Grades are detrimental to education

Rebuttals 1.Grades create stress Great. Recent research that suggests stress has many benefits. Moderate stress can lead to cell growth in the brain’s learning centers In this 2013 study out of University of California, Berkeley, adult rats were immobilized in a small space for three hours or left unchanged. Two days and then two weeks later, the rats were given a fear-conditioning test, which evaluates the rats freezing or avoidance behavior when in a context that last lead to a negative consequence such as a shock. The measure is known as ‘fear extinction memory.’ The immobilized rats showed an increased level of the stress hormone corticosterone (the rat equivalent of cortisol in humans) as well as an increased growth of neural stem cells in their hippocampus, an important learning center of the brain. As compared to the control group, these rats had similar results on the fear extinction memory test given two days after the initial stressor, but showed significant improvement on the test after two weeks. The authors put fourth that these newly proliferated cells, after taking multiple days to integrate to fullest capacity, helped in learning at this improved level. Overall, it suggests that moderate levels of stress enhanced neural function and learning. Source. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... 2. Feed back. As I stated in my opening case. 3.Grades provide feedback to the student Students might *feel* that they understand the material or that they are learning. However, that subjective feeling must be tested by some objective, external measurement. A student that *thinks* has learned the material may have a rude awakening when he takes a quiz and scores 20/100. Without this external feedback, the student would never know whether he truly understood. Psychological studies have found that all people have a natural bias to believe that they are above average. For students, this translates to most students believing that they have above average knowledge of the subject matter. Without external feedback to dissipate this bias, students that don't really understand the material would not realize that they need to study more or harder. 7. This is irrelevant to the issue at hand. This is mainly a case against standardized tests however a creative piece of writing may also be graded according to a rubric which may make student work harder to accomplish everything in the rubric and get a high grade. Tests may foster rote memorization but not grades. 8. Again grades provide the student something to work towards perhaps the student doesn’t want to learn but the fear of failing encourages him and makes him finish the 5 problems which in turn may make him interested in the subject. 9. Students working for a grade view knowledge as something that must be internalized in order to achieve a high mark, instead of something that can be intriguing when discussed and grappled with. Again this has to do with issues in TESTS and not grades. Tests perhaps should be given in different formats to encourage more critical thinking or have a class discussion which is also graded. For example I have had class discussions that have been graded. 4. However they are still learning and without grades they would not WANT to learn at all without that extrinsic motivator they may not do any work or learn anything at all but with grades they are still learning even if indirectly Furthermore education is ultimately utilitarian. 1.Grades give immediate gratification for hard work & and something tangible to work towards… Grades provide gratification for hard work. As pro pointed out ” People do better in life if they can work towards a more concrete, important goal further down the road” For many people GRADES provide that goal to work towards. 2.2.Efficiency Not only are grades beneficial for students but also teachers greatly benefit from qualitatively quantifying the performance of students. For example letter grading systems provides teachers with concrete and effeicent ways of evaluating mastery of course content by students. Furthermore if a high school student applies to college, one major factor that the admissions office consider are grades. When college students apply to graduate school, the admissions office again considers grades. When students apply for a job, the employer considers the students grades. Without grades, post-secondary schools and employers will have no way to know whether the student learned the material well or badly. Employers would obviously prefer to hire computer programmers and lawyers who achieved top grades rather than those that received the worst grades because top grades are a proxy for learning. The students with the best grades learned the material better than the other students and are therefore likely to make better workers. UC Santa Cruz, for example, used to have a holistic rating system, where each student merely received an "essay" as feedback from each professor. The campus switched to grades so that graduate schools would have some legitimate way to measure students' performance (against each other and against other students from other schools). As pro pointed out. Grades allow educators to make clear and informed decisions. This benefits EDUCATION. “educators are helped to make decisions” 4. 4. The educational system would crumble without grades. My opponent would have to offer a rival educational system without grades. It is incoherent to talk about whether a student has learned a certain subject matter, without somehow grading their knowledge. Without some tangible form of knowledge, any attempt of a student or teacher to figure out how much a student had learned would be nothing more than a subjective guess based on cognitive bias (such as a teacher saying that students who he or she liked "knew" the material better). Without grades, students that did not talk much during class would likely be marginalized because the teacher would assume they had not learned anything. Thus, I negate the resolution and argue that grades are on the whole necessary and beneficial and the educational system is better with them. Since an essay will be graded according to a rubric if a student met those goals within the rubric the teacher has no choice but to assign the grade deserved.