For many teachers and administrators, the practice of grading the students is an obvious necessity, and so it is often done without much reflection. The obvious part is that a student must be evaluated for his fitness for continuing his education in order to ensure that the job is getting done.
If a man is hired to build a house, everyone can see the house going up. If a man is employed to write a piece of music, we can all gather in order to hear the music being performed. If a man is paid to fix the transmission on your car, you can tell afterwards whether your car runs or not. So it would therefore seem obvious that if a teacher is employed to get certain things into the students’ heads, there must be a time when it is necessary to check whether or not it got in there. Hence we have quizzes, tests, finals, midterm grades, and final grades. Then at the end of the year we have promotion to the next grade or not, or we have graduation. All of this seems obviously necessary, such that the whole process is almost invisible to us.
But there are some questions about the meaning of grades that need to asked and answered, because they actually reduce to questions about the meaning of education itself.
We need to realize the fact that when we grade students, we are actually speaking in metaphors most of the time. Because we live in a society dominated by industrial technology, the metaphors reflect that. And because we have a tendency to trust and internalize our metaphors, a time comes when we don’t realize how out of place and bizarre they are.
For example, suppose an English teacher assigns an essay to the class in which they are supposed to describe a lurid sunset on a beach somewhere. The students dutifully do this, and they all turn their essays in. Now let us pick on one student, who had his paper returned to him with a red 78 written on the top of it. This was right alongside the C+ that was written there.
Now I have a question. What on earth is this supposed to mean? If we break down the metaphor, the grade the student received means that as 78 is to 100, so this essay was to . . . to what? The sunset essay that resides in Plato’s realm of the forms? The essay that Jesus would have written? What it usually means is the misty, floaty ideal in the teacher’s mind.
There are times when such a metaphor makes good sense. Say the students were assigned to memorize 100 Latin vocabulary words, and one student got a 78 there. This would mean that as 78 is to 100, so this student had correctly answered 78 questions out of a possible 100 correct answers. Now the grade makes better sense.
But back to the essay. I have graded many papers over the years, and I can speak of certain things with certainty. If I handed back an essay that was graded as an 89, the chances are pretty good that I would be having a conversation with that student. He would be wondering if there is any way he could squeeze another point out of me, or perhaps do some extra credit. And why? Because he knows that the threshold between a B+ and an A- is a 90. He wants to inch across that threshold. But if I were to write “this was very good” on the top of a paper, no student would ever come to me in order to ask, “why didn’t you write ‘this was very, very good’”? What could I do to get a second very?
Now I understand why the students think this way. It is only natural. And I also understand why school have to quantify such things—otherwise transferring students from one institution to another would be a royal headache. But I also trust that you can see how over time this whole system begins to shape how everyone thinks about the meaning of education. We start to think that it is possible to send a student off with 6 credit hours of history in his head, as though he had just purchased from us 10 pounds of flour, or 3 yards of fabric. We start to think of education as a knowledge factory, where we are churning out widgets, and placing them on shelves.
The challenge is not quite as great in math classes, or with vocabulary quizzes—although the problem is not entirely absent even there. But when it comes to grading a poem, or an essay, or anything like that, the teacher has to be aware of a fairly large subjective element to it. But such is our trust in numbers, when a student comes in to ask about his final grade of 88, he is often satisfied when the teacher opens the spread sheet and shows him a row of numbers, the average of which is 88. “I see,” says the student, not realizing that two thirds of those numbers were clean made up out of the teacher’s head. And he does not realize that his missing two points could perhaps be attributed to the fact that his final paper was near the bottom of the stack, and graded when the teacher grumpy and ready for bed, or that he wasn’t a cute blonde named Kimberly, or that he was the fourth student to ask about his grade instead of the first. In any case, teachers have to remember that the knowledge they are dispensing is not flour or fabric.
One other related issue. Our faith in numbers can at times get us to invert the whole point of the education experience. The English Lit class exists to introduce students to Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice was not written so that the students could be asked a question about who Mr. Collins was. The primary educational experience is simply reading the book. The secondary blessing is the experience of reading the book together with others so that the discussion that results can highlight aspects of the book itself, enabling students to gather more insights from the book. The test is simply a backstop measure to check to see if a particular student has in fact read the book.
If a student starts to think that the grade is the point, and not the experience of learning, then this sets us up for the industrious grade nerds as well as for the manipulating cheaters. But neither of them are actually getting the education. What develops is that a certain amount of data goes from the notebook of the teacher to the notes of the student, without passing through the minds of either.
Grades are supposed to be a meat thermometer that tells you when the turkey has been in the over long enough. But when this delusion that I am discussing takes over, the thermometer is kept in a place where the temperature can be carefully monitored by education experts, entirely in keeping with the policy manual, but where there is no turkey and no oven.