Grades are detrimental to education

Thank you I'msmarterthanyou98 for accepting my challenge, thank you all who are following this, I will now present my opening case. Contention 1: Grades create stress. The ides that grades engender create stress in two ways. Firstly, grades are effectively a way of linearly comparing a group of people, by comparing their work to a fixed external standard. In doing this, one creates a sense for students of having to measure up to those around them, creating stress. This is a major impact because stress decreases from performance. Few students perform well under stress and most perform poorly. [1] One can see this from a purely psychological and reasonable standpoint in that it causes extraneous thought. When one is stressed, one worries about a failed outcome while preparing for or attempting to achieve a successful one, detracting from ones ability to solve the problem at hand. If one is not measured against an external standard, thought about the outcome goes away. Not only can stress be shown to be detrimental from a psychological standpoint, it is also shown to be detrimental Neurologically. Conditions in which an individual is overstressed lead to activate the fight of flight response, pumping adrenaline into your system. Small amounts of adrenaline keep you focused but large quantities begin to shut down all but the parts of your brain necessary for survival. When constantly living under high stress, one sees everything as a threat, and has trouble focusing on things like schoolwork. Contention 2: Grades discourage students from looking at meaningful feedback, and discourage teachers from giving it. Even if a narrative (or some other form of meaningful feedback) is given, students don’t pay attention to it, and it is often written as a justification of a grade. It is essential in correcting ones mistakes to place a premium on feedback that tells a student what they can do better, and not feedback that tells them where they fit with respect to others. If this is so obvious, one might ask why students don’t just look past the grade? The answer is that grading becomes a lifestyle. Students are taught that they must work hard to get a good grade, and must get a good grade to get into the next level of education because educational specialists believe that all forms of motivation are the same. This overemphasis on and often threat on arbitrary placement and sorting, means that students are taught from a young age that grades are what they are and what they judge themselves by, making meaningful feedback seem irrelevant. Contention 3: Grades harm interest and ambition. [2] When a student receives a grade that does not live up to their standards, they are discouraged from pursuing work in that field. A student who gets a bad grade in math for example, may think, “I’m interested in math, but I’m not good at it, maybe I shouldn't take advanced math classes.” Students have two reasons to come to this conclusion due to grading. Firstly, they are dissuaded because of the possibility that further grades may be bad, lowering their GPA and making it harder to progress into a desired institution for the next stage of their education. Even if a students bad grade comes from external circumstances or if the student was merely behind because of a class that did not prepare them earlier in life, the result is the same. With the way that most grades are doled out; someone who made use of their skills from a disadvantaged position to attempt to solve a problem but failed, will receive the same mark as one who makes little use of the wealth skills they have; and fails anyway. Taking away grades forces teachers to give meaningful feedback about student work and effort. Secondly; grades emphasize 2 things: adeptness over interest and precision over creativity. A student with a controversial approach to a problem who gets some minor calculation or detail slightly wrong thinks that they had better not go into the field in which they failed, because grades teach that one must be adept. Contention 4: Grades put emphasis on external, extrinsic motivation. Kids are learning not because they are interested, but because they want to be given a good ranking in comparison to others. This type of motivation tends not to interest students in the subject but rather interest them in a grade. In fact, extrinsic motivation has been shown to directly impair intrinsic motivation, and “ A “grading orientation” and a “learning orientation” have been shown to be inversely related and, as far as I can tell, every study that has ever investigated the impact on intrinsic motivation of receiving grades (or instructions that emphasize the importance of getting good grades) has found a negative effect.” [3] Contention 5: Grading fosters individuality and detracts from interaction, as well as promoting cheating. Because of the intrinsic competition involved in grading (especially grading on a curve,) students are encouraged to compete rather than to work together. If you work with Johnny, and it turns out you understand the material better than him, then he will benefit from your knowledge, and drag your grade down. Collaboration has been shown to be an integral part of student learning, and has been shown to raise intrinsic motivation, cognitive functioning, and retention of information, as well as decreasing racism. [4] Conversely, the pressure often leads students to cheat, so as to do as well as (or better than their piers.) [5] Contention 6: External standards do not allow for teaching to outliers. With a grade based system it is difficult to teach to children that are either far above average or far below average. A student that is far above average is given an A, and rewarded for what is simple to them, where they should be being pushed and challenged. Every detail should be explained to them. Conversely, a student with a D or an F is discouraged and, instead of having the general picture explained to them comes away with a sense of disappointment and dislike. Contention 7: Grades foster rote memorization over creativity, and put arbitrary standards on creative processes. In any system grades will be somewhat arbitrary, especially in the humanities, but it is hard to grapple with that rationally as a young kid. A kid receiving a B from a class with a more difficult professor that a friend receives an A in with a different professor, assumes that they can not work at the same level as their pier. To account for this, schools tend towards rote memorization. It is easier to see if Student A is better than Student B, if both teachers give a grade on a vocabulary quiz, rather than a piece of creative writing and or an analytical essay. This has results in horrible curriculum standards, especially in STEM fields. To create a level playing field and make sure kids are learning the same things, they assign a curriculum that everyone can take standardized tests on. This allows for people's results to be quantized, even if the tests are arbitrary and meaningless. In the field of mathematics especially, most students must get to college or even grad school before they actually start doing proofs, research and creative work. This deters students from taking math, and gives the impression that math is a field only used as a tool. The same is done with many of the sciences. Contention 8: Grades promote focus on easy problems, and detract from willingness to challenge oneself. Lets say that a student were to have a homework assignment with 10 problems, and had only one hour to complete the assignment. Now assume that 5 of the problems take from 3-5 minutes, making them comparatively easy to get done, but 3 of the remaining problems take 5 to 10 minutes and the last two take 10-20. From an interest and educational standpoint, the last two and the three before that are the most important, and all five could probably be done within the hour the student has available. A student with internal motivation about the subject does those five problems, but a student motivated by the need to get a grade does the first 8, completing more problems in less time. By assigning a grade, the teacher detracts from the level of work students engage in. The same is true with the humanities; students are discouraged from writing about topics that are more complicated than necessary because there is a greater chance of failure. This is corroborated by educational psychologists mentioned in my 3rd and 6the sources. Contention 9: Students who are graded tend to forget what they learned more quickly and think in a more superficial manner. 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. It follows that once their objective is completed, the knowledge becomes unnecessary, as it is no longer necessary to obtain a grade. It also follows that students are less likely to engage with material, thinking only about what they need to know for a test and not about what a particular passage means in the grand scheme of things, or how a text relates to the world. In a study “students told they’d be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved. Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later.” (Grolnick and Ryan, 1987) [6] Thank you, please vote Pro [1] http://www.apa.org... [2] http://www.bbc.com... [3] http://www.alfiekohn.org... [4] http://www.ccsstl.com... [5] www.mendhamboro.org/cms/lib02/NJ01000391/Centricity/ModuleInstance/638/Anderman_et_al._1998_-_Motivation_and_cheating.pdf [6] http://www.alternet.org...