Grading in an Age of Covid-19
By: Michael Satlow
Tags: Higher Education, College, Grades, Education

Grading in an Age of Covid-19

In the midst of a global pandemic that is causing tens of thousands of deaths, ravaging the most vulnerable of us, and bringing millions to the brink of economic catastrophe, college students throughout the country are worrying about their grades. How can they protect their GPAs at this unprecedented time?

Student stress is understandable. Grades, students believe, are really important: good grades lead to good jobs and graduate schools which in turn is their ticket to upward (or at least not declining) social and economic mobility. Many are socialized from an early age to focus on their grades (becoming, in William Deresiewicz’s memorable phrase, “excellent sheep”). In my own experience teaching, over the last decade or so it has seemed to me that students are much more concerned with grades — and therefore much more transactional about their learning — than they used to be.

And in some areas, grades do matter. Graduate schools, particularly professional ones such as law and medicine, use grades as a criterion for admission and some employers weed applicants by GPA. On the whole, though, grades probably matter less than most students think. The same schools and companies that consider GPAs know well that they are highly imperfect measures of genuine learning (and ubiquitous grade inflation has also lessened their utility as accurate measures). Recognizing the limited utility of grades, some companies, such as Apple and Google, have changed their hiring practices so that they rely on their own assessments of a candidate’s skills rather than on student grades.

COVID-19, and student panic over grades (rather than, primarily, their learning), should give us pause. Like all such crises, this one brings into relief certain structural assumptions that deserve to be reconsidered. The very practice of grading is by no means the most important of these, but our present moment does help us to articulate and debate a basic question: Why grade?

Grades are thought to serve two purposes: to incentivize learning and to certify that a student has learned. Yet multiple studies have shown that grades are actually good at neither task. Grades correlate well with a student’s ability to do the assignments according to certain criteria but far less well with measures of true learning. Someone who receives good grades is likely to be good at following directions and grinding through difficult, sometimes unpleasant, tasks (the quality of “grit”), but those same grades say little about whether a student has really mastered and is able to apply particular skills to new situations.

Recognizing that grading is at best a crude incentive and measure, and at worst a detriment to genuine learning, leads to a further question: When, and why, did we come to believe that grading was an essential part of higher education?

Grading is a relatively recent addition to higher education. Final, often oral, examinations were a common part of university education in Europe and the United States well into the nineteenth century. These examinations were meant to measure expertise and they were usually assessed as a simple pass or fail. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did colleges, especially in the United States, begin to experiment with assigning grades to students, and then they were meant only for internal use so that faculties could award prizes to students that they judged to be outstanding. Over time, in large measure due to the larger cultural shifts toward industrialization and quantification, the practice of assigning grades became widespread. It was not until the twentieth century, though, that colleges became not just institutions of learning but institutions of sorting. They were moving toward fulfilling an emerging, unstated contract between the companies that needed increasing numbers of mid-level bureaucrats who had grit and certain (often non-creative) skills, student “consumers” who wanted those jobs and the security that they provided, and the colleges happy to accept increasing amounts of money to keep the pipeline moving.

Our economy is not like that of our parents and grandparents. It is “flatter” and more service oriented. Increasingly, students need a set of skills that grades do not do a good job measuring. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether grading still makes sense.

In my own work in the college classroom, I have become increasingly distressed about what grading and, more importantly, student anxiety about grades, does to learning. Grades often encourage students to stay in their comfort zones, where they can protect their GPAs, and take the paths that they deem safe over the paths that lead to learning and intellectual growth. Grades often serve as a perverse incentive to not learn. In such a classroom, my role shifts from educator and mentor to sorter.

We can reimagine college as a place that educates rather than sorts. Companies and graduate schools can, and should, take more responsibility for their own assessments: Do candidates have the appropriate skills and knowledge? Let colleges do what they do best, which is educate. And let students focus not on grades, but on driving their education forward, even during these challenging times.