What is the point of a grade?

I return to this topic again and again. It is report card time at my school. So grades are on my mind.

I loathe grades. Too often, they get in the way of learning and they don't give much in the way of information. They imply an objectivity that rarely and perhaps can never  exist. Some suggest that grades serve to motivate students. In some cases that is true. However, I taught for 23 years without giving grades and my students were motivated. In the video below, Alfie Kohn explains far more eloquently than me why grades don't work.

Yet in most schools...

sadly...

we are stuck with grades. And so, I find myself keenly attuned to grading and testing practices. If we agreed that grades should be no more and no less than a shorthand "snapshot" of a student's learning, then I'd be okay with them. I wouldn't like them, but I would tolerate them. But we don't use grades that way, even if though we say we do.

For instance, I have had advisees, who not knowing tests had a second side to them, score D's on tests in which they answered correctly every question they attempted. While yes, the students should have looked to turn the page over to find more questions, the "D" tells the student, and the student's parents, and potential colleges next to nothing about the students' learning. Everyone involved, including the teacher, knows this "D" is not indicative of learning. So why give false information? 

 I also wonder about the role of extra credit. I know there are students who score 106% on tests. That is impossible! One cannot know more than all the material. It also reinforces the notion that tests are about the points, and not the learning. 

Yet, here is my real point today. I'm resigned to giving grades in my new role. What I want to know is when did we decide in American education that an average was the best way to determine student understanding?

Imagine a foreign language class.

Student A scores

80, 80, 85, 80, 84= 81.8 average

Student B scores

55, 70, 75, 90, 100 = 78

Who has learned more? Who is the more proficient student of the foreign language. Hasn't student B learned far more and by course's end,  know more? This is an unlikely example (though it is one that any long-time teacher has seen), but it does prove the point that averages can deceive. In terms of weather, the average temperature in Dublin and Philadelphia is largely the same. The average tells us nothing about the weather in Philadelphia and Dublin. I've spent a good amount of time in Dublin. It isn't like the weather in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA. 

A colleague of mine pointed out that for one's golf handicap, the highest and lowest scores are dropped. Makes sense. Outliers are just that, outliers. 

Some schools are rethinking assessment and grades. Some have dropped grades. Others have become very intentional and specific in what they say the role of grades are. 

If you give grades, please remember the point of a grade is to quickly show student learning. Do yours? And pointing the mirror back to me, do mine? 

The Rules of the Game

How much of what we do in schools do we do because students will do it again later? I hear this all the time in response to my appeals for change. "They'll need it in high school" or "They'll need it in college". Look, there's a certain logic to this. However. let's posit that some of the things we make students do aren't helpful, useful or right yet we still do them "to prepare" kids for what is coming later. Can any reader nod their head yes in agreement? I found myself doing just this a couple of weeks ago. (Note my recent blog post about student choice in summative assessment) I worried that my students would be unprepared for the department created final exam which is full of "what" questions. The fear is real. 

We can look this another way, however. Who would be mean to children with the logic that it is preparing them for people to be mean to them later? Actually, I hear whispers of this in some of the people who mock the "everyone gets a trophy" awards. "Suck it up kids, life sucks", seems to be the mindsets of some critics. By the way, I also argue against giving kids trophies, but for different reasons. Alfie Kohn has largely convinced me that rewards punish in the long run.

I digress. What I really want to write about is that sometimes we are misguided in the game of school. We think we are preparing students for what is coming next. But we aren't. The rules are changing; we don't realize it yet. Tests for recall once made sense in a world in which information wasn't ubiquitous. Way back in 1997, David Shenk wrote, "Information used to be as rare and precious as gold. (It is estimated that one weekday edition of today's New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime.)" Process this and now think of the revolution in information technology that has happened the past 19 years. We simply can't expect people to remember everything that they'll need to know in their profession.

I'm thinking of this because Friday night I was listening to a fascinating Fresh Air broadcast on NPR on the impulsive and addictive prone teenage brain. It's worth a listen and I include a link to the entire broadcast. During a fascinating segue midway through the broadcast, my ears prickled when the neuroscientist being interviewed said this:

" Well, it is a different way of learning. And actually in the medical education field - here's an interesting fact - that over the last two or three decades, learning had - it was determined that learning had to be done in a different way. There were just simply too many facts to memorize during medical school... So about 20, 25 years ago in a few schools, including at Harvard, they started to do a different form of learning, which is really teaching students how to access information rather than absorbing, digesting and ingraining that information. And, frankly, that today's modern physician does operate much more in that mode because, of course, there's always this new information coming every month about new treatments, new patterns of practice that you should be employing. You couldn't possibly stay, you know, up to date by memorizing everything. So it's more teaching you how to access information. ...This actually is playing out very - in a very real way in the medical education field, I can tell you that. [So when your doctor has to look something up it doesn't mean] they're a bad doctor. It means that they're probably doing you a huge favor, that they're making sure that there isn't a better drug available that might have just come out or a new test that they can look for that mysterious disease that they still haven't made a diagnosis on."

So, why do Science AP exams still look the way they do? For that matter, why do all the AP exams look the way the do?

Look, I'm a constructivist. I believe our minds need some facts to build a scaffold. Schema theory tells us this. But next time you do something only because you think you are preparing students for things that are going to happen to them later in university, grad school and beyond, maybe you're wrong.