giving single persons so goddamn much power over other people".

With a healthy dose of democracy, you can collaborate on appropriate procedures without risk of enshrining unfair precedents into firm rules.

Yes, any of my several jobs that had clear rules and guidelines. I know what behavior is unacceptable and I could report a manager or director if I felt the need. I know I'm entitled to X days off a year and I have reason to complain if I'm not able to take that time off. I know how much my salary is and so on and so on. Regular jobs and schools will never be democratic because college students and employees don't have a direct say; at most they can encourage (within what limits their leadership allows) or quit.

If you enjoy being in an unstructured environment, that's great. You would've loved my first job. I hate it. The more rules and bureaucracy a job has, the more I thrive. I don't care about democracy, I care about living my life as simply as possible, and rigid, plentiful rules are my preferred way of living.

Is your salary also determined by a clear function of years of experience? Do you know what your manager makes?

Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of vacation you get was determined? What's the process if you're unhappy with that?

I get that it's very convenient to have fair and clear rules and formulae for everything. What I'm saying is that in practise, that's not actually what happens. What looks like clear rules, once you dig a level deeper, rarely is.

In practise, the rules are almost always limited in their extent, arbitrary, and opaquely decided by the people in power in ways that disadvantage people not in power. Unfair rules are rarely changed or removed but generally just appended with more complex, opaque additional rules.

> Is your salary also determined by a clear function of years of experience?

No, it's determined via negotiation, which is fine by me. If there was a clear function, I'd be even happier.

> Do you know what your manager makes?

No, and I don't care, I just care about making as much as I can get away with and knowing what to expect. If there was some formula, I'd be even happier with that.

> Has anyone explained exactly how the number of days of vacation you get was determined?

No, and I don't care if they rolled a set of dice to determine it, I just want as much as I can get away with, and to know how many I can use. If they

> What's the process if you're unhappy with that?

I suck it up or find another job, which I'm fine with

> What looks like clear rules, once you dig a level deeper, rarely is.

Which of my rules do you think are unclear? I can assure you I take off the time I'm entitled to and my paychecks so far have added up correctly.

> opaquely decided by the people in power in ways that disadvantage people not in power. Unfair rules are rarely changed or removed but generally just appended with more complex, opaque additional rules.

We seem to be discussing different points. In settings like university or work, I don't care how rules are determined, I just want them to exist and be clear. You seem to care a lot about how they're determined, which I literally couldn't care less about.

>I mean, this entire thing about the grades is a great case in point: it's a bad system from the start

Is it though? It's not like it's only used in one country. It's been adopted globally by pretty much every nation on earth. I think the reason for that is that there really isn't any other way to do education at scale.

>There is a middle ground between chaos and full-on bureaucracy and it's "not giving single persons so goddamn much power over other people".

Which is why this 'ungrading' method is so terrible. It gives all the power to the teacher.

>Structure and guidelines protect the followers. When there are clear rules and guidelines, then you're able to point to a violation and demand a solution ... It's the whole reason society evolved laws in the first place.

Exactly. This is a terrible system because it takes away all agency from student to understand by what yardstick they were measured against. The teacher just makes up a grade based on their personal feelings of what this student 'deserves'.

background: I have tried ungrading in engineering courses, it freaks students out and tends to trigger process inappropriate optimization behaviors as opposed to learning orientation shifts...I've had better luck with a middle ground. overall statement of positionality - grades and summative assessment are necessary and important but are unrelated to creating learning, formative feedback is much more affective at creating learning.

exactly. Students are people with lived experiences and expectations that drive how they perceive things. A lot of times things that are 'theoretically' better in education bomb in practice because they conflict with students' emotional/psychological needs, wants, and expectations. There are NORMS and all this does is mess with the norms the faculty can control - but not all the norms. The most important thing he is doing is cleaving formative from summative feedback.

This isn't really a perfect with the underlying principles of ungrading...this isjust ungrading within the controlled climate of the course itself. Thats great, but the problem is his drive towards formative feedback over summative feedback is constrained by outside forces. There is still a grade at the end of the course and that makes it hard. And then add in that if too many students do well you get accused of 'grade inflation' (which is a whole nother ball of nonsense). Students KNOW there will be a grade at the end, to act as if there isn't is just introducing ambiguity not necessarily learning. You can bypass some of the problems with strong trust - but only some. Specific to the comment on rubrics, GOOD rubrics can't really be useful, self and peer evaluation can be useful, using the rubric to provide formative feedback can be useful. Revisions can be ESPECIALLY useful. But you can't truly (ugh...sorry, no true scotsman) within a typical university that demands I assign grades. Anything you do to try will be 'gamed' so the best you can do is make 'gaming the system' and 'learning' as similar as possible.

I would love LOVE to just have all of the classes I teach be taken as pass/fail but they aren't and can't be based on the external systematic rules. I've settled on a tool called 'specifications grading' as a middle ground that basically translates learning behaviors and outcomes into a clear grading system.

<3 this. For technical courses, where work can be objectively right and wrong, specifications grading, aka standards-based grading, aka mastery based grading, is 100% the way to go.

There are some "ungrading" practices that are useful, but the grade earned serves an important credentialing step, and clearly showing students the skills they need to master is the whole dang point.

two notes:

1) I would argue that most questions we are asking students in technical courses shouldn't have right and wrong answers...it communicates the wrong thing and reinforces the assumption that technical work is 'getting the right answer' for students. College level technical teaching should work beyond that norm towards using 'right answers' for decision making

2) While there are similarities and they are often used interchangably, standards based, mastery based, and specifications grading are not exactly the same thing.

1) Fair point. The problem-solving technique is the most important part, but from this physicist's perspective, there is work that is objectively wrong, and there is basically always a limited set of solution approaches and results that I'd consider fully correct. Making the leap from "right answers" to "right thinking for decision making" is the key indicator of the expertise we want to train, and it doesn't happen just by making feedback less clear ;)

2) True! You really have to be careful even within terminologies. There are lots of different implementations of mastery-based grading, for example, and they're subtly different.

And a final note: we're of dangerously similar (but not quite the same) perspectives! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78

Friend?

Yup! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ZUDtaGf3I&t=21s

Your grade in an English Literature class basically comes down to what grade the professor decides to assign you regardless of the grading method. There's no objective determination for what makes a paper an A paper versus a B paper, and plenty of people have stories about getting a C on a paper they thought deserved an A.

Yes, but you've removed the feedback loop that allows a student to adjust their output to accommodate their grader's wishes.

Not really; there is a literal feedback loop with the teacher writing comments/critiques, and the student responding to them.

What is removed is the ability to say "this is good enough, I am meeting expectations, and am confident in staying the class" vs "I am not able to meet expectations and should instead drop it with a W instead of risking my GPA". That said, I think as a student if I'd had a teacher engage with me this way it would present enough of an opportunity to build trust that I'd be able to get a feeling as to whether they were invested in me improving my work, and use that to determine if I should stay in the class or not.

>there is a literal feedback loop with the teacher writing comments/critiques

Sure - but words are ambiguous. Does the feedback mean I'm struggling, or is the feedback meant to elevate my already excellent work?

Here's any idea, why not give a grade AND feedback. This way I, as a student, know objectively how I did, and what I need to do to get better.

We had a teacher in high school that was universally accepted as being sexist. I took "Honor's English" (basically "hard" English for more intelligent students) with her in 9th grade. There were 3 of us boys in her class of ~20 or so, and we were all on the high IQ end of the scale and good students. The girls were a mixed bag, including some that definitely shouldn't have been in the "honor's" class.

They all got As and Bs. I pulled in the only Cs of my scholastic career. One of the guys got the exact same grade to the second decimal place on 4 papers in a row.

My personal highlights were getting told my Polyphemus' cave diorama (boy, what a good use of time!) wasn't colorful enough, along with the time she accused me of plagiarism in front of the class in the middle of my book report because of the vocabulary I used.

The sexism was so bad that the daughter of another teacher actually left mid-class to complain to the principal about it. Nothing was done.

The Honors Algebra II class at the HS my sister went to was the same way but it was girls rather than boys that she treated more harshly. Girls would drop out of the honors track to avoid her class. Math class might provide fewer opportunities for subjectivity to creep in, but it still provides plenty. My sister's homework was "lost" several times, and she was falsely accused by the teacher of skipping class (3 unexcused absences in a quarter was an automatic F).

The response by the administration any time complaints were made were "We don't comment on any teacher's methods, but some of our best students come out of her classes." Given that honor students went into her classes, it would be rather troubling if that weren't the case...

Unless I'm mistaken there's no indication in TFA on the topic this person teaches, which is very important in my opinion, because grading a science-related work is indeed very different from grading literature-related stuff.

Both teachers and students sometimes forget that grading is not a "judgment", but an evaluation of how much of the knowledge/know-how they are supposed to have by graduation, have been learned. To the point that sometimes you can get a "F for bad behavior". No wonder students are confused when you use different meanings of sanction with the tool.

FTA: "Some took my children’s literature class because they thought it would be a fun or easy way to fulfill the requirement."

Indeed; I was a somewhat ... ill-behaved student, and it was interesting to see how different teachers reacted to it. It always crept in a bit. One teacher I never got above a C on an assignment, so I swapped papers with someone who never got below a B. The paper with my name on it (which he wrote) got a D+, the paper with his name on t (which I wrote) got an A.

The most blatant was when an instructor told me to my face that no matter what work I did, the highest grade I was getting in her class would be a D. The class required a C to fulfill my graduation requirements. This was about a month into a 16 week semester. In retrospect she was probably trying to get me to drop her class, but I didn't consider that at the time (It was my very first semester of college and it hadn't yet occurred to me that dropping a class was an option).

Sure - but at least this is on a paper-by-paper basis, so your final mark is at least based on something tangible that you can refer back to. It also means you can instant feedback on how you're doing. Here, we're talking about providing an arbitrary grade at the end. The student has no recourse to argue the grade. The student may even have been blindsided.

> a unscrupulous teacher could punish or reward a student by 'making up' any grade they feel like and the student has no recourse if they disagree with the grade

Surely the second assessor would catch that though? Or the external examiner's spot-checking?

You want multiple teachers (completely disconnected from the actual class) to catch those issues? Isn't the point of this 'ungrading' policy to take in student context - which this second reviewer system completely upends.

I still don't understand why grading assignments and giving that (instant) feedback to students is so bad.

The thing that really spins my head about this, is that since you never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the goals you need to meet, this system forces you into over-committing to the course. You can always go back and revise that essay one more time, and you need that A in the course for your GPA etc. Students have a limited amount of time to dedicate to their work, and giving them clear feedback when they've met that target means they can focus the rest of their time on other things - whether that's other classes or simply having more social time so they can be well rounded humans.

If you look at the 3 reasons the author did this - 1, the students don't pay attention to the feedback, that is easily solved, you hand them the feedback and hold back the grade for 1 week. - 2, they don't like grading students based on their incoming skills? That's easy to solve, you weight their grades by time in the course. Hell, you can grade their first 3 peices of work and not use them at all in the final grade. - 3, You don't like grading. Well that's fine, but the cost of doing this is that you're taking away the single most important indicator that the student is meeting expectations in your class.

Some students will cruise through, seeing the feedback comments, assuming it's good enough, only to come to the end of your course with a lower grade than expected. Their first concrete indication that they're not on track is when it's too late. Some students will submit work and then continually revise it, continually under the threat that they won't get that perfect grade they need for the next step in their career seriously impacting all the other things that are expected of them.

> this system forces you into over-committing to the course.

This is a good point! This is why I always say getting a 4.0 doesn't mean you understand the material more than the person with a 3.8 but means you put more time into the class. Getting 4.0's is less about understanding the material and more about jumping through the teachers hoops and doing everything you can to get every small bit of credit. I've spent ~2 hours to get a few extra points on one small assignment just because you cannot miss a single thing if you want a 4.0. Did that extra 2 hours give me a great understanding of the material proportional to the time spent? No, not at all!

> never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the goals you need to meet

… but you do get concrete feedback. What more concrete, detailed, specific feedback could there be than comments on what's good and where you need to improve in your work?

Meet all the goals you need to meet, and the teacher's comments will reflect that. Fall short of the goals, and the comments will show you where and how to improve.

See also the passages in the post about students who are there to get the grade more than to learn the material. One approach is about meeting someone else's goals, while the other is perhaps more about meeting your own goals for yourself.

Feedback about what you can improve doesn't necessarily provide you any feedback about how well you are meeting expectations. This is especially true of writing and other work that doesn't have a right or wrong answer. There are always ways to improve, there are always other aspects to consider. As a teacher, the author likely delights in finding students that are gifted, and finding ways to develop them even further, so she will always have some feedback to provide.

Also, there is nothing wrong with a student simply wanting to learn material well enough to get a decent grade. All students have to take classes that go beyond their interests or even needs; it should be their choice as to which classes they want to be merely competent at and which they want to master.

How are you supposed to know whether a comment is “this is a standard good for a B, improve for an A” or it’s a “this is good enough for a C, improve for a B”.

Grades don’t prevent students who are there to learn the material, but they do harm students there to get the grade, and since the corses we are talking about are prerequisites to graduate it’s reasonable to expert at least some people to be there for the grade.

I don't know if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you, but I once got a paper back graded 56/100. The only written comment on it was "Good job! Almost an A paper"

I guess assigning or not assigning a grade doesn't matter if the teacher can't provide constructive feedback.

It matters in that the 56 is what's going on your transcript and the feedback isn't.

“ The thing that really spins my head about this, is that since you never get concrete feedback on whether you're meeting the goals you need to meet, this system forces you into over-committing to the course.”

I think this is a problem in educaion in the N. America. What are these “goals” that your are potentially “overcommitting” to?

Nothing you produce in undergrad is of any value except to advance your knowledge. The grade isn't the teacher’s payment for good work, its an assessment of how well you’ve mastered the topic.

Seen this way, you know how well you’ve mastered a subject even if you get nothing back.

> Nothing you produce in undergrad is of any value except to advance your knowledge.

Tell that to the job recruiters that require a 3.6 minimum GPA and verbally berate someone for wasting their time for handing them a resume with a 3.5 GPA on it.

Okay most recruiters won't verbally berate you[1], but GPA is regularly used to winnow resumes for college graduates.

1: The one time I witnessed this was at a college job fair. To this day it was the most unprofessional public behavior I have witnessed by a recruiter; he had 3 coworkers next to him at the booth and they seemed neither perturbed nor surprised. As long as I have the luxury of choosing who I work for I will not work for that company.

Well thats the decay, aint it?

GPA is a great predictor of ones ability to work hard, finish the stated goals, etc. Basically its great at predicting a good busy bee.

But I think its perhaps poor at predicting orthogonal people; people that will create things that weren't envisioned by those who built the thought tracks.

Some thoughts:

1. A company that treats you with disdain for a 3.5 is not a company to work for. 2. GPA inflation is real. In a healthy education system no company could hope to attract only >3.5 GPA hires.

Let's look at how this works in real life. How do you know you have, e.g., implemented a feature in a way that helps the business?

Is your product manager saying, "I give this implementation a C" the point where you go, "whew, I met the goals I needed to meet!" and then you move on to the next feature?

Does that sound like a helpful, healthy interaction?

Does it teach you anything about your users?

When I work on a feature, I collaborate with other developers, product people, and occasionally customers to try to figure out what problems they need solved, and where my work can efficiently fit into that. It's a dynamic, nuanced discussion with no clear right or wrong answer.

That's what we need to teach our children.

The obsession in school with getting the "right" answer stymies critical thinking, exploration, and, well, learning -- which can only happen when you get things wrong and figure out why on your own.

That is absolutely how performance management works in every large corporation. You set "SMART" goals, and then you periodically review how you're progressing to those goals.

You have a point that in life sometimes, particularly in creative tasks, goals are unclear. But goals aren't unclear in a college class that hundreds of students take per year. In fact the goals generally should be listed on a website before you even apply for the course.

No clear right or wrong answer, sure.

But do you not take any sort of measure both before and after the feature launch to evaluate what effect it had? How much “more right” (or not) you got?

How do you know that all the talk with the customers led to a feature that made a difference?

Of course! "How do I know I'm successful?" is one of the most important questions one can ask of oneself at work. And one students should ask themselves, too.

The current grading system teaches people not to ask this. That's a problem.

> The current grading system teaches people not to ask this.

I would love to see your evidence to back this claim.

> Of course!

Can you tell me a little bit more about the pre and post measures you used? Were they numerical? Were they based on observable facts? Did they give you a sense of how close to (or far from) your goal you landed?

Pink's Drive cites some studies on grading as extrinsic motivation, and one of the Kahneman books touched on it too, but I don't remember if it was the bias or noise one.

How I measure success (or recognise failure, at least) varies between problems. Sometimes quantitative, sometimes qualitative. Sometimes based on theory and process, sometimes based on observation and outcome.

I rarely, however, find it meaningful to know "how close to the goal I landed" because that generally says more about the goal than the outcome.

Regarding the research - thanks! I do like Dan Pink. Kahneman is still on my to-read list.

So the assertion is that, if grades act as an extrinsic motivator, they replace passion/pride/curiousity as intrinsic motivators? That argument vaguely makes sense to me but personally it feels like more of a “both and”.

As for your approach to measuring success - no offense, but it sounds like the sort of vague, feel-good, don’t-fret-it sort of goal-setting that techniques like SMART goals, KPIs, and OKRs are intended to supercede. Do you do anything like those?

I homeschool my children, and I don't grade their work. Instead, I use the errors they make to guide my teaching; what they can't do successfully obviously needs more of my attention and theirs.

What's interesting is the difference that makes in what feels like an accomplishment to them. Whereas I would be proud, in the public schools, to have the highest test score, my kids are proudest when they manage to excel after failing. If they excel the first time around, their response is, "Well, okay, but that section was easy."

I think that's a more beneficial attitude to carry into their futures.

You are you are absolutely right that this will be a more beneficial attitude to carry into their futures because it is exactly what has allowed me to succeed, but only after unlearning some terrible internalized anxiety about failure caused by being told I was smart.

Please keep it up. I hope I run into your kids in the workplace and they are running circles around me with their productivity and goal setting.

I think this would be the best way to teach, but it doesn't seem practical with the class sizes in most school. I frequently had 40 people in my classes and I know other schools in my district had similar class sizes.

I completely agree. Classroom teaching is a far more difficult and limiting situation, and I don't mean to imply that what I can do with my three kids can be extended to a classroom of thirty in a school of hundreds — though in many ways I wish it could.

Grades are some of the dumbest things in modern education. Besides the reasons listed in TFA, they suffer from several other problems:

- They are generally highly subjective and really measure how well the student manages to say what the teacher wants to hear.

- The above leads to a further problem: they discourage critical thinking, by rewarding students that don't even attempt to step out of line.

- On the subject of stepping out of line, how does one learn, again? Oh, right, by trying difficult things and failing at them. Grades discourage this.

- Grades further emphasise a strict hierarchy of authority that is an outdated way to organise thinking. (Some schools are improving this by allowing students to grade teachers, but I'm not sure adding more bureaucracy is worth it.)

- External motivation (bonuses, grades, gold stars, ranking) etc. generally leads to short bursts of effort but are surprisingly bad motivators for continual effort.

- External motivators like grades often lead to competitive behaviour as well, rather than collaborative. We need less competition and more collaboration in society and particularly in the workplace. (Though this is bordering on another criticism of how education is set up: why in the hell would it be considered cheating to collaborate?!)

- All of the above was great when we needed to "educate" non-thinking factory workers for whom showing up and obeying is the number one priority. We know better by now, and our schools ought to reflect that.

And, perhaps most critically,

Grades are generally just statistical noise. Yes, there are some three-sigma outliers who are consistently better or worse than the group, and these deserve special attention -- but productive attention, not just letter grades!

For the vast majority of students, there is little to no signal in the grades. The grades people get are generally better attributed to the abilities of the teacher than the students.

As Deming would say, grades (like "employee of the month" type things) are a pure lottery disguised as merit, which is an awful thing to subject humans to.

----

If I were a teacher, I would do what Deming did: give everyone a passing grade on sight.

Then I would randomly sample assignments to see what the general quality of them is. If someone is performing significantly worse or better than the group, that requires a root cause analysis to see what's up.

If the entire group is performing worse than desired, that's not the student's faults, but mine. So then I'd root cause myself.

----

My children are not yet of school age, but I sincerely hope I can strike a deal with their teachers about grades when it's time for that. I feel awful thinking about the fact that I might have to subject them to grading. Not because they are special snowflakes, but because it kills the human spirit.

Does anybody have any background on why US Universities seem to universally focus on continuous summative assessment rather than formative assessment followed by summative assessment at the conclusion of a course?

Surely the knowledge a student can demonstrate at the end of the course is what they should be measured on?

The only justification I can think of is some patronising attempt to force attendance.

Here in the UK there are courses I went to because I wanted to learn about the subject but chose not to answer questions on in the exam because I couldn't quite get a solid grip on. And there are courses I didn't intend to master that I ended up realising I was more suited to so revised/studied to a high standard for the exam.

Why should I be forced to learn in a very specific way if I can reach the same level of knowledge in my preferred learning style?

In the schools I've attended it was mostly because they didn't want to weigh final exams too heavily (due to test anxiety), and putting too much weight on a final project doesn't scale well when every class you are taking does so - too much crunch time. Over the past few decades most have moved to allowing you to drop your N lowest homework scores which helps a lot with students entering the course with varying preparedness levels.

I've experienced both styles (studied abroad from the US to the UK) and the final exam counting as everything in the course tended to encourage cramming and a lack of learning during the rest of the course.

Learning happens well when you are able to revisit and review content over time (see Anki repetition patterns). Most people need some structure to help them with this! Some people do not, and for those people they will be annoyed but will still learn the material over time! So this is sort of a lowest-common-denominator situation I think.

If everything is contingent on a final exam you find a lot of folks fail. You need the continuous feedback. That doesn't mean you have to grade assignments, but rather provide that feedback..

Having some sort of regular feedback keeps students focused on whats happening in class and gives feedback to the educator if they need to do a better job explaining something in the next lecture. A lot of students have a bad time pacing out their studies or keeping up with lectures on their own, as if they have nothing in the near term to study for they just won't bother to spend time on that class over others with more pressing deadlines. Then when its deadline time and shit is hitting the fan, then they will flood the inboxes and office hours asking things that could have been clarified weeks ago when the topics were covered in class.

Having assignments broken out in regular intervals is pedantic, but there's often not really a better way to get these sorts of students engaged without a threat to their GPA basically.

I have taken classes that combine both. Work during the course count as points on the final exam and/or let you skip parts of the final exam.

I think it's because different people have different learning styles.

> Does anybody have any background on why US Universities seem to universally focus on continuous summative assessment rather than formative assessment followed by summative assessment at the conclusion of a course?

Because a single summative assessment is worse?

Honestly, a single 3 hour exam is a horrible way to assess your mastery of practially any material.

There are few "good" ways to assess large classes of students for mastery. Small classess of students have a lot more flexibility. However, you can also get the problem that if the professor simply doesn't like you, you have no recourse--hopefully that class wasn't a requirement for your major.

I have been on both sides of this argument (lecturer and student). I had a Computer Arithmetic and an Analog Filters classes that were ferocious about grading--you had to be 100% correct or you got zero. That is really rough--if you blew an exam you dropped.

When lecturing in CS, I tended to be a little different--exams got a lot of partial credit, homework got some partial credit, but the 5 or 6 projects were 100% or nothing. Of course, the difference there was that I had automated testing running and you could resubmit your project as often as you wanted over about 2 weeks.

This was probably the best compromise I've come up with. It drives the students without pounding them, and it limits the destruction if you're just kind of "off" on a day when there is an exam.

This sounds good in some niche cases, like an English class with a small class size and a highly experienced teacher. However of all the potential fads in higher education this one seems particularly risky to students. In the end the grade is given based on how the prof feels about you, and if they agree with your self assessment. Which can be easily gamed (e.g. student pretends to be a bad writer at first and has a seemingly miraculous transformation) and is subjective. The assessment will also be tainted by one's individual biases, by definition. Whether you agree or disagree about the importance of diversity equity and inclusion in higher ed, one useful principle of that movement is that of clearly defined evaluation, precisely to avoid effects of personal bias.

I've had courses that allow your grade on the final to replace your overall grade, if it ends up being higher.

This sounds like a fair compromise to me, if you know the material by the end of the course, then you've earned a good grade, regardless of how long it took you to get there.

At least in my experience, if the teacher wasn't grading at all the students would quickly pick up on it. It's easier to write a C paper than an A paper, and we would definitely have taken advantage of this. This was in a STEM major though where the majority of us are just looking to get the piece of paper that we can exchange for a 100k+ a year job, and not really looking to learn.

I love what this prof is doing. I suggested it here in the UK [1] and was met mostly with terrified laughter. Wonder how he gets away with such a progressive stance?

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/fear-zombie-stud...

I think it's a good idea, you just have to be really careful with:

> “Will you tell me where I stand?” My comments on your work, and our conferences, should give you a good sense of how you’re progressing in the class.

As an undergraduate student I had the experience of thinking I was doing just fine for an entire term (and to a lesser extent an entire year), only to find out at the end that I was doing so badly my professors actually wanted me to drop out of my course (despite my exam grades being ok-ish passing grades).

I'm sure they thought they were communicating clearly, but they weren't. It probably didn't help that I spent my entire school career having teachers tell me I needed to put more effort into my homework only to get straight-A's in my exams. So similar messages in university didn't seem like a big deal.

> I suggested it here in the UK and was met mostly with terrified laughter.

I read your article and I honestly couldn't tell whether it was serious, or whether it was some swiftian "why are we even bothering to give exams if it's impossible to fail? we might as well just graduate everyone on day 1 of term 1" which was actually calling for higher admission standards and fewer resits.

> I read your article and I honestly couldn't tell whether it was serious

Thanks for reading. It was indeed serious, though the concern was more about what I think is a financial abuse of students when they are recycled round and round a system that keeps giving them one more chance in order to take more money from them.

The rest is an attempt to ponder solutions, and I kind of have to offer lots of angles for the piece to fit well with the publication.

One of those, as you say, is that we offer a basic "pass" certificate just for completing the course. That's in keeping with student's expectations these days, since we commodified higher education and made degrees a "product", students expect to get something for their money even without effort.

That's not an argument against meritocracy, because good students could still get a better degree grade if they want.

Anyway just one idea to stop them being held hostage in a sunk-cost trap. And yes, another is to raise admission standards to a level where almost nobody who got in could fail, which is what some European institutions do.

> though the concern was more about what I think is a financial abuse of students when they are recycled round and round a system that keeps giving them one more chance in order to take more money from them.

Aside from changes in the fee structure, I would suggest that the better solution here is to let students retake individual modules without having to redo an entire year. This is something that most European institutions allow, and has the bonus that it is likely more accurate in terms of assessing a student's actual level than the current system.

Removing grades might be the best thing for teachers, is probably the best thing for students, but is very challenging for one specific reason unmentioned in this article.

School is competitive and bureaucratic. The best classrooms/schools have less seats than students that want to be in the classroom. Grades are a valuable tool for matching students to classrooms.

I agree with everything right up until "valuable". That grades would be better than outright sortition (lottery) is a very strong statement and I don't think it's true.

I get it.

Going to an Ivy League school in the '00s... everyone got As.

This made grading BS.

Employers just wanted to know that you had "at least a 3.0" and you parents just wanted to know that you weren't failing out. And the hyper-inflated grades I received from my expensive elitist school ensured I wouldn't hit issues. But... totally true, grates "are demotivating, they don’t actually measure learning and they increase students’ stress."

The moment you introduce grading, you introduce ways to game it.

Now look, the long standing joke for schools that don't grade, "I got a Pineapple in Underwater-Basket-Weaving-and-Thermo-Gender-Dynanics!" But yeah, so what if you get a Pineapple as long as you learned something? That spark of a desire to learn more is really what I want to see in anyone, and I don't know how to measure that.

In most schools, it seems like getting good grades is just an act of subservience. "Yes, Professor! I gave up my weekends to do 3x 'extra credit' assignments, and I washed your dog and dusted the erasers!" Oof... not really the qualities I want to hire for a leadership position. Not unless I wanted a bunch of Yes Men.

Seems like it should be on the interviewer to determine if you're any good at what you do, not rely on some arbitrary metric when hiring you. (And a lot of states are "right to work" so it's not like they don't know how to fire someone if they don't work out.)

I'm all for abolishing grades in university classes. Just probably need some sort of standardized test at the end to say, "Yes, you know 85% what you should as a History Major..." And... that opens up a whole other can of worms. Oof.

There's no great solution, but look I get that grades suck.

The best applicant for a job has a portfolio of work samples including projects.

It always puzzled me why you got multiple grades in any particular class. I always thought that the object of a class was to master some body of subject matter. If that’s the case, then the most obvious objective way to rate students is a single grade on a final examination. I realize that most people don’t like this because it puts too much emphasis and stress on a single event, but it measures your mastery of the subject.

You could adopt such a system and maintain the general current pattern of education by changing the grading of projects and tests (before the final) to be diagnostic in nature. By this, I mean that instead of assigning a letter grade, The instructor should map individual questions and project feedback to a rubric for the class.

In this way both you and the instructor can see the areas of the rubric that you have mastered in the areas where you still need work. Great instructors could even use that to tailor future work individually to the student to maximize their mastery of the rubric.

This even lends itself to standardization. For example, instead of an instructor designed or department designed final exam, you could use some form of standardized test. Just like industry has certifications, professional societies and other organizations could develop exams to demonstrate mastery of a body of knowledge, and these could be administered instead of an institutional exam.

Further, with this methodology we are emphasizing the outcome, not the process. Now, you can objectively measure how well specific institutions or even instructors prepare their students for these exams. And if the rubric for the body of knowledge that the exam tests, is public, then one can learn on their own and can demonstrate mastery of the body of knowledge just by taking the exam. Or, by taking the class online, or preparing using test prep books and sample tests, etc.

Further, if someone developed curricula to specify which bodies of knowledge are required for a particular degree, then conceivably one could have degrees without universities. To prove you have the degree, you would simply need to provide evidence that you passed each of the exams for each of the bodies of knowledge in the degree requirement.

I know this is a weird thought, and there are lots of problems with standardized testing, but this would be a way to end the financial tyranny of the current university system, at least in the United States.

In high school in Italy (at least where I was from) your final grade was basically decided based on the teacher’s belief of how well you mastered the class.

For example:

In Latin class (chronologically) I had a 6, a bunch of 5s, and a couple of 4s. Finally I put a bunch of effort and got a couple of 7s in an oral and a written exam.

Pass was a 6, and the teacher gave me a 6. A 6 was really where I stood in the class (I had learned the subject by the time I got the 7s). My average, though, was a 5 something - a fail.

The system is open for abuse, but I always thought it made more sense than “earning” points towards an A. For starters the material can be made much more difficult since the kids wont blow their final grade in the first few months. I always liked classes with weighty exams.

The issue about equity and early poor performance dragging down the grade even when by end of course mastery the material has been known for years.

The solution is to weigh work from the end of the course to be worth more, to have some assignments early in the course where you drop the two lowest score ones, or similar. Not to just stop grading.

This way you can give critical feedback and establish the framework for evaluation without ruining any GPAs. It also protects the students because the instructor is behold to the framework, the students ca. appeal to higher authorities that the framework is unfair/flawed, etc.

"As for motivation, I asked them, What do you want to learn? Why are you here?"

This is probably the most important statement in that article.

How many of us do not seriously look at our motivations for what we, and other, do?

Imagine if they no longer gave you money for your current job. How many of you would still do work where you do or do the job you do?

I agree that we could collectively be more mindful about why we're doing things and what we're getting out of them, but this seems like a strange example to emphasize the point.

Do many people claim that they're intrinsically motivated to do their jobs independent of compensation?

My answer to "would you still do the job you do if they no longer gave you money for it?" has been an emphatic NO for every day of my working life and I assumed that was the common perspective.

Making another observation on this - this is actually how the corporate world works - so might as well get used to it. You submit a self assessment -- and fairly or not -- your manager adjusts it to what they perceive. Might as well get started on understanding how to play and master that game.

The entire point of school was for me to experiment and learn and make mistakes. But when am I supposed to do that when literally everything and anything is graded?

Human brains don't go at "oh but look at the weight of this one lab" they go "fuck I got a C, I'm pathetic and shouldn't be here".

At most the grading should be "attempted something" vs "did literally nothing". And even that is useless imo.

But yeah I didn't feel like I'm studying to learn and get better in school. I felt like I have a limited amount of time and I'm gonna have to just do what I can do increase my grades.

I hate higher education. This is just one of the reasons.

If a student is evaluated on individual growth relative to their potential rather than an (imperfect) objective scale of mastery of a topic, this requires the teacher to have a comprehensive understanding of the student's potential. This seems like a wide-open opportunity to subject the student to the biases of the evaluator.

In the US public university system, students (and their parents) are increasingly taking the mentality of a customer that is owed a grade. Throwing out objective evaluation knocks out the one remaining leg instructors have to stand on against this entitlement, and defend against accusations of bias.

This 1000%.

Not only would this effectively turn the class into a 100% final, there is also no chain of evidence to support a grade at all.

We already see parents of university students coming to defend their children's grades. It is already hard enough for professors at private schools to defend incremental assignment grades from the melding of helicopter parents with high placed friends.

This would make it impossible.

Yup. I get as close to this as reasonably possible. For most of my classes the biggest grade is an ongoing project that you get multiple submissions for.

Where it's something "basic" like first year web design, I'm a huge fan of specs grading (and surprised that people take advantage of it) -- like

You get a 50% if there's a file on the server with the name "index.html."

You get a 60% if there is valid HTML on it...

on up to

You get a 100% if you have a fully responsive page with css and javascript that views differently on phones etc.

(and many people are fine with the 80 or 90 level)

The toxicity on this site still amazes me. We have people here claiming, "It's only English, would never fly with engineering." How horrendously dismissive and arrogant an attitude. As if engineering is some god-like holy discipline that sorts the "real" students from the "fake" ones. This professor makes many valid points, and I think it would be entirely applicable to engineering. It's like you never analyzed an op-amp? That is a scalable demonstration of knowledge, that can be critiqued and revised.

Circuit design is more an art than a science, that's why two of the most popular non-textbooks on the topic are called:

"Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities" - Williams

"The Art of Electronics" - Horowitz and Hill

Get over yourselves.

EDIT: If you read these two books, they focus on the highly subjective nature of analog design, and how multiple designs can still meet the design criteria, but have a certain elegance about them that is an expressive quality of personality. The same could be said about source code, in that an experienced programmer can deliver creative alternatives to the most naive solution that solves the problem. Sure, it is important to learn that 1+1=2 (or 11, depending on '+'), but the same can be said of English, where spelling and grammar matter, and mistakes can be just as deadly as Metric vs Imperial.

To some degree, but I think a lot of more objective fields like natural sciences and engineering like to exaggerate the "artiness" of their work because they don't want to come across as uncreative robots just as the more subjective subjects like to exaggerate the "science" of their fields (even often naming their field <name> science which is a bit like how communist dictatorships liked to call themselves "democratic republics").

That's still a judgemental statement but has not nothing to do with the fundamental complaint: that learning isn't about ranking and rating to multiple decimal places, and that Language curricula isn't somehow inferior to Engineering.

I'm not sure about that. Questions like "Given the following problem description, write out a solution" is not in any sense more objective than the humanities. The fact that STEM professors are less likely to ask that type of question on an exam does not change the artiness of the field.

Indeed.

In my most challenging and valuable CS classes, the ones I think about still to this day, the grades were practically irrelevant. We spent most of our time looking over our solutions, talking about why one person did it one way and another person did it another way. We could tell when a solution was efficient or elegant, and when a solution was awkward or clumsy. And we all learned from it.

We never compared each other's grades. Honestly, I have no idea what anyone else's grade ever was. And today I have no idea what my own grades ever were. But when our project was up on the screen for the whole class to see, we knew right away where we stood relative to our peers. And that is every bit as true today in my work as it was back then.

"Un-grading" strikes me as better preparation for being a real-world contributor and, dare I say, leader, than grades.

Peehaps your argument is about how engineering should be taught, and everyone is saying how it is taught as black-and-white answers.

I studied Electronic Engineering, and I would say 95% of the questions in my exams had a correct answer, with zero subjectivity. It was decades ago in NZ so maybe things have improved?

> 95% of the questions in my exams had a correct answer,

Of course. There's only one answer to 9 = 3x (at the undergrad level).

Just like there's only one way to spell "correct".

English has "correct answers" too.

> with zero subjectivity.

Really? Wow, that's impressive. I don't understand how that is even possible.

I can think of 10 different ways to implement a linked list. Which one is correct?

I can think of 10 different ways to build a single-transistor amplifier that meet frequency and gain specifications, which one is correct?

And that's just two examples off the top of my head of applied knowledge that are absolutely subjective.

Want more?

Grades give students a way to calibrate their performance relative to peers. For some this is demotivating, for others it's motivating. Competitiveness is not inherently bad, and many people can't thrive in an environment where only effort counts and everyone gets the same participation trophy.

Detailed feedback is a separate issue and is not an alternative to grading, but complementary to it. All writing can be improved in some way, and the teacher should give tips to each student in how to get to the next level. The best kid in class may saturate the grading scheme, but should still be told how to improve relative to themselves.

Maybe English as a subject is too subjective for numerical grading, but the problem with text-only evaluation is that it's not clear and can be misinterpreted by students and parents.

In Hungary, we had some years when the first few years in primary school were grade-free, with only free-text evaluation sent to parents, in order not to discourage low-achieving kids. Parents found it very difficult to interpret or conclude anything, though, like "okay, but what does that actually mean?" Eventually, most teachers converged on using certain turns of phrase which constituted a pseudo-grade-scale, and finally the thing was reversed and only the first school year is gradeless now (afaik).

> Competitiveness is not inherently bad

Creating competitiveness where is not needed is harmful.

This is how it goes in the workplace, getting and giving feedback on documents to improve them.

This is a neat concept and could work well, especially in the more subjective, art based classes. One of my favorite classes was digital audio production. A big part of that was the amount of creativity we could take with it, partially thanks to the grading. The teacher graded very easily, as long as you utilized this technique and “tried” you get 100 on the assignment, or a pretty high grade. This let me worry less about if I meet the requirements or not, and instead spend time putting creativity into it. He would always offer feedback as well spending time critiquing weak aspects about it and it helped me a ton. Yes, this means the class became a big blowoff for a lot of kids, but I liked being able to dip into the creativity without many worries.

The grading discussed in the article probably couldn’t apply to stem classes or something with a definitive right or wrong answer, but giving less focus on raw number grades in more creative classes can push kids in the right direction. I heard somewhere that kids are increasingly putting less creativity and energy into assignments because they are concerned with hitting the teachers exact expectations, and I think I see that in my own experiences.

I don't quite understand how that would be less stressing for the students. As long as you teach in a way that even someone starting without specific knowledge could understand everything, small graded tests along the way are nicer. That's because you can build up your final grade instead of everything depending on one big exam. Also it forces you to study along the way, instead of delaying everything until the final exam.

I'm not a fan of this.

There are two theories for why school improves outcomes for students:

1. Human Capital Development Theory: School improves students.

2. Signalling Theory: School ranks students.

Both predict that students with higher quality of certain traits (intelligence, self-discipline, social skills) that lead them to all kinds of good outcomes: higher income, donates more, votes more, less likely to experience crime, less likely to commit crime, more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, more friends, etc.

My opinion is that's schools ability to achieve the above comes 20% from HCDT and 80% from Signalling. Reading, writing, and arithmetic make up nearly all of HCDT.

In our society, it seems you're only supposed to acknowledge HCDT. From the perspective of HCDT, this policy of not grading work makes sense. Other feedback is more valuable, and has more room for nuance. The grade is redundant.

But I do acknowledge that Signalling is part of the equation, and believe it provides the majority of the affect. From that perspective, this policy prevents ranking from happening. To make up for that, we will need to extend school even longer just to get the same amount of the long list of good outcomes.

I had a teacher do something like that for a "communication" class and I hated it. Not only on the basis of class average/GPA, but mostly just because it was a complete joke.

You'd have people that could barely speak the language, were reading their cards the whole time and with powerpoint presentations stuffed with grammatical errors that got better grades than native speakers.

In the USA, public school students who show up the required amount of days will graduate. No child left behind. Since failing grades can't keep you from graduating, then grading is pointless. Stop grading and colleges that are based on merit will look at your standardized tests, and colleges not based on merit don't care about how you perform anyway.

Since failing grades can't keep you from graduating, then grading is pointless.

That’s not true, there is still the GPA.

I teach English but I rarely call myself The Teacher. I'm there to help them on their journey. I explain at the start of every class that their final grade (the uni currency) will rely more on the effort they put in than an actual note. The motivated ones love it, and I have seen this approach help the uncertain feel more confident when their effort is what is noticed, not a grade not lower language ability. Those students then start putting in more effort, and excel. There are still a number who just come, just sit, low effort, and this group is often equally divided into high level and low level language levels. It's not just the "bad" or "poor" students.

By the start of the second semester the class is functioning really well, with students really trying, confident regardless of actual level, participating. It's always so heartening to see former back row students moving up to the front, and the front row making room for them.

I kind of don't like this approach. I grant there is a huge discrepancy between students in reading/writing ability coming into a class, but forcing everyone to put in the same effort didn't fly in my math and science classes, so why should it be different here? Instead of being able to use my extra time that I didn't need to use in my literature classes by studying other things, I had to put in more effort to make my writing "extra extra" good. Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could use the extra time not spent studying math to study literature, or whatever else.

> Conversely, if someone was a math wiz, they could use the extra time not spent studying math to study literature, or whatever else.

If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying I'd question why they're not taking a harder math class. Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on literature (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it more efficient to skip the math class entirely?

Maybe in high school or mandatory undergraduate courses I could imagine a rationale for deliberately taking easy courses, but I've encountered students in graduate-level courses at an expensive private university that could have passed the final exam on the first day.

I can't fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own time and money on a class that isn't going to teach them anything.

When I was in university for engineering I didn't get a choice which classes I took. You took the classes that were part of your degree. You also didn't get a ton of flexibility in when you take a course. Courses were generally offered once per year as all students would progress at the same rate.

> If a math wiz can ace their math class without studying I'd question why they're not taking a harder math class. Alternately if the math wiz want to focus more on literature (or whatever else) this semester wouldn't it more efficient to skip the math class entirely? ... I can't fathom why anyone would waste so much of their own time and money on a class that isn't going to teach them anything.

I agree, but unfortunately you can't just test out of required classes much of the time.

The college typically requires a bunch of classes. You can't test out of them.

This was a pain for me when I started college at 23; I'd been programming as a hobby since I was 16, but was shoved into intro-level classes anyway. I spent the classes learning tooling, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it wasn't very productive.

That must have been disappointing.

I've also heard of the reverse part of that problem in which half of the students in intro-level CS classes end up feeling discouraged because half the class already has substantial programming experience.

I was good at pretty much every academic discipline growing up (except math when I got to calculus, ha). Being held to a higher standard in the things I was good at made me better at those.

I think this approach has merit - if there is discipline to downgrading students that clearly haven't mastered the material and assigned themselves an "A"

I was a perfectionist and very competitive university student. I didn't just want the A -- I wanted the top score in the class. I often reflect decades later that I would have been better off mastering about 85-90% of the material in a class and then moving on to something else -- versus mastering 110% of the material through repetitive practice even after I had mastered it to obliterate a narrow exam in it.

The current system encourages this because employers are more interested in the high GPA student than the students that have mastered a wide range of content at a B+ level. Perhaps this is part of the solution. There has to be accountability in the system for not mastering it - but the goal should be developing overall knowledge.

One student may outperform another because she is currently working harder, has worked harder in the past and is thus better prepared, or is simply more intelligent. The professor does not know why some students are doing better than others, and it's his business only to the extent that he can adapt his teaching to improve student learning.

"For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student’s background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed."

One of the best course structures I ever had was my Circuits Theory course. There were three total exams where the first two covered different material, and the third covered everything. On the third, we were able to 'correct' our score one of the first two exams if we did we better on the portions of third exam that covered the material. And the best part is that if you did worse on the third exam over the past material. It wouldn't retroactively degrade your score.

It went something like:

1st Exam: Subject A 2nd Exam: Subject B 3rd/Final: Subject A/B/C

I always wished this was the structure for every course. It allowed for those who didnt do well to stay in the course and encouraged them to understand the way the proffesor assigns work too!

>>Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student’s background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

I guess if you're just doing English as a supplemental course or something. It seems a bit daft if you're doing an actual English degree.

There is a trend in which policies and actions are more and more being optimized to maximize the apparent empathy of the policy or action. There seems to be more concern with having good intentions than with achieving good outcomes.

This is great for the policy-maker. After all, the goal of appearing empathetic is easily achieved and requires little effort. Just shoot off your blog post (season well with progressive buzz-words), stop grading papers and accept incoming congratulations at your convenience.

Achieving good outcomes, on the other hand, requires actually doing something. It requires an understanding of a real, measurable problem. It requires careful planning, execution, observation of outcomes, and iterative improvement. It requires risk--risk of looking silly, risk of failure, risk of wasted time.

Nobody writes articles about teachers whose methods erase the performance gap between the privileged and underprivileged. Why do the hard, thankless work of actually solve the problems? Why not be an empathy zombie?

Grades are not about equality. Grades are a model of what life will be.

At your job you will be graded based on how well you are able to do the work that is required from you. When you apply for a loan you will be graded and receive a higher or lower interest rate based on how much of a risk you represent. It's imperfect, it's unequal, it discriminates. If you follow the rules you get better outcomes.

>you will be graded based on how well you are able to do the work that is required from you

I can assure you, very few jobs actually promote people this way.

An interesting question arises from my reading of the article. Should geniuses be better off socially or economically because they are geniuses? If the answer is no, then the only solution is to handicap them. If the answer is yes, then don't do anything and that's how it will play out.

People need motivation, if there is no advantage from achieving more, why bother?

Look at the general apathy in the old communist block, where rewards are based on who you know, not what you accomplished.

More teaching/guiding and less judging. About time. School always felt like mostly a waste of time, doing rote things not because they would provided value but instead "because we always have done it".

So much "we had to eat shit at your age, so here's your shit sandwich too"

I am a fan of portfolio evaluation, and I think it can work in engineering courses as well.

I also like the idea that when you graduate you have a portfolio of work that basically turns into lines on your CV or resumé.

As a high school gym coach I noticed students with lots of experience running tended to get faster times. This is an example of fit privilege! So, I had to do away with my stopwatch...

Gym class is an excellent example of something where not grading, especially not based on absolute performance, would probably be quite useful, yes.

That is patently absurd. Without knowing your absolute numbers it's very difficult to tell if you are improving or not and if so at what rate.

It's also both unfair and dishonest to pretend that students who have spent more time training or have greater natural aptitude perform similarly to students who do not.

Not sure how you got from "not grading" to "not knowing numbers". Do you care more about "got 15s faster between start and end of year" or "grade C at start and end"? Not grading != no feedback. The source article explicitly makes that distinction.

The author doesn't exactly describe her method but says "No, I answered, because I really won’t have put a grade on it." Which makes me think she's not putting numbers on things - she has, in other words, thrown out her stopwatch.

Getting faster or writing better papers are both good results. Importantly, you can only know them if you are taking objective measurements. If you aren't, you will struggle to know if your methods and changes are improvements or degradations.

Fittingly, the article suffers from the same relativistic malaise the author inflicts on her students. The article doesn't explain objectively why not grading is good. Instead, it's subjective feelings, preferences, and beliefs. Maybe this is a good change, I doubt it, but we haven't seen any evidence in this article.

It's not at all clear or obvious that giving higher grades to someone with higher natural aptitude, in gym class, is "unfair." It seems mostly wrong to me.

Example: I start gym class and run a course of arbitrary length, my best effort. It takes me 60s. After working very hard over the semester, I lower that down to 45. You can even physically see I'm in better shape, but that's as low as I can go, during that semester.

Meanwhile some other kid starts at 44s, literally holds back, and 'improves' at the end (no real change) to 40. They pretty much don't work at it; where they finish is the same place they started.

Should they get a higher grade than I do? If we're grading by how hard the students applied themselves to what the teacher taught them, the bigger improvement deserves a bigger reward.

It's not obvious that "A for effort" is the wrong answer here.

Literally no one cares if I'm improving or not.

Gym teachers pushed me away from exercising for years and it's taken therapy and unlearning to get rid of my fear with working out.

YOU DON'T NEED TO MEASURE HOW GOOD I RUN.

This toxic view point that everything should be a competition and grading needs to die the fuck out. Gym is supposed to be a fun place for students to move their bodies and interact with their peers in a different capacity.

People who want to go do this more professionally should have the opportunity and the right gym teachers to encourage them there. But grading me because I didn't run a certain distance in a certain time is absurd and damaging and emotionally humiliating. Shit that I wouldn't want to subject an adult to, let alone a kid.

You should care if you are improving. Your talents and abilities are the ones being improved.

In general, especially outside of school, I think you're right that people don't really care if you're improving. Imagine being a professional essayist writing bad essays - you wouldn't build a readership on the strength of "Well last year I was way worse!" You build a readership, in part, by writing well - not relative to how you used to write, but writing well enough that people want to read.

Most things are like this. People generally want quality, they want their doctor to be good, not just better than he was last year. I'd rather have a good doctor who had decayed from great than a bad doctor who had improved from terrible. You want your employees or the people you interact with to be objectively good. Pretending like objective measurements don't matter is an approach for school that is at odds with life.

'ungrading' is what used to be called remedial education.

I can see that as a useful approach for evaluating English writing. It is less useful for evaluating architects or bridge engineers.

It is perhaps a false dichotomy to say that you cannot give formative and summarize feedback.

This is great in creative writing. It's so subjective. What about a math test?

The math test is subjective too, because what determines your grade is what questions the teacher included just as much as your ability in the subject.

But there are right and wrong answers. The correct answer isnt subjective.

Consider a student who accidentally arrives at the correct answer using a completely incorrect method for a problem and a student who arrives at the wrong answer using a correct method but making a simple arithmetic mistake.

Who is demonstrating a better understanding of the subject? I would argue that it is student 2.

This is well and good for a subject that’s just accumulated opinion, like most of the humanities. It would be awful though to be the poor kid who went through an un-graded math program in secondary school and got dropped into calculus freshman year of college.

During my physics degree we had relatively fine-grain evaluation - every module was examined and graded (e.g. /100) individually and the sum formed the basis of your degree. Some modules were compulsory, some you had one shot to pass (labs), some took an entire semester, some were half, etc. You could work out exactly how much of your degree an exam was worth, to the point that some people knew that they could sit out most of their final exams and still get a good degree.

With the exception of the dissertation and occasional paper-writing exercises in labs, there was always a correct answer and marks were normalised using a formula that a previous professor had invented. It was expedient to take the hardest courses (e.g. Gauge Theories of Particle Physics) because you would almost certainly be boosted up from the low class average, rather than "simple" ones where everyone did well. By the third year, homework was optional. You also wouldn't flunk a degree if you bombed a course.

Labs were universally hated for marking because it involved qualitative assessment (beyond "did you make the experiment work) and it was run by PhD students who each had wildly inconsistent criteria, despite presumably working from a rubric. I'm somewhat sympathetic because I've taught labs and a lot of students are just inept, but the grading system should really have been overhauled there.

Compare that to the English students in my cohort who had what we'd call a "doss" 1st year (worth 0%) and then in their second and third years might sit four essay exams that were worth 12.5% of their degree. As far as I know, some courses were 50/50 assessed/invigilated, but many were 100% examined.

You are still receiving feedback and more-so than a traditional grading system you have a reason to understand what went wrong since revisions to your work are reflected in the final grade.

I don't see any reason this system doesn't work in the face of objective criteria. The professor is still determining your level of understanding and aptitude, they are just doing it across the entire course rather than in a series of small and irreversible steps.

Probably fine in something like english but maybe not circuit design.

You can point out something is wrong without grading it, so why do you think it wouldn't work?

You always have to grade students if you want to put them in classes where they are prepared to handle the material. Whether you call it grading, ungrading, or anything else some form of assortment relative to the class is necessary if you want every student to study material that is challenging for them.

From this it follows that the scenario where truly not grading is feasible is the one where the class has no required preparation that isn’t met by the least capable student in the cohort. Incidentally that was what I observed in general population US public secondary schools. There was no homework. In fact, there weren’t even textbooks.

Lets say someone designs a circuit. Shows it to the teacher and the teacher points out the flaws. The student puts in some more work and comes up with a better design that took care of the flaws. Now the teacher gives the student a more challenging assignment.

Do you consider that grading?

Some kids derive motivation from being better than that other kid. In other words, competitiveness. Except modern education considers competitiveness toxic and is determined to stamp it out.

Let's consider a kid who half asses it knowing he can use the teachers notes to fix it. lots of people want admission to med school or an engineering job. its incredibly fair to test and evaluate those kids on their own work product.

You didn't answer the question and in your example you assume there is enough information in the teacher's comments to fix the design, this was not stated in my example. The discussion wasn't about fairness either.

So the professor just tells you you got it wrong? That’s what grades are. To solve the problem of bad initial performance being low many classes weight mid semester and final exams highly so you have plenty of time to learn

“educational privilege”

Are you kidding me. Whats the point of all the all nighter's i did to top the class. Stupid communism mindset

Huh? Those stock photos

Very cool concept, but doesn't the institution still require you to evaluate students in the end?

I gathered from the article that basically the state of the work at the end of the semester (or whatever) is what will be graded, so students can submit work, get feedback, revise, etc.

I think I like that. The notion that education is purely transactional - put kids through school, pay X dollars, get educated kids - is not how things really work.

With this method, no one can say the kid didn't have a chance to turn in his/her best work possible.

Won’t students end up with the same grade for significantly different levels of understanding?

Wouldn’t that affect their future coursework? How would a ‘behind’ student be incentivized to catch up?

I understand that, but the reason that you get grades on assignments throughout the semester is so that you can get an understanding of where your level is and how you should expect to be evaluated at the end. If you get a bunch of subjective feedback throughout the semester, but no grades, then you seemingly have no idea what to expect when you receive your final grade.

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