The Case Against Grades
Comments(2) I personally think our focus should be less on the case against grades but the case for grades with meaning. I think everyone has had the experience where they had a paper or an assignment or test returned to them and it had a big fat “B” or “C” on the front. And you thought to yourself “Well what the heck, this paper was totally ‘A’ material.” You flip through the pages and see various grammatical corrections and the odd sentence rearrangement here or there and a couple notes saying “I love your point here, but it seems vague to me”. More or less it’s a bunch of nonsense and leaves you wondering why you got the grade you got. Meanwhile the person next to you who wrote on the same topic writes a masterpiece and gets a gold star and set of balloon stickers floating around their “A” they received making you feel like a nobody. Here’s the thing, I believe certain students deserve better grades then others, I mean if one kid does all their homework and assignments as asked and the other does nothing, yeah I’m going to mark them accordingly. I think the discrepancy lies in two important factors: student progress/effort and expectations. When we are going to assess a student we better darn well tell them what we expect, If i’m looking for a lab report I’m going to say I want the following criteria, with the following expectations and a model example for them to work from. It’s about setting a bar and a standard for them to work towards and exceed! If you don’t tell them what you won’t or how you want it, very few will hit the mark that you have set in your head and forget to let everyone know about. The other factor is progress/effort, honestly there are a lot of kids who work their butts off to get a C in a certain course after starting the year around a D or F, I think that should be celebrated and put on a silver platter indicating their achievement. Because lets face it not everyone is good at everything, but effort to excelling in something you are down right terrible at deserves recognition. How I will incorporate that into my assessment in whether it is formative or summative I have yet to discover, but I will try my best to find a place where it fits.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/lled360/2013/12/02/the-case-against-grades-3/#respond
I like the distinction and phrase you use –– “grades with meaning.” I’ve had that exact experience you lay out where I received a paper back with little comments scattered throughout my paper and a final mark slapped on at the end, leaving me pondering what was going on.
Therefore I think the use of rubrics, criteria, and example papers are crucial. I remember that, even though this was in university, my first year English proff did a great job of scaffolding us to our large end-of-term paper by assigning various smaller papers that would increase in length and depth of analysis over time. The best part was that in assessing us, she always provided us with an example paper and rubrics! She would weight our later papers more than our smaller ones because that would have given us enough time to develop our skills and become more familiar with the content.
I think that was a positive experience for me and my fellow students because the feedback, the scaffolding, the understanding of the criteria––led to some quality work from us but also no surprises on the assessment front.
So I think that is perhaps one way you and I could think about incorporating it into our practice––scaffolded assignments that work up to a final large assignment that builds upon all the previous assignments and skills. All the while, proving continuous, transparent, and informative feedback.
I agree with your points. I also think teachers should be careful with the way they assess. I remember back in high school (even in undergraduate courses) I have encountered so many written questions on exams that rather than marking the quality of the response the number of “key words” mentioned in the response were counted and marked instead. I remember just panicking during some of my biology exams where the key words just blanked out from my mind during exam, and despite how well I am able to explain the concept, the word is not there the mark is not there. This happens in high schools often as well and in a way this makes assessment fair for all students, because marking the quality of writing and explanation can become subjective at times. At the same time, I really do not think this style of assessment produces results that is representative of students learning.
I also agree with celebrating effort. For me, I will be introducing certain components of the course that takes into account for individual effort and group work. I will also consider re-tests for individuals if they agree to attend extra workshops either during lunch time or after school.