I had a professor...who taught the introduction to tactical engineering course. He said he never bothered changing his tests from term to term to prevent cheating, because while the questions were always the same, the answers changed. I'd thought he was joking. --Miles Vorkosigan in Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold

 

I hear voices in everything. --Mikhail Bakhtin

 

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. --Ursula K. LeGuin, "Introduction," The Left Hand of Darkness

The Nature of Grading

 

My actual feelings about grading depart from my practice. For clarity's sake, I will talk about the two separately here.

 

If Only...

There is a solid faction of teachers, at all levels, who feel that grades are the death of true education. I happen to be one of them. Grades do not, except in very rare and serendipitous circumstances, actually say how much the student has learned in a given class. Rather, they say, quite clumsily, how well the student has been able to demonstrate retention of a narrowly defined body of information (x many stories and accompanying lectures on history/interpretation, which we will mendaciously call a representative sample of American Literature) by means of an equally narrowly defined system of communication (x many papers or short-essay exams). Even worse, because grades are the means by which prospective employers/graduate schools/etc. judge accomplishment, all of a student's motivation is directed toward learning the above mentioned narrow definitions. Thanks to economics, teachers find themselves directed to gear their classes toward said narrow definitions, and the cycle is complete.

Personally, I think this is a criminal waste of both the student's time and mine. If that's the model we're working on, let's admit it and get rid of these allegedly "broadening" requirements. Let's make universities highbrow vocational schools and have done with it.

If, on the other hand, the goals of the university are actually to teach critical thinking and problem solving (the way the brochures say), then we should ditch both exams and grades. It's absurd to think that a grade can measure those skills, or that an exam (which are, after all, basically a call for regurgitation however we may deny it) will allow a student to demonstrate them.

If I had my way in all things universities would not have required classes or grades or exams. Instead, there would be a variety of goals any student might aim for, and a body of classes to help in achieving each goal. The student defines the goals s/he wants to attain and chooses which classes s/he will take in pursuit of those goals. A range of tests, as practical, hands-on and realistic as possible, would be available to any student to take at any time in order to judge how far s/he has come towards the goal in question. How fast the student got through college would depend entirely on that student's discipline. If it takes ten years, well it's the student's money (since, you see, only a certain number of years would be funded by other means which is a whole different essay).

When I'm elected queen of the world things will work that way. In the meantime...

 

At The Moment

My grading scale is as much a hodgepodge of conflicting priorities as any other teacher's. I tend to put a great deal of weight on essay assignments, because after all I'm teaching lit classes and that involves interpretation. At any rate, I think it should involve interpretation, and that interpretive skills are best shown in essay form. I didn't used to put much emphasis on participation. My basic philosophy is that students who participate will get more out of my classes but that this only works if the participation is free-willed. Forced participation does nothing besides produce anxiety for everyone. If a given student doesn't care about getting anything out of my class, besides in fact out, that's her business and her choice. All my students are adults. I would be perfectly happy to run a sort of combined seminar/lecture in which the eight or so students out of forty who actually care can sit down front with me and have a wonderful discussion-based class while the remaining two thirds listen as they would to a lecture, take notes, regurgitate them on the exam and go away happy with their Cs.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of people who dictate department policy don't seem to agree. Thus my participation grade fluctuates between ten and twenty percent, depending on my mood that term, and I do what I can to encourage everyone to participate at least some.

Of course, when it actually comes time to grade based on these things, that's when conflicting imperatives show up most strongly. On the one hand, I want to encourage with good grades anyone who shows the ability to extrapolate beyond what we have said in class. On the other, my mandate is to measure retention and so my exam questions are geared to elicit a recital of the information given and connections made in my lecture. Failure to repeat this information and those connections back to me rather calls for a low grade under that mandate. I try to strike a balance between these, but it's an uneasy one--as uneasy as the balance my students have to strike between recital and innovation.

 

When are we having the next queen-of-the-world elections, do you think?

 

First Posted: 3/17/2002
Last modified: 08/23/08

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