Grades are detrimental to education

On the subject of grading this debate: There is a difference between a competition and education, and between score and grade. A grade pertains to ones performance in an academic endeavor, but a score pertains to the rating of someone in a competition, like a debate. Saying that people voting on a debate is giving us a grade, is like saying that a soccer game is graded. One indication of this is that anyone who votes can give certain categories to one person and other categories in favor of another, and is not giving an objective rating to each person individually. Rebuttal to point #1: Instant gratification isn’t a good thing. People do better in life if they can work towards a more concrete, important goal further down the road [1. ] This goal can be to learn enough to pursue a career they are interested in, or to learn something interesting about the world. Grades detract from ones ability to think this way because they force people to do less difficult activities. This whole argument plays right into a lot of the contentions that I brought up because all of your ideas focus on the idea that any motivation is as good as any other motivation and that as long as a student is motivated, you are doing something right. The whole point of my fourth contention is to show that extrinsic motivation is detrimental to important intrinsic motivation, as well as bringing a host of other problems with it. In the case you mention with the student Bobby, there are a few things that you don’t account for. Firstly it doesn’t account for the fact that Bobby, instead of being motivated to get the grade, is motivated to get the PS3. This makes things even worse, now getting the A doesn’t give Billy a sense of accomplishment, getting a PS3 does. So now the motivation to succeed in any intellectual way is completely gone. Secondly, this means that Bobby is more likely to forget what he learned, as my earlier study shows. And thirdly Bobby doesn’t do the more difficult problems and doesn’t take intellectual risks because he is only interested in getting the grade. This also means that Bobby doesn’t do more work than is necessary for things that he is interested in because it could harm his A. You state that “Even if this motivates students to learn indirectly they are learning. ” But they aren’t retaining what they are learning, and aren’t learning in a meaningful way, aren’t striving to know more. Grades (along with rote memorization and standardized curriculums and testing) are what Carl Sagan meant when he said “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. ” Kids file knowledge away as ‘learned’ instead of ‘interesting and useful’ and ask questions like ‘will we need to know this for the test’ instead of, can we learn more about that. ­Rebuttal to point #2: I see two problems in this contention. Firstly, this contention is irrelevant. This debate is about whether or not education is benefited, not whether educators are helped to make decisions. Even if you accept that as a valid argument, once again we as a society are putting ease and comfort above education. The other main problem I see with this argument is that the whole idea of needing an objective way of determining between students results in the detraction from the overall quality of the students. It is like a college cutting off a child’s hand and then using how well they can withstand pain. The students who are best at handling get to go to college, but all the students are worse for it because they don’t have a hand. If in setting up a standard on which to choose people, you make everybody worse, it isn’t a good standard. Colleges can look at narratives and work more on the basis of interviews. As fare as your one campus switched argument, the fact that one campus switched doesn’t mean that they were right, or that all non-grading campuses should follow. Hampshire College does not employ grades, and MIT doesn’t grade for freshman year to reduce stress, and foster student’s interest in the subject matter. Rebuttal to point #3: Once again, grades reduce to the least common denominator. You may be able to show students that they aren’t learning well slightly more effectively, but it comes at the cost that on average, all your students will score worse on the quiz, and forget more of the material. Additionally students can tell from their professor’s comments whether or not they understand material, but in this case are motivated to fix what they did wrong because they are interested in the subject, and not merely trying to get a grade. Rebuttal to point #4: Firstly, I don’t see how grades remove a bias. Teachers that are more likely to say that a student they like is better than a student they dislike are also more likely to give a better grade on an essay to a student they like than to one they dislike. Additionally, students who are learning for a grade are less likely to talk because they feel they are constantly being matched up to their classmates and to some arbitrary objective standard, and are therefore more afraid of making mistakes. If class participation is being graded, then students worry about their comments level of complexity, when adding what they have to say to a conversation is the first step to getting their ideas tested and coming up with more complex ones. I personally talk with friends about things that I am not quite sure about, and may seem somewhat absurd, to use them as a sounding board. I have a more interesting, developed, objective standard because I have taken the time to voice my opinions in setting where I don’t feel threatened. As a result of this, I am more confident about stating my ideas in class; I am not worried about a grade, but about having an interesting conversation. In this way, taking away grades gives students spontaneity, creativity and collaboration, all of which are essential. Narratives are just as biased as grades, but they tell more. In conclusion, I would like to state two things. Firstly my opponent’s second third and fourth arguments all rest on the idea that students, teachers colleges and/or parents need a way of discerning whether or not a student is learning, and that the only way to do this is to grade them. Not only have I already stated that there are other alternatives that allow for this, but I have also showed a myriad of ways in which the practice of grading is detriment to students. Unless my opponent can show that these other forms of judgment pose the same detriments to Education, he looses these three points. This follows from the fact that, when comparing my alternative, which doesn’t have any detriments to its name (and is in fact more indicative than just assigning a student a number or letter) and my opponent’s, which does; it is a fairly clear choice in favor of my alternative. Secondly, my opponents first argument is erroneous in that it rests on ideas that I have already disproven, namely that all motivation is equal, and that none is detrimental. If my opponent can not directly show that his form of motivation (grades) do not cause the harms that I have laid out he looses this contention as well. This covers all of my opponent’s contentions. To ensure that students are, on average, more creative, intrigued and intrinsically motivated, and to increase their retention of knowledge, their ambition and their inquisitiveness, I urge a pro ballot, thank you. [1] . https://www.apa.org...