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 i

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).