How are we to interpret and understand grades?
In a previous installment, I objected to the common idea that our evaluation of student performance can be all that precise. It other words, it is not possible to evaluate a student’s knowledge of the Battle of Saratoga out to the tenth decimal place. Knowledge of battles does not admit of decimal places. It is not that kind of thing.
At the same time, if you are to have degrees of praise for your students, any kind of honors at all, you will have to establish a line, one that will at times seem arbitrary. In all my years of teaching, I have never written very good at the the top of a student’s paper, and have them come to inquire why I limited it just one very. Why didn’t I say very, very good? But when I have written 89 at the top of a paper, to make up an example, I have had students come to me in order to argue for two points. They do this because they know that 90 is the watershed between a B+ and an A-.
So in the discussion of grades that follows, we should all begin by noting our limitations. We need to over the pretensions of being overly precise, on the one hand, and on the other, we do need to communicate with students and parents how the student is doing.
In the common parlance, in the older system, an A refers to really good work. A B refers to good work. A C refers to okay work. A D means the work was subpar. And an F means that the work was unacceptable, or perhaps not done at all.
But because we live in a time when self-esteem has become the watchword, this has transformed the meaning of grades for many. Instead of an A meaning that the work done on the assignment was really good, an A has now come to mean that “you are a valuable person.” By way of contrast, a C now means that you are a waste of skin, and ugly on top of that. Because we remember that this is the era of self-esteem, we never want to make that kind of assessment, of course not, and hence the grades tend to go up.
There is no reason why a C should not be considered an honorable grade. In awarding a C, a teacher is saying that the student grasped the essentials of what is going on, such that it would be appropriate to send him on to the next level. If we send him on to the next level, we won’t be saddling the Algebra II instructor with a student who hasn’t a prayer because he didn’t get the basics of Algebra I down.
The C can be honorable for any number of reasons. We all know of some students for whom acquisition of knowledge is a true breeze—they simply have to sleep in the same room with their textbook in order to pull down A’s. Another student has to eat gravel in late night study sessions to acquire a C. And the latter student might be truly building character while at the same time acquiring knowledge of a subject that is “okay.” The A student might be able to answer all the questions while continuing on in his entitled lassitude.
Or take another example. A student might be making C’s because he is saving up for college and has two part-time jobs. The fact that he even passed his classes is a monumental achievement.
I think of my father, the second of six sons. He lived on a Nebraska farm. His father was laid up, recovering from a heart attack. Dad said everything on the farm was pregnant, including his mother. His older brother was off on a destroyer in the Second World War, and so all the responsibility fell on my father. So he was up early, doing all the chores. He then went to school all day. After school, he went straight to the Omaha stockyards, where he worked until midnight. Then home, and over again. Do you think my grandmother ever looked at a C he got in some class, and said, “What is this nonsense?”
Because we have drifted into the self-esteem world where all students who showed up breathing assume that the baseline grade is an A, to then be augmented or buttressed with excuses, the pressure for grade inflation is thereby applied to the instructors. Everyone assumes the A, and then all the shades of meaning are applied in the process of making explanations and excuses. But if we had our wits about us, we would realize that all the different shades of meaning were meant to be communicated by the grades themselves.
If parents and student together have determined what their priorities, schedules and goals should be for a particular semester, and the student keeps his end of the bargain, everything is well and good. But if he goofs off, and garners a C when the goal was an A, and he had the time and talent to get that A, but spent all his available intellectual energies on his X-Box instead, then the student has something to make right . . . with his parents. He doesn’t have the same kind of relationship with the teacher. He did okay work, and the teacher said on the report card that he did okay work. There is nothing there that needs to be put right.
Now the teacher might be concerned for the student because he is a fellow Christian, or is friends with his parents, or for other personal reasons. But at the professional level, as a teacher, it is no different than if he were owner of a bike shop, and the student in question came in and bought a less valuable bike than the one he and his parents had been planning on. He might need to buy the cheaper bike because he had been fooling around instead of working, or he might have to buy the cheaper bike because he had to quit one of his jobs in order to help take care of an ailing grandfather. All of that is neither here nor there for the owner of the bike shop. What he is in charge of is making sure the transaction is an honest one.
In short, one of the deleterious effects of grade inflation is that it cuts down on the ability of the participants to evaluate the honesty of educational transactions. And it shows.