We’ve arrived at the end of the fall semester, and students have turned in their final projects. You may be finishing up grades this week, and everyone deserves a well-earned break from the grind of the semester. I’ll be taking a break from this column for a few weeks, so you’ll have to forgive me for elaborating a little bit more than usual in this end-of-semester post on … grades.
Earlier this fall, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a “panel” article titled “What does an A really mean?” It features a range of academic administrators and scholars with their hot takes on what grades mean (or don’t mean). While these are interesting (and, in some case, a bit predictable), a quote from the opening paragraphs summarizes the range of responses well:
“Grades mean something — articulated by an instructor and interpreted by a student — in the context of a particular course. But that isn’t all they mean. Grades play a gatekeeping role, helping to sort students into colleges, majors, graduate programs, and jobs. They can shape the way students see themselves. Heck, they can get them a discount on their car insurance.”
Unpacking these ideas one by one, it’s easy to see how tensions can arise. Grades are indeed articulated (given?) by instructors, as are the standards by which those grades are determined. And, yes, grades are interpreted by students. Again, “they can shape the way students see themselves.” We see ourselves as particular KINDS of students (A students, B students, C’s get degrees…), and the grades we receive lead to the questions: “Am I smart? Or good enough?”
Yet, per the extended quote above, all of these considerations (the articulation of standards and grades by the instructors, and the interpretation of grades by students), occurs “in the context of a particular course.” While grades were (historically) intended to make inter-institutional comparisons easier, the narrative around grade inflation assumes a homogeneity of standards that isn’t reflected in reality: grades may not reflect similar levels of understanding across time or across institutions. Different sections of courses at the same institution can vary, and grading, while often normed across sections, can reflect the values of instructors and graders.
Moving right along, grades do indeed play a gatekeeping role: One of the reasons it’s so intuitive for students to sort themselves into A students and any other category is that we do the same as adults: “You’ve got your A students, your B students, and then…” A body of research points to the ways that our assumptions about students shape our expectations and even students’ outcomes (see Canning et al., 2019; Friedrich et al., 2015). Whether framed in terms of Carol Dweck’s “Mindsets” (growth v. fixed) or the Pygmalion effect, grades have the pernicious effect of shaping access to institutions of higher learning but also our expectations of those students. The nature versus nurture questions become muddled, and it may be easy to wonder if all we need are higher expectations (and not higher grades).
Finally, we arrive at the idea “they [grades] can get them a discount on their car insurance.” Grades are seen as a marker to others of someone’s reliability, and they are tied to other more immediate financial incentives: scholarships, federal financial aid. When critiques of grades point to questions of access to higher education, instructors find themselves with an awesome responsibility that they may not have signed up for when they chose to go into teaching.
Given the multidimensional nature of a seemingly singular construct like grades, it may make more sense to ask a different question than “What’s a grade?” or “What does an A mean?” A question like “What do we want grades to mean?” or “What do we want A to mean (or a B, and so on)?” can bring our values into these conversations: do we want to honor the improvement that students make, or does this feel subjective? Do we want only to assess their performance on clearly defined criteria, or does this potentially ignore the diverse background experiences and knowledge that students bring into the classroom? These questions are less the realm of statistics and more the realm of ethics and values. As such, I’m in no position to answer these questions for anyone, but I was struck by the assurance with which the panelists in this feature gave their respectives ‘takes.’ I’m of the mind that these are discussions that need to be had to make progress, and, in the spirit of this article, it will mean opening ourselves to new viewpoints.
In the spirit of ‘not answer, but questions,’ I wanted to end this post with a list of resources that have been helpful in my attempts to make sense of ‘what a grad means.’ While I hyperlink the articles I reference in most of my posts, I want to be more transparent in suggesting reading on the topics covered. If any of these challenge or confirm your own beliefs, feel free to reach out (asmith@pcad.edu).
Further Reading:
- Why demands for better grades are misunderstood (Inside Higher Ed): Here, the author explores the meanings of grades referenced above, highlighting the presence of two key discourses around grades: a discourse of ‘effort’ and one of diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI). Rather than dismissing either, she considers how these notions can inform future discussions of grades, teasing the possibility of “moving beyond the first few letters of the alphabet.”
- Finding common ground with grading systems (Grading for Growth Blog): A number of approaches to “alternative grading” have found their way into the discourse on teaching and learning. Rather than work through the in’s and out’s of any particular one, this blog post does a great job of summarizing the commonalities, such as the ability to resubmit work (opportunities for growth).
- The Origin of Grades in American Schools: A highly readable introduction to the history of grades by Joshua Eyler, scholar and author of the recent (and also quite readable) book Failing our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What we Can Do About It
- Century of Grading Research (Deep Read): TL:DR – Grades aren’t necessarily objective reflections of student learning that we often assume them to be. If we don’t take grades as self-explanatory, what then?