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

bjornlouser 5y ago
'ungrading' is what used to be called remedial education.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
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-student-apocalypse https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/fear-zombie-stud...
- nicoburns 5y ago
  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.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > 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.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    > 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.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > 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.
jgwil2 5y ago
Very cool concept, but doesn't the institution still require you to evaluate students in the end?
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  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.
  - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    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?
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    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.
a_shovel 5y ago
> 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.
- Double_a_92 5y ago
  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?
  - matt321 5y ago
    >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.
    - jdkee 5y ago
      “ 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
  - conradludgate 5y ago
    > 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
ryan93 5y ago
Probably fine in something like english but maybe not circuit design.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  You can point out something is wrong without grading it, so why do you think it wouldn't work?
  - User23 5y ago
    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.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      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?
      - bonoboTP 5y ago
        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.
      - ryan93 5y ago
        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.
after_care 5y ago
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.
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
- deleted 5y ago
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Double_a_92 5y ago
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.
NoblePublius 5y ago
- gadders 5y ago
  I was thinking Driving Licences.
  - dr_orpheus 5y ago
    But this is closer to how getting a drivers license works. You go and take the test and you either pass and get your license, or they tell you what you did wrong so you can go practice with your learners permit and come back again.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  I did do this in multiple engineering courses in grad school. Various homework assignments and projects throughout the semester that we turned in, got feedback on and submitted all of it as we got through it, or as one big portfolio at the end of the year. Similarly, we got a single grade on the whole body of work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
wnscooke 5y ago
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.
- dbsmith83 5y ago
  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.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    > 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.
matt321 5y ago
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.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  Since failing grades can't keep you from graduating, then grading is pointless. That’s not true, there is still the GPA.
gadders 5y ago
>>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.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  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?
matt321 5y ago
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.
- visarga 5y ago
  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.
User23 5y ago
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.
- joshvm 5y ago
  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.
- enragedcacti 5y ago
  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.
axus 5y ago
This is how it goes in the workplace, getting and giving feedback on documents to improve them.
macspoofing 5y ago
>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.
- Dayshine 5y ago
  > 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?
  - macspoofing 5y ago
    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.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  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.
belval 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
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ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
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.
orforforof 5y ago
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.
ucm_edge 5y ago
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.
ALittleLight 5y ago
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...
- detaro 5y ago
  Gym class is an excellent example of something where not grading, especially not based on absolute performance, would probably be quite useful, yes.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    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.
    - detaro 5y ago
      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.
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        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.
bonoboTP 5y ago
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).
- SpodGaju 5y ago
  > Competitiveness is not inherently bad Creating competitiveness where is not needed is harmful.
Traster 5y ago
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.
- etataetaet 5y ago
  > 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!
- jmbwell 5y ago
  > 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.
gotaquestion 5y ago
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.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  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").
  - gotaquestion 5y ago
    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.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    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.
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JasonFruit 5y ago
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.
- 30367286 5y ago
  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.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  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.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    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.
jdkee 5y ago
“educational privilege”
Qw3r7 5y ago
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!
TedShiller 5y ago
Huh? Those stock photos
dbg31415 5y ago
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.
- sjg007 5y ago
  The best applicant for a job has a portfolio of work samples including projects.
efitz 5y ago
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.
Bostonian 5y ago
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."
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aaomidi 5y ago
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.
bob2222 5y ago
kqr 5y ago
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.
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
SpodGaju 5y ago
"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?
- conro1108 5y ago
  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.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
This is great in creative writing. It's so subjective. What about a math test?
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    But there are right and wrong answers. The correct answer isnt subjective.
    - wilsonnb3 5y ago
      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.
skeptikal 5y ago
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.
jrm4 5y ago
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)
Dayshine 5y ago
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?
- kqr 5y ago
  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.
- pavon 5y ago
  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.
- schimmy_changa 5y ago
  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.
yupper32 5y ago
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).
- atdrummond 5y ago
  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.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    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.
    - atdrummond 5y ago
1shooner 5y ago
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.
- uberman 5y ago
  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.
outside1234 5y ago
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.
outside1234 5y ago
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.
fattless 5y ago
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.
EricE 5y ago
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"
cuddlybacon 5y ago
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.
redleader55 5y ago
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.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  >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.
8bitsrule 5y ago
I can see that as a useful approach for evaluating English writing. It is less useful for evaluating architects or bridge engineers.
musicale 5y ago
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.
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reagle 5y ago
It is perhaps a false dichotomy to say that you cannot give formative and summarize feedback.
throwaway54976 5y ago
Are you kidding me. Whats the point of all the all nighter's i did to top the class. Stupid communism mindset

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

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-student-apocalypse https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/fear-zombie-stud...

nicoburns 5y ago
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.
michaelt 5y ago
> 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.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > 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.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    > 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.

jgwil2 5y ago

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

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
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.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  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?
- jgwil2 5y ago
  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.

a_shovel 5y ago

> 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.

Double_a_92 5y ago
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?
- matt321 5y ago
  >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.
  - jdkee 5y ago
    “ 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
- conradludgate 5y ago
  > 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

ryan93 5y ago

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

cinntaile 5y ago
You can point out something is wrong without grading it, so why do you think it wouldn't work?
- User23 5y ago
  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.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    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?
    - bonoboTP 5y ago
      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.
    - ryan93 5y ago
      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.

after_care 5y ago

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.

kqr 5y ago
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.
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Double_a_92 5y ago

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.

NoblePublius 5y ago

gadders 5y ago
I was thinking Driving Licences.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  But this is closer to how getting a drivers license works. You go and take the test and you either pass and get your license, or they tell you what you did wrong so you can go practice with your learners permit and come back again.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
I did do this in multiple engineering courses in grad school. Various homework assignments and projects throughout the semester that we turned in, got feedback on and submitted all of it as we got through it, or as one big portfolio at the end of the year. Similarly, we got a single grade on the whole body of work.
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wnscooke 5y ago

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.

dbsmith83 5y ago
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.
- asoneth 5y ago
  > 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.

matt321 5y ago

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.

kevinventullo 5y ago
Since failing grades can't keep you from graduating, then grading is pointless. That’s not true, there is still the GPA.

gadders 5y ago

>>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.

marcusverus 5y ago
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?

matt321 5y ago

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.

visarga 5y ago
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.

User23 5y ago

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.

joshvm 5y ago
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.
enragedcacti 5y ago
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.

axus 5y ago

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

macspoofing 5y ago

>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.

Dayshine 5y ago
> 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?
- macspoofing 5y ago
  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.
silicon2401 5y ago
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.

belval 5y ago

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.

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ApolloFortyNine 5y ago

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.

orforforof 5y ago

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.

ucm_edge 5y ago

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.

ALittleLight 5y ago

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...

detaro 5y ago
Gym class is an excellent example of something where not grading, especially not based on absolute performance, would probably be quite useful, yes.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  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.
  - detaro 5y ago
    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.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      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.

bonoboTP 5y ago

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).

SpodGaju 5y ago
> Competitiveness is not inherently bad Creating competitiveness where is not needed is harmful.

Traster 5y ago

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.

etataetaet 5y ago
> 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!
jmbwell 5y ago
> 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.

gotaquestion 5y ago

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.

jhbadger 5y ago
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").
- gotaquestion 5y ago
  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.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  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.

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JasonFruit 5y ago

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.

30367286 5y ago
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.
_-david-_ 5y ago
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.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  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.

jdkee 5y ago

“educational privilege”

Qw3r7 5y ago

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!

TedShiller 5y ago

Huh? Those stock photos

dbg31415 5y ago

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.

sjg007 5y ago
The best applicant for a job has a portfolio of work samples including projects.

efitz 5y ago

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.

Bostonian 5y ago

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."

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aaomidi 5y ago

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.

bob2222 5y ago

kqr 5y ago

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.

kqr 5y ago
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.

SpodGaju 5y ago

"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?

conro1108 5y ago
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.

AlwaysRock 5y ago

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

kqr 5y ago
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.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  But there are right and wrong answers. The correct answer isnt subjective.
  - wilsonnb3 5y ago
    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.

skeptikal 5y ago

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.

jrm4 5y ago

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)

Dayshine 5y ago

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?

kqr 5y ago
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.
pavon 5y ago
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.
schimmy_changa 5y ago
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.

yupper32 5y ago

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).

atdrummond 5y ago
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.
- yupper32 5y ago
  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.
  - atdrummond 5y ago

1shooner 5y ago

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.

uberman 5y ago
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.

outside1234 5y ago

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.

outside1234 5y ago

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.

fattless 5y ago

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.

EricE 5y ago

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"

cuddlybacon 5y ago

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.

redleader55 5y ago

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.

wildrhythms 5y ago
>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.

8bitsrule 5y ago

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

musicale 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

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reagle 5y ago

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

throwaway54976 5y ago

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