It’s Time to Ditch the Grade
By: Barbara Decerchio
Tags: Teaching, Education, Education Reform

For the past 12 years, I’ve been an inhabitant of the independent school ecosystem. From my vantage point in technology, I get to interact with a lot of students. Watching them grow up always brings me joy, but seeing them stress over their grades, especially they approach college, always grieves me.

I don’t need empathy to feel this way. As a student in an online college over the past year, I’ve experienced grades first-hand for the first time in over 40 years. And I can tell you, I don’t like them — and here’s why.

At my college, in order to successfully complete a course, students read chapters from an online textbook and take online quizzes. The instructor also requires one original discussion post and two replies to fellow students’ posts on a private forum every week. And then we write a paper.

All of these tasks are traditionally graded, including the discussion posts. But wait a minute. How does one grade a discussion? In my school, instructors grade discussion posts on a 0–40 point scale, based on a rubric having to do with footnoting and number of paragraphs. Even though I know I’m a good writer, I found that as I wrote, that rubric hung over me — not as a guide, but for the sake of the 40 points. Irritating and uncomfortable, the nagging voice of those 40 points distracted me from my writing’s content. Worse, every time I handed in an assignment, I found myself checking my grades to make sure I’d gotten the full 40 points. It became a game: how close to a perfect score could I get by the end of the term?

So it’s not surprising that I was outraged when my instructor once gave me 36 points with neither explanation nor feedback. Not only had I not aced the post, but the lack of feedback made me feel insignificant, as though I were just a cog on an assembly line. The grade felt completely arbitrary. I’d worked so hard on my writing, and received neither an “A” nor an acknowledgement for the missing 4 points.

Why should I, a grownup, worry about a grade? After all, I’m not under pressure to succeed, and I certainly don’t have a parent haunting me. No, I’ve reached the conclusion that the grade was a red herring, a distractor, sapping my attention from the work and refocusing it, instead, on the number.

A grading system is just that: A way to measure, quantify, or compare things. Our brains enjoy compartmentalizing, categorizing, comparing, and sorting. In this regard, grades make our brains happy, but they don’t encourage us to learn. The evidence of this is all around us in schools. Sit in any classroom when a teacher hands back a graded assignment and you will hear kids asking each other, “What grade did you get?”

We are so wedded to the concept of grades that even I struggle to imagine school without them. Students find themselves similarly challenged — many will tell you that they need grades in order to learn. When I ask parents how they would respond to a school that does not assign grades, they’re often taken aback, asking how their child will get into college without them.

Would I have been satisfied without a grade on my discussion post — if instead, my teacher had written a short, thoughtful, and personal response? Absolutely. Pointed, constructive feedback tells a student so much more than a letter or number ever could. Personalized responses are not only conversational, but honest, removing the anxiety and potential stigma of a low grade and giving praise where praise is due. Most importantly, a narrative response is born out of a genuine desire to teach, not a need to quantify.

Of course, crafting personalized narratives takes time, and a lot of it, and who has that? I recognize that eliminating grades may be idealistic. But we need to start unraveling our tightly-woven security blanket somewhere.

Growing up is hard work, fraught with pitfalls and plenty of anxiety. As teachers, we should be tasked with removing that anxiety, not adding to it. It’s time to ditch the grade.