Understanding the Basis for Grades
In the preceding paragraph, I described how I evaluated my students, and that word was deliberately chosen instead of the more common term of grading students. There is a difference, and it is very significant. When grading is the focus, all attention is directed to the grade that is awarded, with students asking “what’d you get?” The far more important question, addressed through the evaluation process, is “why did you get what you got?”
Revisiting this subject takes me back to the last three decades of the 20th century when – as a Professor at St. Lawrence College – I experienced frequently changing grading systems. When I started in 1969, A, B, C, D, I, and R were the grades. R stood for Repeat and was a euphemism for Fail and I stood for Incomplete. There were percentage ranges for the four passing grades, allowing those who believed in the precision of grading to feel quite comfortable.
The situation changed dramatically in the early 1970s when the college introduced an H, P, I, F grading system. This new system caused consternation with faculty who believed in precise grading of student performance. I shared an office at that time with one such person. He could not manage with only two passing grades – and his efforts to get around this limitation were inventive to say the least. Initially, he graded students on the basis of H, H minus, P plus and P – thereby creating four categories that approximated the A, B, C, and D that he had come to know and love. When our Department Head insisted that plus and minus signs were not part of our official grading system, my colleague was briefly stumped and dismayed. Not long after, however, I overheard him explaining his new grading system to a student. He indicated that the student had received a “small H.” With an improved effort, he exhorted, the student would be able to earn a “large H.” Similar small and large sizes were assigned to the P grade. On another occasion, I heard him explaining to a student that he had received an “F plus,” which I took to mean what might be termed “a fail with distinction.”
Keeping an Open Mind
Evidence of closed minds is everywhere these days in our increasingly polarized society. When someone offers an alternative point of view, they are all too often subjected to a personal attack rather than an objective consideration of that view. There has never been a better time for the educational system to encourage open minds willing to consider differing perspectives. To the extent that the public school teacher’s consultative approach to grading encourages such an approach, it is to be praised rather than condemned.
[1] But what about subjects like mathematics, for which there is a “correct” answer (I hear you cry). Research has shown that grades vary considerably even when an answer is correct, with some teachers focused on the answer and others giving considerable weight to the steps taken by the student to arrive at the correct answer.