Grades

Quality and effort are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand. Quality should follow effort. These are both subjective terms. Quality is in the eyes of the client or teacher, the adjudicator. Effort can only be judged by the creator. A person can make their own qualitative judgement of their work but in the end his/her opinion does not matter except to defend their work. The client or teacher may look at the amount of “obvious” effort and deem it appropriate or insufficient but this is only based on the judgement of the final product.

One situation I see repeatedly as a teacher is a lot of effort for the wrong or a small aspect of a project. I provide a rubric, making the student aware of exactly what I will be looking for when I grade their final product. Students, especially in the middle grades, will get hung up on one element of the project and forget about everything else. I see them exerting great effort on that one element of the project but the quality of their final product when looked at with the rubric is lacking. Should this effort be rewarded? I think not, considering, as Bryan says above, “...life is about results...”

Grades are arbitrary. It is a quantitative measure of learning, which is not quantifiable. I remember in high school and middle school becoming extremely frustrated because my grades did not reflect my knowledge or abilities. Why? I did not like doing homework. I did quality work on tests and projects but I hated the worksheets and chapter review questions, so I neglected to complete the work. I still hate paper work.

I once told a co-worker that “teaching would be perfect, if I didn’t have to grade.” How am I supposed to tell a sixth grade student that their art was, or was not, good enough? Grades have dropped us into a world where we learn for peanuts. The number on the paper at the end of the marking period is more important than the knowledge and experience. The system (in Texas) evaluates them based on a couple sixty question multiple choice tests. Grades do not instill a love of learning but an attitude of “good enough,” of counting the number of points “I need to get to get an ‘A.’”

How else do we hold students accountable? There is the rub. There must be some way for the admission office to compare people to decide who gets into Harvard. So we grade.