Grading is a controversial topic in education. Let’s briefly explore the two sides.
Arguments in favour of grading
Measuring is fundamental to improving. We want to measure how well someone (even ourselves) is doing something so we can track and understand progress.
Grades give us a standardised way to compare performance. We can use that to create and establish quality standards across different schools and areas.
High grades are connected to satisfaction and respect, a motivator for many students to improve their work and learning processes.
Inverting this, avoiding low grades can be another, additional, motivator, as low grades can be associated with shame and disgrace.
Grades can foster competition among students which can lead to everyone striving for higher quality results.
A grading system gives us a clear and direct way to communicate quality to people outside of our learning institution, or other stakeholders, such as the state.
Arguments against grading
Grades can cause stress to students, which makes them perform worse, not better.
Grades foster extrinsic motivation instead of nurturing intrinsic motivation. For example, grades can enable a student to think “I want to learn X because in this way I will get high scores” instead of “I want to learn X because in this way I will acquire this valuable knowledge”.
Connecting to the point above, since students can sometimes perceive grades to be the goal of a learning process, instead of acquiring knowledge, they are implicitly encouraged to avoid hard to acquire knowledge. An easier project means higher chances of good grades.
Grades have too limited of a form (i.e. a single number) to express the complex reality of one’s skill or understanding of something.
A grading system can encourage competition in a toxic way, for example people contributing to their classmates’ detriment rather than their own betterment.
Grading, depending on how it is done, can be a vehicle for bias.
Navigating synthesis
Choosing a side — so much more as a learning institution — can be hard. But maybe we don’t have to. Different things work for different people. Grades contributed a lot in my learning during primary school but as I went into high school and university, my ego convinced my mind to stop believing in them. It’s important to note that across these three stages of education, I had friends in both sides of the spectrum.
It’s common for grades to be absent in adult courses outside of academia. Shoshin College mostly follows this pattern, yet we also identify as an association of experimentalists. Unless we play with grades, we will not find out whether they work. For better or worse, the answer will not be binary across an unknown number of dimensions. For better or worse, it’s always case-by-case.
Gatekeepers
Judging from the above presentation of arguments in favour and against, we might be tempted to think that whatever the case of when grading comes up, both strategies are viable; as both have benefits and drawbacks.
Yet a common argument of grading advocates is: how can we trust a doctor who hasn’t learned with grades and exams?
To answer, we have to note two distinct purposes of grading: (a) improve learning effectiveness and (b) profession gatekeeping.
In certain domains, the boundary between these two is clear. For example, in law, there is law school and there is the bar. The first serves as a learning place. Even if they use grades and exams, they are not sufficient to become a lawyer. For that, one needs to pass the bar. The bar is also an exam with grades, yet one not intended for learning. The bar is designed for assessment and gatekeeping. Yet there is no bar equivalent for all professions.
With this distinction made clear we can now re-synthesize our argument as follows.
Grades can be conducive to learning, but they don’t have to be. Whether they are depends on the circumstances. To figure out if they are we can look into how they can or cannot be conducive, as discussed in the first section.
Grades are conducive to establishing quality control and this is something we might imperatively need in certain professions (e.g. doctor or pilot) more than others.
Through this lens, as a school we position ourselves as a learning place. This is in contrast to a profession gatekeeping place. Hence, we have no imperative need for grades. We can optionally utilise them in cases where they serve our learning goals.