Learning should be more important then grades

Thanks for the topic itsmanuela. ==Defintions== The dictionary defines "grade" as affixing a "rank, quality, proficiency, intensity, or value." I will negate the resolution by arguing, alternatively, that: (1) grades are more or *equally* important as learning or (2) that grades are such an important proxy for learning that the two concepts cannot coherently be separated. The following is my case for why grades are important. ==Why are grades important?== (1) 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. (2) Grades provide a signal to others When a high school student applies to college, one major factor that the admissions office considers is: 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). (3) Grades are an important motivator When grades do not exist, students often feel like the assignment does not matter. [1] Compare results of students on graded and ungraded assignments, and you will see a huge gap in effort for most students (if they do the ungraded assignment at all). Grades signal to students that the assignment should be taken seriously [although grades do not have to be the *only* motivator that a teacher uses, they are an important tool in the toolbox]. (4) Grades mimic real-world meritocracy-based systems When a student moves on the job-world, he or she will be evaluated based on some objective metric of performance. A salesperson's performance is measured by the total number of sales that the person makes over given period of time. A CEO's performance is measured by the performance of the company's stock over his or her tenure. A surgeon's performance is measured by how many successful versus botched surgeries he or she performs. Students are going to be measured in the job-world, and their ability to advance in their careers and receive raises will be contingent on their ability to get feedback and to adapt to that feedback. A student who gets a C and learned to change it to an A gets an important life lesson. A student who always gets all A+'es and then gets a B in his or her first college course and uses this experience to learn not to slack in order to continually achieve excellence in life also learns an important lesson. (5) It is incoherent to talk about "learning" without discussing grading My opponent talks repeatedly about how students should care more about whether they are learning rather than getting more than a 50% on a test. However, a student who cannot answer more than 50% of the math questions correctly has not actually learned enough of the material to be proficient in math. My opponent claims that someone is more likely to remember their grades from a course than their actual learning. However, I disagree. Personally, I don't remember the exact grades I got in middle school, but I remember how to do algebra; I remember the grammar rules I learned in English class; I remember genetics and the fruit fly experiments we did in biology class. And yet I distinctly remember times where I didn't *want* to study for those classes, but I did anyway because I was afraid of getting bad grades and jeopardizing my future. Grades were an important motivator for the substantive learning and the only way to actually measure whether I had learned the subject matter. So 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 at least important as learning because they are a key proxy for learning and the concept of whether a student has "learned" something in a class is so *intertwined* with grading that it does not make sense to talk about learning without talking about grades (whether grading means letter grades, class rank, percentages, or even qualitative comparisons). [1] http://etale.org...