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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 progre

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
    I am American, for what it's worth. Similarly in the UK, the best jobs are restricted to 2:1 or 1st Class Honours degrees and there's been a move towards more American style reporting of the average grade received rather than just the classification. My point is mainly that I don't buy this system would negatively impact one's ability to time manage courses and extracurricular work and activities. And if grades were to suddenly disappear, companies would find other ways to weed out applicants.
dpeck 5y ago
| It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters. That tracks fairly well with most every class I remember. | Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop. Sadly that maps pretty well with client work as well. The person getting the work done always thinks it’s the most important thing you’re doing because it is for them.
anm89 5y ago
This is an English class, and the teacher is arguing it allows her to give more specific and useful feedback. This isn't some kind of "everyone gets a trophy" thing and I don't thing any one is advocating for this in the hard sciences. In this specific case of a writing seminar it makes a lot of sense.
sirspacey 5y ago
It seems ridiculous, but it’s not. Grades are an invalidated assessment framework: 1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress) 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit). I’ll zero in on “track progress” since you mention that. Start with a simple question: What is progress in learning? You’ll quickly uncover two things: * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion Here’s another teacher’s view: https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/ https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/ Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it. Task completion is an important skill, but it is currently being taught at the expense of much more important & valuable skills. The justification for that is that task completion is hard, difficult for children to learn. Only it’s not. It turns out that children generally complete many tasks when they are engaged in an open, iterative learning process. They’ll even generate & complete their own! Can you name one student who invented homework for themselves after they already knew they are getting an A+?! “Most likely to succeed” by Harvard professor Tony Wagner is a great introduction to the academic research behind the above. There really is a better, child-friendly way to learn.
- yupper32 5y ago
  You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the original post: This professor is still living in the bad system you describe. They just pretend it doesn't exist until the very end. If they were some private school that lived outside of the GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure it'd probably work well. But they don't. So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured on: GPA.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    There are private schools including home schools that live outside the GPA requirement. A few colleges remain that do not grade. We like GPAs because they reduce evaluation to a summary statistic. But guess what? GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education. We fool ourselves and do our children a great disservice by creating artificial ranking mechanisms for the sake of convenience.
MarcScott 5y ago
> Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying. Which subjects you should be studying, but not how to improve your work, or specific areas of the subject you should be focusing on. If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B? I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback. There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well. For some kids a grade C is great, for other it means they've failed. What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers. You talk about your job, and meeting the needs of your client. Does that mean you don't read or listen to feedback from your client? If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about? Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.
- yupper32 5y ago
  > What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers. That's not true, though. What's important in the current system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct correlation). What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what they'd like them to be.
  - itronitron 5y ago
    My undergraduate major was within a college (within a university) in which all of the major classes were portfolio driven and the first year core classes were a mix of portfolio and graded assignments. All of the classes regularly engaged in feedback (daily, weekly, or monthly) and in a group setting as well. Students very quickly learned the criteria for A level work, and depending on the professor or assignment it wasn't always achievable. An important part of that system is educating students so they can identify for themselves where their work can be improved, and what they can achieve given their current abilities and available resources.
ryandrake 5y ago
I grew up with A, B, C, D, and F. You always knew where you stood, where you were excelling, where you were going fine, and where you needed to put in extra effort. It was simple and effective. My daughter’s school uses this ridiculous categorization: - M: meeting standard - P: progressing towards standard - T: needs more time to meet standard - AC: area of concern Her “grades” are usually simply all M. Totally useless as a parent. I have no idea what “M” means in terms of her competitive ranking amongst her peers, readiness for AP or advanced courses and/or trajectory for future success in college. Someone who is barely hanging on, but technically “meets the standard” and someone who is a literal genius in the subject will both get “M”. It tells me (and her) nothing.
- sytelus 5y ago
  This is classic example of what happens when system tries to make everyone feel good about themselves no matter where they actually stand. The feedback signal is now so blunt that it is fairly useless. It's like you remove all the grading in compass and how you have no idea which direction you are moving and where you have to go. As a child, grading is what motivated me to work harder and be proud of my achievement. It's the reward you get for putting in the work. It was the reason I gravitated to doing extra work instead of watching TV. This new system basically says you have to do minimal thing and there is no reward or motivation provided for going above and beyond the norms. The argument that this will somehow help underpriviledged students is so severely misguided. I was in fact the underpriviledged student. The good grades is what allowed others to invest in me and give me opportunities. It was one thing I could own and control. I feel sorry for so many talented hardworking underpriviledged students who will have nothing more to show for than "Meets standards".
- sjg007 5y ago
  How would a letter grade change your understanding of where she ranks? And why is a competitive ranking among her peers important?
- alexvoda 5y ago
  And that is perhaps the point. I believe that the intention is that you should not stress about it as long as they are doing fine. And that you should not pass that stress to the child either. The grade is only there to warn you if there is a problem. To get feedback about the areas of performance, you should talk directly to the teacher and receive more than just 3 bits of information. Even with a much more granular grading system, as long as the grades are assigned based on task completion (correctly solving all the exercises in a test) instead of ranking, you will still have a inability to distinguish anything above top grade. If you move to a ranking system, where grades are assigned by comparison to peers, you run into issues of fairness, because resource availability inevitably plays a role.
EricE 5y ago
What is more meaningful? A letter grade with no context, or written feedback/commentary on your work? A dialog around improving your work? Seems like a far superior concept than simple letter grading. Also as you get better, the need to revise goes down dramatically. Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade. Meaningful learning - after having dealt with "education" I can see why the concept puzzles you.
- yupper32 5y ago
  > Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade. Well that's great, but it doesn't help me when I also require the good grade, because the system still works around GPAs.
mariusor 5y ago
> At the end of the semester, I do have to give students grades, as required by the university. > But I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise. I see here both tracking progress and providing a clear report on the end result of a task. This teacher seems to meet both your requirements, and probably doesn't deserve the disdain of someone that seems to hold the opinion that mindless grade chasing is the way to actually learn things. More so, there's no indication that the answer "I am here just to get the credits and get some reading done" is unacceptable to the question of "why are you here?".
olliej 5y ago
Why is it ridiculous? Especially for a subjective class like "English" They aren't saying they're not giving completion feedback, they're saying they aren't giving explicit grades. They also call out specific problems with the grading approach, and I'm curious what your solution to those problems is?
michaelbrave 5y ago
If grades didn't translate into real life consequences then it would be fine to use them as merely measurements. But they do affect real life, some companies ask for GPA scores, which colleges attended open doors, even car insurance companies give discounts for good GPA. I had an uncle once joke about "Friends are temporary but GPA is forever" and as I've aged I've found it to be true in a "that's not funny" kind of way.

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
  I am American, for what it's worth. Similarly in the UK, the best jobs are restricted to 2:1 or 1st Class Honours degrees and there's been a move towards more American style reporting of the average grade received rather than just the classification. My point is mainly that I don't buy this system would negatively impact one's ability to time manage courses and extracurricular work and activities. And if grades were to suddenly disappear, companies would find other ways to weed out applicants.

dpeck 5y ago

| It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters. That tracks fairly well with most every class I remember. | Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop. Sadly that maps pretty well with client work as well. The person getting the work done always thinks it’s the most important thing you’re doing because it is for them.

anm89 5y ago

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

sirspacey 5y ago

It seems ridiculous, but it’s not. Grades are an invalidated assessment framework: 1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress) 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit). I’ll zero in on “track progress” since you mention that. Start with a simple question: What is progress in learning? You’ll quickly uncover two things: * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion Here’s another teacher’s view: https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/ https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/ Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it. Task completion is an important skill, but it is currently being taught at the expense of much more important & valuable skills. The justification for that is that task completion is hard, difficult for children to learn. Only it’s not. It turns out that children generally complete many tasks when they are engaged in an open, iterative learning process. They’ll even generate & complete their own! Can you name one student who invented homework for themselves after they already knew they are getting an A+?! “Most likely to succeed” by Harvard professor Tony Wagner is a great introduction to the academic research behind the above. There really is a better, child-friendly way to learn.

yupper32 5y ago
You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the original post: This professor is still living in the bad system you describe. They just pretend it doesn't exist until the very end. If they were some private school that lived outside of the GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure it'd probably work well. But they don't. So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured on: GPA.
- sjg007 5y ago
  There are private schools including home schools that live outside the GPA requirement. A few colleges remain that do not grade. We like GPAs because they reduce evaluation to a summary statistic. But guess what? GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education. We fool ourselves and do our children a great disservice by creating artificial ranking mechanisms for the sake of convenience.

MarcScott 5y ago

> Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying. Which subjects you should be studying, but not how to improve your work, or specific areas of the subject you should be focusing on. If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B? I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback. There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well. For some kids a grade C is great, for other it means they've failed. What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers. You talk about your job, and meeting the needs of your client. Does that mean you don't read or listen to feedback from your client? If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about? Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.

yupper32 5y ago
> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers. That's not true, though. What's important in the current system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct correlation). What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what they'd like them to be.
- itronitron 5y ago
  My undergraduate major was within a college (within a university) in which all of the major classes were portfolio driven and the first year core classes were a mix of portfolio and graded assignments. All of the classes regularly engaged in feedback (daily, weekly, or monthly) and in a group setting as well. Students very quickly learned the criteria for A level work, and depending on the professor or assignment it wasn't always achievable. An important part of that system is educating students so they can identify for themselves where their work can be improved, and what they can achieve given their current abilities and available resources.

ryandrake 5y ago

I grew up with A, B, C, D, and F. You always knew where you stood, where you were excelling, where you were going fine, and where you needed to put in extra effort. It was simple and effective. My daughter’s school uses this ridiculous categorization: - M: meeting standard - P: progressing towards standard - T: needs more time to meet standard - AC: area of concern Her “grades” are usually simply all M. Totally useless as a parent. I have no idea what “M” means in terms of her competitive ranking amongst her peers, readiness for AP or advanced courses and/or trajectory for future success in college. Someone who is barely hanging on, but technically “meets the standard” and someone who is a literal genius in the subject will both get “M”. It tells me (and her) nothing.

sytelus 5y ago
This is classic example of what happens when system tries to make everyone feel good about themselves no matter where they actually stand. The feedback signal is now so blunt that it is fairly useless. It's like you remove all the grading in compass and how you have no idea which direction you are moving and where you have to go. As a child, grading is what motivated me to work harder and be proud of my achievement. It's the reward you get for putting in the work. It was the reason I gravitated to doing extra work instead of watching TV. This new system basically says you have to do minimal thing and there is no reward or motivation provided for going above and beyond the norms. The argument that this will somehow help underpriviledged students is so severely misguided. I was in fact the underpriviledged student. The good grades is what allowed others to invest in me and give me opportunities. It was one thing I could own and control. I feel sorry for so many talented hardworking underpriviledged students who will have nothing more to show for than "Meets standards".
sjg007 5y ago
How would a letter grade change your understanding of where she ranks? And why is a competitive ranking among her peers important?
alexvoda 5y ago
And that is perhaps the point. I believe that the intention is that you should not stress about it as long as they are doing fine. And that you should not pass that stress to the child either. The grade is only there to warn you if there is a problem. To get feedback about the areas of performance, you should talk directly to the teacher and receive more than just 3 bits of information. Even with a much more granular grading system, as long as the grades are assigned based on task completion (correctly solving all the exercises in a test) instead of ranking, you will still have a inability to distinguish anything above top grade. If you move to a ranking system, where grades are assigned by comparison to peers, you run into issues of fairness, because resource availability inevitably plays a role.

EricE 5y ago

What is more meaningful? A letter grade with no context, or written feedback/commentary on your work? A dialog around improving your work? Seems like a far superior concept than simple letter grading. Also as you get better, the need to revise goes down dramatically. Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade. Meaningful learning - after having dealt with "education" I can see why the concept puzzles you.

yupper32 5y ago
> Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade. Well that's great, but it doesn't help me when I also require the good grade, because the system still works around GPAs.

mariusor 5y ago

> At the end of the semester, I do have to give students grades, as required by the university. > But I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise. I see here both tracking progress and providing a clear report on the end result of a task. This teacher seems to meet both your requirements, and probably doesn't deserve the disdain of someone that seems to hold the opinion that mindless grade chasing is the way to actually learn things. More so, there's no indication that the answer "I am here just to get the credits and get some reading done" is unacceptable to the question of "why are you here?".

olliej 5y ago

Why is it ridiculous? Especially for a subjective class like "English" They aren't saying they're not giving completion feedback, they're saying they aren't giving explicit grades. They also call out specific problems with the grading approach, and I'm curious what your solution to those problems is?

michaelbrave 5y ago

If grades didn't translate into real life consequences then it would be fine to use them as merely measurements. But they do affect real life, some companies ask for GPA scores, which colleges attended open doors, even car insurance companies give discounts for good GPA. I had an uncle once joke about "Friends are temporary but GPA is forever" and as I've aged I've found it to be true in a "that's not funny" kind of way.