Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about grades. This is at least mildly ironic, seeing as how this is the first year since 1987 that my primary purpose in life hasn’t been the biannual production of a piece of paper containing a list of course names followed by the letter ‘A’. Graduating from the rather plebeian class of people who exist only to be graded feels pretty good…or at least it did right up until the point I realized that the group I’ve been graduated into is even more unfortunate. Instead of receiving grades, I now find myself in the unenviable position of being forced to give grades, and to my surprise and horror it’s becoming clear that I have absolutely no idea how to go about it.
For one thing, I’ve never liked the idea of curves. In a class where every student learns all the material, why should anyone get less than an A? Likewise, there are clearly some minimum standards for competency, and if those standards aren’t met by any student, why should anyone be allowed to pass? Conversely, if every student masters all of the required material, the course should have been more rigorous. Similarly, if nobody’s learning anything, whoever was responsible for the instruction should probably be fired (or at least shot a couple of times).
If curves are bad, assigning arbitrary point cutoffs seems worse. Does a student with an 89.9 really deserve a different letter grade than a student with a 90? Should cutoffs be published up front so that students can determine the minimal amount of work necessary to earn a certain grade? Alternatively, should students be kept completely in the dark about where they stand in the class? In many cases, the best student in a large class is several orders of magnitude ahead of the second best student: is it fair to give the two grades which are separated by at most a few percentage points? Is it really fair to all students to lower the letter grade cutoffs at the end of the quarter?
Even if one could determine a good algorithm for computing grades, there’s still the question of what exactly we’re supposed to be grading. It isn’t clear to me how much fact memorization should count compared to, say, the ability to apply concepts to new problems. I’ve always thought that the primary function of education is to train people to think critically about difficult topics, but even the best critical mind won’t be much use if it doesn’t know anything.
Another problem is that some students will do well no matter what challenges are placed in front of them, and others will fail to learn no matter how alluring and accessible the course material is made to be. Some of this has to do with motivation and work ethic, and some of it is merely a question of intelligence. Society gains maximal benefit from having each of its members as educated as possible, but it also places ultimate value on productivity. What, then, as educators, are we supposed to assess? Biasing grades in favor of intelligence doesn’t seem fair: telling someone that they’re stupid over and over again probably isn’t going to inspire them to live up to their potential, however limited it may be. Grading effort seems equally untenable; your boss doesn’t care if you work two hours a day or twenty: she just wants your work to get done.
The whole affair seems an intractable web of contradictions.
The first time I was a Teaching Assistant (in charge of two lab sections for UIUC’s CS 105), I had my students fill out a mid-year evaluation asking what they liked and disliked about the labs. One of the questions was “Rate the pace of this course from 0 to 5, where 0 is much too slow and 5 is much too fast.” I remember this particular question so well because the average across all my sections was exactly 2.5, a seemingly perfect pace! However, when I looked at the numbers in more detail, I discovered that the standard deviation of the responses was about 2. In fact, just about all of the students hated the speed at which I covered material, but on average their misery cancelled.
This sort of phenomenon seems to be incredibly common in education. Being unable to do things right, we instead attempt to make all of our screw-ups average out.
So, I ask my readers: does anybody know a good way to go about grading? Does anyone have a principled philosophy about evaluating student achievement that they’d care to defend?
