Professors Make Their Case for Ending Grades – Opinion

For reasons I can’t understand, it seems society has decided excellence is the enemy.

Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood — maybe there’s an excellent reason for American education putting an end to grading.

Boston University has some students who believe this.

For local news site WBUR, Professors Marisa Milanese and Gwen Kordonowy recently penned “Why We Stopped Grading Our Students on Their Writing.”

It’s a bold move.

Meritocracy was once thought to be America’s greatest strength.

People were then rated according to their performance. Based on their performance, employees were promoted and hired.

But these are the days of equity, which — so far as I can tell — is often code for a communistic forcing of inferiority.

For better or worse, Marisa and Gwen — along with many others in their field — are canceling grades.

Per their article, the Boston academics’ decision was “motivated by students’ trauma during the pandemic.”

But don’t get them wrong:

Don’t get us wrong: We still carefully read and comment on our students’ work. However, we don’t place any number or letter on the writings of our students. There are no As or Bs. There are no 92s and 94s.

It’s a special and sophisticated approach:

The pedagogical approach we’re using is called “contract grading,” which is spreading across universities, particularly in writing programs like ours at Boston University.

What’s the key to a thriving skillset?

To hear the professors tell it, it’s minimum expectations:

Although there are numerous ways to structure it, contract grading typically involves minimum expectations for students to earn a final course grade. These expectations are unrelated to performance: Attend class and participate, meet due dates, fulfill the criteria of every assignment, make substantive revisions and so on — the kinds of “activities and behaviors that will lead to learning,” as composition scholar Peter Elbow put it. Do the work and you will get the grade.

What if the work is hard but your stench stinks? Do you have to keep stinking?

You will be near an academic subject, no matter your answer.

Contract grading is part of the larger “ungrading” movement, the subject of a recent anthology edited by anthropologist Susan D. Blum. The book’s subtitle — “Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)” —summarizes the premise at its core.

The authors admit “letter grades often play the role of a motivational tool,” yet “external motivations squash internal ones like curiosity and interest, the mindsets that motivate actual learning.”

It is possible to make quality up with curiosity.

I’m curious about the future:

Professor Razes The Evil of Writing Rules and Whacks White Supremacy By Gonging Grades

Virginia School District Shoots at Grades, Deadlines to Target Inequity

College Schools Students and Staff on Microaggressions’ ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’ and the ‘Myth of Meritocracy’

In Order to Attack ‘Systemic Racism,’ a School Eliminates Failure and Time Constraints

Does grading make you feel prejudicial or oppressive? Marisa and Gwen set the standard:

There’s a crucial equity piece here, too. Typically, the students who tend to get the highest grades on their writing are native English speakers with highly educated parents — those students who attended the best high schools, the kinds with smaller classes, teachers who have more time to give feedback and even private tutoring on the side. However, universities are increasingly welcoming students from low-resource schools as they diversify their student bodies. The architect of the kind of grading contract that many of us employ, Asao Inoue, has argued that all forms of assessment (which) “exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards” should be dismantled. We’re still assessing student writing in our comments. Course grades are now based on the effort students have put in and not on the property value of the school district.

The instructors claim that their students are difficult to believe.

They have never written better.

Whatever the case, if all of education stops scoring pupils’ progress in a way that forces them to improve, “has never been better” is likely a description that will go the way of the do-do bird.

Perhaps that bird is still with us and American education has been taken over by a dodo.

-ALEX

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