Welcome to this week’s Friday thread, where I offer a few questions to continue conversations begun earlier in the week. I’ll drop in and out of the discussion throughout the next few days, and I hope you’ll feel free to contribute as you have time. Comments were available only to paid subscribers on Tuesday, but today’s conversation is open to all. I hope you’ll join the discussion!
The first question comes from a reader who emailed me privately. In her view (and mine), inclusion should not require dispensing with traditional grading altogether. However, she acknowledges that grading is more of a necessary evil than an unequivocal good. She wrote that the struggle teachers face is “how to make sure the high standards we hold up suck as little as possible for as many people as possible.” How accurately does she capture your own view as a teacher, as a student (or former student), or as a parent? What do you think the purpose of grading ought to be? What relevance (if any) do grades have to our personal and professional lives after high school or college?
Grades are often thought to be more meritocratic than standardized tests, though both systems have their flaws. For a grade to be earned, the standards need to be clearly stated and consistently applied. No one does this perfectly, but typically teachers rely on checklists or rubrics to make their expectations visible.
The following is a rubric from one of my formal writing assignments. Do metrics like this improve equality by clarifying expectations for all? Or does a rubric like this simply reward the already-privileged? What value (if any) do you see in the non-academic world for mastering the rhetorical conventions described below?
One problem for the grader is that grades do two things--judge and motivate (or at least provide some kind of emotional charge). Rubrics certainly clarify the judging part of the grading activity, both for the teacher and the student. The difficulty for both participants, however, lies with the often unpredictable but overwhelming emotional response to the grade. We (I did anyway) spend a lot of time and emotional energy worrying about how the grade will be received. There's just no way to get around it no matter how much we explain that this grade is just one snapshot of one product. And the only grade that seemed to produce a positive emotional response was an A.
As an experiment in one of my classes, I announced that everyone would get an A if they "did the work" and managed to "meet the standards of writing competence." OK, it was admittedly a niche course, a partial credit course called "Teaching Writing" designed for highly motivated, upper-level English majors who wanted to be tutors in our writing lab. It worked quite well and students seemed to go above and beyond the standards set out in the course description. Some even wrote me later to say that they found themselves farther ahead of their colleagues in grad school who were floundering as untrained TAs. But all this was a long time ago now.
Certainly the institution and the culture generally expect some kind of ranking from the academic experience, and clearly some people perform better than others (in specific, well-defined aeas). The students in Humanities are trickier to evaluate than in some STEM fields because we're also always implicitly evaluating their cultural capital, or theirs against ours. The emotional toll of these nuances, as another responder below has noted, are long-lasting, damaging, but perhaps, in the end a means to help others do better.
Since you like football, I'm reminded of a story which is probably not true. It is said that at the end of the practice season Vince Lombardi lined up all his players and simply asked the starters to step forward. They did. Let the analogies begin...
Walter, your Teaching Writing course has some affinities with labor-based grading. I don't mean to goad you into polemics, but I'm curious about your thoughts on whether the damaging toll of grading has roots in racism, patriarchy, and other social ills? I don't think any of us like being in the position of judging others, and yet there does seem to be an expectation of doing something like that for quality control: for assessment, for accreditation, possibly for external audiences. Competitive scholarships, graduate school and professional school admissions, and sometimes employment seem contingent on GPA -- there's the ranking piece of it -- yet grades are often so inflated, or doled out inconsistently, that I wonder how much GPA matters.
There are some intractably difficult questions here about how much latitude an instructor ought to have to determine formal evaluation within the confines of a particular course and whether the instructor bears any responsibility to others who will interpret the grades given in particular ways.
I'm struck by the insight that Ta-Nehisi Coates has given me when he said that racism is mother of race (and not the other way around as I was conceiving of it). So, to the extent that racism, and all the other "isms" that have hardened into the ideologies that contribute to our culture (a culture?), yes, grading is a part of the social fabric (ills and all) that define us. The only saving grace here, is a rigorous educational system, perhaps only possible under liberal democracies, that promulgates the two contradictory purposes for education: passing on the "culture" and interrogating the "culture." We (legislative bodies and boards) need to have faith in a system that allows for the process of discovering truth where ever that takes us.
Yeah, I don't think GPAs matter very much.
Does anyone still read or remember Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries"? I'm thinking that there might be some good things left in there.
I quite agree, Walter, that interrogating the culture is necessary...and that it can coexist with preserving some revised version of the culture. Some of that feels more zero sum these days. Elbow is great. Incidentally, he started the movement that is now manifesting as labor-based grading. But I think his argument is still relevant: http://mjreiff.com/uploads/3/4/2/1/34215272/elbow_embracing.pdf
I graduated from one of the few colleges that doesn’t use grades and never did. We had narrative evaluations at semester’s end, and each assignment included actual comments, in ink, from our professors. I have never taught at a school (alas) that had done away with grades. Currently: I cannot figure out the point of grades. They feel inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless. Rubrics, clear expectations, class-time discussions about assignments and the work can and should happen. But what is the point of grades?
I think most of us who give letter grades also give a great deal of narrative feedback. But as Jenn suggests, we often find that students focus more on the score than on the nuances that we provide. Perhaps your suggestion is that the score gets in the way of the more substantive suggestions?
The other question I've posed to Walter above is how one's academic record might be interpreted by others outside a particular institution. Did your college graduate everyone in roughly equal academic standing, with no distinctions such as honors or summa/magna/cum laude? If so, did you find yourself at a disadvantage while competing for teaching positions, or did you feel that you were able to demonstrate your competency in other ways?
The rub in labor-based grading -- which isn't quite what you're describing with narrative evaluations -- is that there is no measurement of competency. But it sounds like you believe in measuring academic competence. What happened at your college if a student failed to meet the minimum expectations of an assignment or of the course? If not a failing grade, what academic record did a student in that situation receive?
Indeed, I have found (over a 28-year career) that the score, grade, mark, number (or any other euphemism) gets in the way of the potential interchange that could result from written feedback/conversation about the student's work, ideas, etc. I began offering students a 'no feedback' option (just a grade and summary comment), a 'half feedback' option (with some in-text comments and a summary comment), and a 'full feedback' option (with in-text comments about the writing itself, plus the ideas/arguments, and a summary comment). Most chose half feedback. The actual grade still mattered most.
In a system that has been based on grades since at least first grade, it is challenging for students to disentangle themselves from that system.
My college had no merit-based statuses or standings, no honors societies, no inductions into anything. We were allowed to choose what went into the large portfolio our registrar submitted to grad schools or jobs or whatever. The typical objects included in that portfolio: final course evaluations, written by our (amazing) professors; reflective short essays about our substantive work across our years in college; professor review committee reports (we chose the professors, they worked with us for 2-6 semesters, typically); evaluations written by internship supervisors, colleagues, etc. The only place where I was disadvantaged was in my attempt to gain admittance to Top-10 PhD programs. There, my GRE scores were of paramount importance, and my quantitative scores tanked me (despite my exceptional evaluations by research methods professors). Once in graduate school, I got the same grade inflated marks as my cohort, and I found that getting job offers was more connected to my actual teaching demos and research talks.
I do believe in measuring 'academic competence,' yes. If I am inviting students to learn something about social science research, then, for example, I need to see their competence at, say, conducting ethical research. What does 'ethical' mean? How do we protect our 'human subjects'? Why do we engage in research with humans?
All this said: I am (sadly) really really disillusioned with higher ed in the US. I think the question of what grades do and are for is the tip of the iceberg of the problem here.
Agree wholeheartedly: "I think the question of what grades do and are for is the tip of the iceberg of the problem here." But I think this is increasingly true everywhere. I spoke to a professor at Charles University in Prague this summer, and he felt that things like assessment and transactional attitudes had taken over his work, too. That was rather crushing for me, because Prague seems like such a haven for the arts.
Some say grades and test scores offer ways for students without other privileges to get noticed. Take them away, and social and cultural inequities carry the day. Obviously others emphasize the bias built into things like the GRE. I took the GRE three times, and my top and bottom scores were 100 points apart (quite a percentile difference). I also dropped a pre-law major because all of the courses had multiple choice exams. Had those exams been essay-based, I might have persisted and even thrived. I'm not sure there is a system of education anywhere that doesn't cater to some learning styles while marginalizing others. And the European model of the sage on the stage with the high-stakes paper or exam at the end is by no means superior. A great deal depends on the relationship between teacher and student.
I suppose some of my other remarks about whether it's possible to charge tuition for courses without formally evaluating the academic work in some way might seem crass. But for some students with limited means, attending a university that did not record a conventional transcript, or that did not recognize distinction in any way, could feel like an enormous risk. As I've written elsewhere, making higher education affordable and accessible, so a college major did not feel like such a high-stakes financial decision, could assuage many of these concerns. But a lot of students can't afford to *not* care about a grade. That shouldn't mean that they care about nothing else, of course, and it's discouraging that more do not choose your full feedback option.
I would add to inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless, that they are also destructive of creativity, and shift the attention from actual intrinsic value of the work at hand to the abstracted value of "some letter" and "some number."
Curious if you find narrative evaluation to be similarly inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless? My interest is less than giving scores than it is in the process by which we evaluate academic achievement. Letter grades and numerical scores are easy targets. This thought experiment began with an honest question about how any institution can justify charging tuition for courses in which there is no formal evaluation of writing quality. It seems to me that without some kind of evaluation, there is little more than a good faith assumption. As a Romantic, I prefer good faith assumptions to coercive measures. But I'm also mindful of the vulnerability of humanities disciplines to institutional hierarchy and external influences, like state legislatures, where it seems like creativity for creativity's sake is not a persuasive argument. It's possible that we're talking about two different things: what the ideal conditions are for teaching and learning, versus how we make a public case for the arts and humanities?
I'd have to make a list of all the underlying assumptions that I disagree with :) (I won't because that would be annoying of me.)
I work in an institution that assigns grades, and I assign grades. I make sure my students know that this is the system we're in and we can still operate within it without having to drink the kool-aid and believe that any of it "means" something.
People learn when they have experiences. Education means opportunities for conversation, argument, analysis, discovery, recognition, beauty, whimsy, humor, and so much more.
Every time I see someone actually learning, I see them doing it despite grades, not because of them.
I think we largely agree. Although you remind me of an experience I had as a first-year student when I played a little game called not reading the assigned texts. I attended class faithfully and listened carefully, even participated enthusiastically, and wrote a perfect Blue Book exam at midterm. 100 percent. I went to the professor afterward and asked for suggestions, because I felt cheated -- in a childish way I was hoping that he would make me do the work, like a toddler flirting with forbidden behavior. But of course I realized that I was only cheating myself, and so my attitude toward preparation for class changed a great deal afterward. I suppose one might read that anecdote as a symptom of what is wrong with grades-based education: that it produced a shortcut-taking student like me. But it's also true that I learned something by having that experience: grades weren't any guarantee that I was learning anything, and an A was no guarantee that I was learning all that I could. So you might say that in a backward way my approach to learning thereafter was *because* of one grade? :)
Otherwise, I think what you describe is what we all aspire to achieve within our imperfect systems: opportunities for experience, shifting from the "have-to" to real ownership.
Another pithy anecdote: My office neighbor in graduate school was a Jewish woman who had been a lecturer for many years. She told me that as an undergraduate one of her professors gave her a B. She went to him and said, "But I did everything you asked." And he said, "Indeed -- that is all you did." Perhaps that lesson could have been learned another way, and maybe it was a paternalistic and cruel way to deliver it. But she didn't remember it that way...
Why would it be paternalistic or cruel? That implies the grade wields a power that it does not. And when you get an A without trying you SEE that the Grade Has No Clothes -- at that point, how do you carry on caring? Imagine how much insight was never attained because it was thought exceeding what was necessary to get an A. :) Learning is limitless as a mother's love.
Also consider how arbitrary these standards are: what is considered "excellent writing" for college students would not be published in most magazines. Most "bosses" don't want thesis-driven arguments from their underlings -- that shit'll probably get you fired. Meanwhile I've seen rubrics that deduct a point each for "errors" that arguably aren't even actually errors ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ just narrow matters of style.
We operate in a miasma of lies about objective standards of excellence or workplace practicality, but then it always seems to come back to the simple exercise of power. Rotten frames piled on rotten frames. Power and its appeasement is part of human society, that's real, but so are curiosity, innovation, and the honing of skills -- when is a doctor done "practicing"? When is the cellist "good enough" to stop trying to get better? When has the writer learned everything any writer ever needs to know? "Never" is the only answer.
We have to dodge these "systems" to do anything true, real, and meaningful. Which is frankly exactly how the "real world" works, too, so what better preparation for "real life" is there? You have a life. You live in a system that will try to impose itself on your life, and reduce it and quantify it and exploit it. How you respond to these conditions -- whether you are cunning and/or brave and/or stubborn enough to dodge or jiujitsu or briar-patch them in your favor -- makes your life what it is. Some people will encounter a thousand misfortunes and still be happy. Others are granted every possible gift and still they're sad.
What education should teach us is how to sense the find the boundaries of what we know. what it should train us to do is to explore, observe, and listen when we enter these new unfamiliar realms. What it should inspire us to do is share the joy delight and insight when we encounter them with our fellow humans.
I was the quoted emailer here--I’m happy to continue the conversation. :)
As an adjunct, it’s a special conundrum, as we’re not paid even close to the level of our specialized labor. So how do we grade? And if we grade too hard, do our contracts not get renewed? We’re especially expendable.
This is a conundrum that I never had to face. Though tenure-track faculty face a similar issue before they earn tenure. Too much rigor leads to blowback on student evaluations, which are often the sole measure used for renewing contracts for contingent faculty (despite the strong evidence suggesting that SETs are unreliable measures of teaching effectiveness). Maitland Jones, Jr., is the most prominent recent example, but what happened to him happens in subtler ways to many adjunct faculty every year.
As you say, Jenn, if you're getting paid $4-5K for an entire semester, there is a cost-benefit question regarding how much attention to grading is justifiable, especially if you're stringing 4-5 courses together to pay the bills.
Exactly--it does end up just not being worth it. Is that fair to the student trying to learn something? Maybe not, but then a good portion of the time, they’re actually not trying to do that at all, they’re just trying to finish their transaction as quickly as possible.
It was $1800 when I adjuncted in Houston, and a quick look shows that it's only a few hundred more now, about $2200.
It's $2700 here, and that's the highest rate in the state for CCs. Despite the fact that the local cost of living in this town is major metropolitan areas.
Well, I wasn't going to mention this, but I was offered $2,000 recently for a graduate school course. I asked for $3,000 and was granted it initially, before learning that the department didn't even have the original $2,000 to offer. So it's being cobbled together now without me. Some might say it's just a market reality, but it is dispiriting to see such paltry compensation for real expertise.
I earned $4500 to adjunct in 1996. When my PhD was granted (in 1997), the institution automatically gave me a raise, to $5000. It is abominable, to say the least, that adjunct colleagues are paid so little, and most receive no money for prep time before the term begins, or for student consults, reference letters, etc post-term. (And, uh, no job security, plus union-busting management IF the adjuncts have or start unions.)
And no office, and no health insurance. And if a full-timer gets a class cancelled due to low enrollment, they can yoink the adjunct’s class out from under them and give it to the FT. And that’s for a position that requires a high-level (read: expensive) degree and specialized expertise. It’s ridiculous. Abominable is actually a good word.
Rubrics do improve the quality of clarifying expectations, and anyone who claims that they speak to privilege is deeply misguided. How can one meet an uncommunicated expectation?
As a first generation college student, and even later in graduate school, I struggled precisely because I didn't have the social or cultural capital of my peers, who knew what questions to ask, who to ask them to, and who presented as young scholars because they knew what that would look like. Never were the expectations explicit, and when I started asking, faculty thought less of me for asking because to them it indicated my unfitness rather than their utter lack of explicit expectations.
Now, years later, I still see that problem in my students and with my colleagues, nationally. At more privileged and closed institutions, I see it in vague expectations that require students to lean heavily on their faculty, and the better faculty see them through. But this privileges social and cultural capital. At less privileged and open institutions, I too often see vague expectations but easy grading, as these are institutions that reward butts and seats and ease.
Over the years, I've noted the wide gap between collegiate habitual practice, in the humanities at least, and what scholars and devotees of pedagogy recommend. It's quite maddening, actually, for those of us who care about our students, and in my case, want to help them avoid the pitfalls I faced.
This is my own thinking. I wrote about it a while back in my review of Tara Westover's memoir. She, too, was judged as inferior for asking questions that everyone else thought should be obvious. And yet she was also the beneficiary of these vague expectations. One of her mentors decided that she belonged in a study abroad program at Cambridge, and then her mentor at Cambridge decided that she belonged in a Ph.D. program at Harvard. In neither case did she understand how to earn her way into those communities -- someone just ushered her through the gate.
I am a fan of Gerald Graff's and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say / I Say because the book makes some of these hidden expectations visible. My feeling was similar to Jason's: that helping students master rhetorical moves that I did not fully understand until I was in graduate school would help them avoid my own mistakes and blindness. But I'm aware that social and cultural capital still carry the day in many quarters.
A friend of mine got into NYU and Cornell that way. She just happened to make friends with a high ranking administrator. She's brilliant, of course, but that is rarely what opens the door.
Likewise, I write a lot of guides for my students trying to educate them even about unspoken expectations. For instance, I wrote them a guide on how to answer standardized questions as they tend to respond to quiz questions with pop culture rather than material-related responses, to try to Google comprehension and application questions, etc. In this case, the hidden expectation is an expectation of metacognitive skills gained through a decent education system ... which is becoming rarer and rarer in the US these days.
I would concur; grades are a means to an end, but not the end. Part of the problem is, though, is that grades are a means to facilitate education, whereas too often students take them to be a means to graduation and a good job. My students overwhelmingly try to shortcut their education to achieve high grades, and the systematic and pervasive nature of their behavior indicates that their prior education has trained them to adopt this posture.
This is the Catch-22 that labor-based grading tries to avoid (unsuccessfully, in my opinion). Avoidance behavior and shortcuts stem from the punitive side of grading: complete this assignment, or else. Good teachers are able to shift the focus away from the punitive forms of accountability toward intrinsic motivation. But even the best-intentioned student struggles to give the maximum effort on every assignment if they are taking 4-5 courses at a time. Grading is the enemy of the most natural sources of motivation -- autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Yet most undergraduates lack the maturity to claim their education in this way without the extrinsic rewards and consequences. Most faculty respond to disengagement from their students (which may be the result of being spread too thin already) by demanding more from them, and this exponentially increases the workload for everyone.
Labor-based grading claims to avoid that trap, and yet its own accountability measures (attendance, participation, assignment completion) still contribute to burnout. I feel compassionate toward students who are trying to work multiple jobs to pay for their education and have even more limited time as a consequence. I can see how gaming the system becomes a survival strategy for some of them.
Would that be somewhere in the middle? I've never tried it personally, but I find the idea appealing, particularly for a critical thinking course, which has easily grasped and objective measures of success.
It ends up being more of a transaction-- you pay the school money, I give you an A. Do this however many times, and you get your product (a degree). Then again, these days that’s how colleges and even universities are set up. I don’t know that that’s even the students doing this but how the schools are innately structured.
I would contest the word "innate." The source is external, as noted before on this blog.
Students around here expect this kind of setup, and the state-level administrators actively encourage it. It's caused more than a little tension between the feeder community colleges and the public universities here, not the least because the state, Iowa, forces the public universities to accept the complete package of credits regardless of any concerns about their quality. Unsurprisingly, the transfer graduation rate at my college (they graduated from the CC and the transfer college) hovers between the upper 20s and lower 30s percentage.
Being a touch cynical, part of the issue is just how transactional a given transfer institution is willing to be, and how much the publics push back against the state (which is heavily weighted to a transactional model).
The same was true when I was in Texas. I hear the same from Michigan.
Yeah you’re right--it’s not innate as much as it is currently constructed to be so, changed maybe. It wasn’t nearly this transactional when I first started back in ‘01.
To be fair ... there's not that much practical difference in a lot of places.
My practical concern is that too many of my colleagues just give in, and phone-in their jobs. Easier to do at a CC than a Uni. So, that both throws the students and colleagues trying to resist under the bus.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I love the reflective, humanist response that Elbow brings to teaching. I remember "teaching" a year-long course on reflective practices sponsored by the Iowa Writing Project for a handfull of middle and high school teachers. We reflected and responded to each other. They were stunning; I learned so much. Another teacher/mentor/writer I found life-changing was Ken MacRorie. His approach (this was before Theory) is perhaps best explained in "A Vulnerable Teacher." I know his notion of vulnerability has found other advocates along the way. I suppose we should just embrace the contraries involved in labor-based and compentence-based grading and do our best, conscious of the fact that our notion of competence is necessarily defined by time and culture and subject to change. But if someone wants to change the culture, one needs to know it.
Intriguing topic. I’m enjoying reading through all of your astute responses. It’s a challenging conundrum, the necessity or lack thereof of grades in education. It does seem we need clear and obvious expectations, as many have said. But are grades specifically the correct approach? I don’t know. Thanks for the inquiry!
One problem for the grader is that grades do two things--judge and motivate (or at least provide some kind of emotional charge). Rubrics certainly clarify the judging part of the grading activity, both for the teacher and the student. The difficulty for both participants, however, lies with the often unpredictable but overwhelming emotional response to the grade. We (I did anyway) spend a lot of time and emotional energy worrying about how the grade will be received. There's just no way to get around it no matter how much we explain that this grade is just one snapshot of one product. And the only grade that seemed to produce a positive emotional response was an A.
As an experiment in one of my classes, I announced that everyone would get an A if they "did the work" and managed to "meet the standards of writing competence." OK, it was admittedly a niche course, a partial credit course called "Teaching Writing" designed for highly motivated, upper-level English majors who wanted to be tutors in our writing lab. It worked quite well and students seemed to go above and beyond the standards set out in the course description. Some even wrote me later to say that they found themselves farther ahead of their colleagues in grad school who were floundering as untrained TAs. But all this was a long time ago now.
Certainly the institution and the culture generally expect some kind of ranking from the academic experience, and clearly some people perform better than others (in specific, well-defined aeas). The students in Humanities are trickier to evaluate than in some STEM fields because we're also always implicitly evaluating their cultural capital, or theirs against ours. The emotional toll of these nuances, as another responder below has noted, are long-lasting, damaging, but perhaps, in the end a means to help others do better.
Since you like football, I'm reminded of a story which is probably not true. It is said that at the end of the practice season Vince Lombardi lined up all his players and simply asked the starters to step forward. They did. Let the analogies begin...
Walter, your Teaching Writing course has some affinities with labor-based grading. I don't mean to goad you into polemics, but I'm curious about your thoughts on whether the damaging toll of grading has roots in racism, patriarchy, and other social ills? I don't think any of us like being in the position of judging others, and yet there does seem to be an expectation of doing something like that for quality control: for assessment, for accreditation, possibly for external audiences. Competitive scholarships, graduate school and professional school admissions, and sometimes employment seem contingent on GPA -- there's the ranking piece of it -- yet grades are often so inflated, or doled out inconsistently, that I wonder how much GPA matters.
There are some intractably difficult questions here about how much latitude an instructor ought to have to determine formal evaluation within the confines of a particular course and whether the instructor bears any responsibility to others who will interpret the grades given in particular ways.
I'm struck by the insight that Ta-Nehisi Coates has given me when he said that racism is mother of race (and not the other way around as I was conceiving of it). So, to the extent that racism, and all the other "isms" that have hardened into the ideologies that contribute to our culture (a culture?), yes, grading is a part of the social fabric (ills and all) that define us. The only saving grace here, is a rigorous educational system, perhaps only possible under liberal democracies, that promulgates the two contradictory purposes for education: passing on the "culture" and interrogating the "culture." We (legislative bodies and boards) need to have faith in a system that allows for the process of discovering truth where ever that takes us.
Yeah, I don't think GPAs matter very much.
Does anyone still read or remember Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries"? I'm thinking that there might be some good things left in there.
I quite agree, Walter, that interrogating the culture is necessary...and that it can coexist with preserving some revised version of the culture. Some of that feels more zero sum these days. Elbow is great. Incidentally, he started the movement that is now manifesting as labor-based grading. But I think his argument is still relevant: http://mjreiff.com/uploads/3/4/2/1/34215272/elbow_embracing.pdf
I graduated from one of the few colleges that doesn’t use grades and never did. We had narrative evaluations at semester’s end, and each assignment included actual comments, in ink, from our professors. I have never taught at a school (alas) that had done away with grades. Currently: I cannot figure out the point of grades. They feel inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless. Rubrics, clear expectations, class-time discussions about assignments and the work can and should happen. But what is the point of grades?
I think most of us who give letter grades also give a great deal of narrative feedback. But as Jenn suggests, we often find that students focus more on the score than on the nuances that we provide. Perhaps your suggestion is that the score gets in the way of the more substantive suggestions?
The other question I've posed to Walter above is how one's academic record might be interpreted by others outside a particular institution. Did your college graduate everyone in roughly equal academic standing, with no distinctions such as honors or summa/magna/cum laude? If so, did you find yourself at a disadvantage while competing for teaching positions, or did you feel that you were able to demonstrate your competency in other ways?
The rub in labor-based grading -- which isn't quite what you're describing with narrative evaluations -- is that there is no measurement of competency. But it sounds like you believe in measuring academic competence. What happened at your college if a student failed to meet the minimum expectations of an assignment or of the course? If not a failing grade, what academic record did a student in that situation receive?
Indeed, I have found (over a 28-year career) that the score, grade, mark, number (or any other euphemism) gets in the way of the potential interchange that could result from written feedback/conversation about the student's work, ideas, etc. I began offering students a 'no feedback' option (just a grade and summary comment), a 'half feedback' option (with some in-text comments and a summary comment), and a 'full feedback' option (with in-text comments about the writing itself, plus the ideas/arguments, and a summary comment). Most chose half feedback. The actual grade still mattered most.
In a system that has been based on grades since at least first grade, it is challenging for students to disentangle themselves from that system.
My college had no merit-based statuses or standings, no honors societies, no inductions into anything. We were allowed to choose what went into the large portfolio our registrar submitted to grad schools or jobs or whatever. The typical objects included in that portfolio: final course evaluations, written by our (amazing) professors; reflective short essays about our substantive work across our years in college; professor review committee reports (we chose the professors, they worked with us for 2-6 semesters, typically); evaluations written by internship supervisors, colleagues, etc. The only place where I was disadvantaged was in my attempt to gain admittance to Top-10 PhD programs. There, my GRE scores were of paramount importance, and my quantitative scores tanked me (despite my exceptional evaluations by research methods professors). Once in graduate school, I got the same grade inflated marks as my cohort, and I found that getting job offers was more connected to my actual teaching demos and research talks.
I do believe in measuring 'academic competence,' yes. If I am inviting students to learn something about social science research, then, for example, I need to see their competence at, say, conducting ethical research. What does 'ethical' mean? How do we protect our 'human subjects'? Why do we engage in research with humans?
All this said: I am (sadly) really really disillusioned with higher ed in the US. I think the question of what grades do and are for is the tip of the iceberg of the problem here.
Agree wholeheartedly: "I think the question of what grades do and are for is the tip of the iceberg of the problem here." But I think this is increasingly true everywhere. I spoke to a professor at Charles University in Prague this summer, and he felt that things like assessment and transactional attitudes had taken over his work, too. That was rather crushing for me, because Prague seems like such a haven for the arts.
Some say grades and test scores offer ways for students without other privileges to get noticed. Take them away, and social and cultural inequities carry the day. Obviously others emphasize the bias built into things like the GRE. I took the GRE three times, and my top and bottom scores were 100 points apart (quite a percentile difference). I also dropped a pre-law major because all of the courses had multiple choice exams. Had those exams been essay-based, I might have persisted and even thrived. I'm not sure there is a system of education anywhere that doesn't cater to some learning styles while marginalizing others. And the European model of the sage on the stage with the high-stakes paper or exam at the end is by no means superior. A great deal depends on the relationship between teacher and student.
I suppose some of my other remarks about whether it's possible to charge tuition for courses without formally evaluating the academic work in some way might seem crass. But for some students with limited means, attending a university that did not record a conventional transcript, or that did not recognize distinction in any way, could feel like an enormous risk. As I've written elsewhere, making higher education affordable and accessible, so a college major did not feel like such a high-stakes financial decision, could assuage many of these concerns. But a lot of students can't afford to *not* care about a grade. That shouldn't mean that they care about nothing else, of course, and it's discouraging that more do not choose your full feedback option.
I would add to inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless, that they are also destructive of creativity, and shift the attention from actual intrinsic value of the work at hand to the abstracted value of "some letter" and "some number."
Curious if you find narrative evaluation to be similarly inequitable, superficial, arbitrary, and useless? My interest is less than giving scores than it is in the process by which we evaluate academic achievement. Letter grades and numerical scores are easy targets. This thought experiment began with an honest question about how any institution can justify charging tuition for courses in which there is no formal evaluation of writing quality. It seems to me that without some kind of evaluation, there is little more than a good faith assumption. As a Romantic, I prefer good faith assumptions to coercive measures. But I'm also mindful of the vulnerability of humanities disciplines to institutional hierarchy and external influences, like state legislatures, where it seems like creativity for creativity's sake is not a persuasive argument. It's possible that we're talking about two different things: what the ideal conditions are for teaching and learning, versus how we make a public case for the arts and humanities?
I'd have to make a list of all the underlying assumptions that I disagree with :) (I won't because that would be annoying of me.)
I work in an institution that assigns grades, and I assign grades. I make sure my students know that this is the system we're in and we can still operate within it without having to drink the kool-aid and believe that any of it "means" something.
People learn when they have experiences. Education means opportunities for conversation, argument, analysis, discovery, recognition, beauty, whimsy, humor, and so much more.
Every time I see someone actually learning, I see them doing it despite grades, not because of them.
I think we largely agree. Although you remind me of an experience I had as a first-year student when I played a little game called not reading the assigned texts. I attended class faithfully and listened carefully, even participated enthusiastically, and wrote a perfect Blue Book exam at midterm. 100 percent. I went to the professor afterward and asked for suggestions, because I felt cheated -- in a childish way I was hoping that he would make me do the work, like a toddler flirting with forbidden behavior. But of course I realized that I was only cheating myself, and so my attitude toward preparation for class changed a great deal afterward. I suppose one might read that anecdote as a symptom of what is wrong with grades-based education: that it produced a shortcut-taking student like me. But it's also true that I learned something by having that experience: grades weren't any guarantee that I was learning anything, and an A was no guarantee that I was learning all that I could. So you might say that in a backward way my approach to learning thereafter was *because* of one grade? :)
Otherwise, I think what you describe is what we all aspire to achieve within our imperfect systems: opportunities for experience, shifting from the "have-to" to real ownership.
Another pithy anecdote: My office neighbor in graduate school was a Jewish woman who had been a lecturer for many years. She told me that as an undergraduate one of her professors gave her a B. She went to him and said, "But I did everything you asked." And he said, "Indeed -- that is all you did." Perhaps that lesson could have been learned another way, and maybe it was a paternalistic and cruel way to deliver it. But she didn't remember it that way...
Why would it be paternalistic or cruel? That implies the grade wields a power that it does not. And when you get an A without trying you SEE that the Grade Has No Clothes -- at that point, how do you carry on caring? Imagine how much insight was never attained because it was thought exceeding what was necessary to get an A. :) Learning is limitless as a mother's love.
Also consider how arbitrary these standards are: what is considered "excellent writing" for college students would not be published in most magazines. Most "bosses" don't want thesis-driven arguments from their underlings -- that shit'll probably get you fired. Meanwhile I've seen rubrics that deduct a point each for "errors" that arguably aren't even actually errors ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ just narrow matters of style.
We operate in a miasma of lies about objective standards of excellence or workplace practicality, but then it always seems to come back to the simple exercise of power. Rotten frames piled on rotten frames. Power and its appeasement is part of human society, that's real, but so are curiosity, innovation, and the honing of skills -- when is a doctor done "practicing"? When is the cellist "good enough" to stop trying to get better? When has the writer learned everything any writer ever needs to know? "Never" is the only answer.
We have to dodge these "systems" to do anything true, real, and meaningful. Which is frankly exactly how the "real world" works, too, so what better preparation for "real life" is there? You have a life. You live in a system that will try to impose itself on your life, and reduce it and quantify it and exploit it. How you respond to these conditions -- whether you are cunning and/or brave and/or stubborn enough to dodge or jiujitsu or briar-patch them in your favor -- makes your life what it is. Some people will encounter a thousand misfortunes and still be happy. Others are granted every possible gift and still they're sad.
What education should teach us is how to sense the find the boundaries of what we know. what it should train us to do is to explore, observe, and listen when we enter these new unfamiliar realms. What it should inspire us to do is share the joy delight and insight when we encounter them with our fellow humans.
I was the quoted emailer here--I’m happy to continue the conversation. :)
As an adjunct, it’s a special conundrum, as we’re not paid even close to the level of our specialized labor. So how do we grade? And if we grade too hard, do our contracts not get renewed? We’re especially expendable.
This is a conundrum that I never had to face. Though tenure-track faculty face a similar issue before they earn tenure. Too much rigor leads to blowback on student evaluations, which are often the sole measure used for renewing contracts for contingent faculty (despite the strong evidence suggesting that SETs are unreliable measures of teaching effectiveness). Maitland Jones, Jr., is the most prominent recent example, but what happened to him happens in subtler ways to many adjunct faculty every year.
As you say, Jenn, if you're getting paid $4-5K for an entire semester, there is a cost-benefit question regarding how much attention to grading is justifiable, especially if you're stringing 4-5 courses together to pay the bills.
Exactly--it does end up just not being worth it. Is that fair to the student trying to learn something? Maybe not, but then a good portion of the time, they’re actually not trying to do that at all, they’re just trying to finish their transaction as quickly as possible.
Fairness really ought to work both ways.
...$4000 or $5000 for a part-time per course adjunct colleague is probably a lot more than most are being paid...!
Yup—I get around $3000 per.
Ouch -- many places are trying to aim a little higher, but that's a brutal rate.
It was $1800 when I adjuncted in Houston, and a quick look shows that it's only a few hundred more now, about $2200.
It's $2700 here, and that's the highest rate in the state for CCs. Despite the fact that the local cost of living in this town is major metropolitan areas.
Well, I wasn't going to mention this, but I was offered $2,000 recently for a graduate school course. I asked for $3,000 and was granted it initially, before learning that the department didn't even have the original $2,000 to offer. So it's being cobbled together now without me. Some might say it's just a market reality, but it is dispiriting to see such paltry compensation for real expertise.
I earned $4500 to adjunct in 1996. When my PhD was granted (in 1997), the institution automatically gave me a raise, to $5000. It is abominable, to say the least, that adjunct colleagues are paid so little, and most receive no money for prep time before the term begins, or for student consults, reference letters, etc post-term. (And, uh, no job security, plus union-busting management IF the adjuncts have or start unions.)
And no office, and no health insurance. And if a full-timer gets a class cancelled due to low enrollment, they can yoink the adjunct’s class out from under them and give it to the FT. And that’s for a position that requires a high-level (read: expensive) degree and specialized expertise. It’s ridiculous. Abominable is actually a good word.
Mmm valid points ❤️
Rubrics do improve the quality of clarifying expectations, and anyone who claims that they speak to privilege is deeply misguided. How can one meet an uncommunicated expectation?
As a first generation college student, and even later in graduate school, I struggled precisely because I didn't have the social or cultural capital of my peers, who knew what questions to ask, who to ask them to, and who presented as young scholars because they knew what that would look like. Never were the expectations explicit, and when I started asking, faculty thought less of me for asking because to them it indicated my unfitness rather than their utter lack of explicit expectations.
Now, years later, I still see that problem in my students and with my colleagues, nationally. At more privileged and closed institutions, I see it in vague expectations that require students to lean heavily on their faculty, and the better faculty see them through. But this privileges social and cultural capital. At less privileged and open institutions, I too often see vague expectations but easy grading, as these are institutions that reward butts and seats and ease.
Over the years, I've noted the wide gap between collegiate habitual practice, in the humanities at least, and what scholars and devotees of pedagogy recommend. It's quite maddening, actually, for those of us who care about our students, and in my case, want to help them avoid the pitfalls I faced.
This is my own thinking. I wrote about it a while back in my review of Tara Westover's memoir. She, too, was judged as inferior for asking questions that everyone else thought should be obvious. And yet she was also the beneficiary of these vague expectations. One of her mentors decided that she belonged in a study abroad program at Cambridge, and then her mentor at Cambridge decided that she belonged in a Ph.D. program at Harvard. In neither case did she understand how to earn her way into those communities -- someone just ushered her through the gate.
I am a fan of Gerald Graff's and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say / I Say because the book makes some of these hidden expectations visible. My feeling was similar to Jason's: that helping students master rhetorical moves that I did not fully understand until I was in graduate school would help them avoid my own mistakes and blindness. But I'm aware that social and cultural capital still carry the day in many quarters.
A friend of mine got into NYU and Cornell that way. She just happened to make friends with a high ranking administrator. She's brilliant, of course, but that is rarely what opens the door.
Likewise, I write a lot of guides for my students trying to educate them even about unspoken expectations. For instance, I wrote them a guide on how to answer standardized questions as they tend to respond to quiz questions with pop culture rather than material-related responses, to try to Google comprehension and application questions, etc. In this case, the hidden expectation is an expectation of metacognitive skills gained through a decent education system ... which is becoming rarer and rarer in the US these days.
I would concur; grades are a means to an end, but not the end. Part of the problem is, though, is that grades are a means to facilitate education, whereas too often students take them to be a means to graduation and a good job. My students overwhelmingly try to shortcut their education to achieve high grades, and the systematic and pervasive nature of their behavior indicates that their prior education has trained them to adopt this posture.
This is the Catch-22 that labor-based grading tries to avoid (unsuccessfully, in my opinion). Avoidance behavior and shortcuts stem from the punitive side of grading: complete this assignment, or else. Good teachers are able to shift the focus away from the punitive forms of accountability toward intrinsic motivation. But even the best-intentioned student struggles to give the maximum effort on every assignment if they are taking 4-5 courses at a time. Grading is the enemy of the most natural sources of motivation -- autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Yet most undergraduates lack the maturity to claim their education in this way without the extrinsic rewards and consequences. Most faculty respond to disengagement from their students (which may be the result of being spread too thin already) by demanding more from them, and this exponentially increases the workload for everyone.
Labor-based grading claims to avoid that trap, and yet its own accountability measures (attendance, participation, assignment completion) still contribute to burnout. I feel compassionate toward students who are trying to work multiple jobs to pay for their education and have even more limited time as a consequence. I can see how gaming the system becomes a survival strategy for some of them.
What about specifications grading?
Would that be somewhere in the middle? I've never tried it personally, but I find the idea appealing, particularly for a critical thinking course, which has easily grasped and objective measures of success.
It ends up being more of a transaction-- you pay the school money, I give you an A. Do this however many times, and you get your product (a degree). Then again, these days that’s how colleges and even universities are set up. I don’t know that that’s even the students doing this but how the schools are innately structured.
I would contest the word "innate." The source is external, as noted before on this blog.
Students around here expect this kind of setup, and the state-level administrators actively encourage it. It's caused more than a little tension between the feeder community colleges and the public universities here, not the least because the state, Iowa, forces the public universities to accept the complete package of credits regardless of any concerns about their quality. Unsurprisingly, the transfer graduation rate at my college (they graduated from the CC and the transfer college) hovers between the upper 20s and lower 30s percentage.
Being a touch cynical, part of the issue is just how transactional a given transfer institution is willing to be, and how much the publics push back against the state (which is heavily weighted to a transactional model).
The same was true when I was in Texas. I hear the same from Michigan.
Yeah you’re right--it’s not innate as much as it is currently constructed to be so, changed maybe. It wasn’t nearly this transactional when I first started back in ‘01.
To be fair ... there's not that much practical difference in a lot of places.
My practical concern is that too many of my colleagues just give in, and phone-in their jobs. Easier to do at a CC than a Uni. So, that both throws the students and colleagues trying to resist under the bus.
True 🔥
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I love the reflective, humanist response that Elbow brings to teaching. I remember "teaching" a year-long course on reflective practices sponsored by the Iowa Writing Project for a handfull of middle and high school teachers. We reflected and responded to each other. They were stunning; I learned so much. Another teacher/mentor/writer I found life-changing was Ken MacRorie. His approach (this was before Theory) is perhaps best explained in "A Vulnerable Teacher." I know his notion of vulnerability has found other advocates along the way. I suppose we should just embrace the contraries involved in labor-based and compentence-based grading and do our best, conscious of the fact that our notion of competence is necessarily defined by time and culture and subject to change. But if someone wants to change the culture, one needs to know it.
❤️❤️❤️
Intriguing topic. I’m enjoying reading through all of your astute responses. It’s a challenging conundrum, the necessity or lack thereof of grades in education. It does seem we need clear and obvious expectations, as many have said. But are grades specifically the correct approach? I don’t know. Thanks for the inquiry!
Michael Mohr
‘The Incompatibility of Being Alive’
https://reallife82.substack.com/