COLUMN: Grades cause problems, get in way of learning

From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99 From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99College is supposed to emphasize learning but here at Penn we support a system that chokes learning: Grading. I was educated without grades for the first 17 years of my life, so I'm in the unusual position of having experienced life both with and without them. And I've come to the conclusion that grades are the single biggest impediment to learning. Grades poison the teacher-student relationship. One of the first things I learned in college is that anything that smacks of enthusiasm is likely to be called grade-grubbing. Now I reconsider every time I want to bring an article to class, send a post to the listserv or even refer to the readings. Especially in lecture classes -- where intimacy is lacking -- these actions are frequently regarded as teacher-pleasing. And why would you want to please a teacher, if not for a better grade? Grades waste class time. I have spent hours listening to droning about the curve, the distribution and on and on. Bad enough that we grade -- do we have to discuss the logistics to death? Good grades have little usefulness in the adult world. The customers I deal with every day don't care if I got an A in Business Writing; they want to be able to understand the letters I send them. My boss is less concerned with my test score in Thinking and Decision Making than with how I actually make decisions. Well, so what? Tests are supposed to measure what you've learned. Chances are, my ability to communicate with a Cuban customer is reflected in my Spanish grade. Or maybe not. Regardless of what they're supposed to do, how well tests actually measure learning is another matter. How many of us have crammed, regurgitated and promptly moved on? In almost any course, someone with a decent grasp of the subject matter might get a good grade. But it's quite likely that some students with a superficial and/or transitory understanding will also push the right buttons to come out with an A. Some people consider it a point of pride to be able to write a successful paper without reading the book they're referencing. Grades contaminate relationships between students. Particularly in situations of artificial scarcity or curves, there are actual incentives to not work together. If only three students will get As, my helping you might backfire if you beat me out for one of those spots. Or putting in extra study time together might mean that we'd shift the curve and earn the enmity of our classmates. This doesn't build great teamwork patterns for our adult lives. Finally, grades are self-reinforcing; their constant use dupes people into believing they're an important and helpful tool. This is reflected in statements such as "You have to have a 3.5 to get into this grad school" or "XYZ big company will hire only people with a GPA of 4.0." So grades don't measure what we've learned, they mess up relationships between and among teachers and students, they waste time and they aren't even useful. They are a clumsy currency. We deserve and can get better. Take away grades, what do we put in their place? Well, you could write a book about this issue (I recommend Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards). But the bottom line is that we need something better than the current system. And we can't assume that people won't learn without grades. No one grades a toddler on how well she's learning to walk and talk, yet miraculously she gains those skills. There are no As for designing elaborate personal World Wide Web pages or taking part in historic re-enactments or even writing books, but thousands of people do. Growing up gradeless is what let me become the passionate, self-directed student I am today and it's done the same for many others. Grades are a recent invention and we can evolve right on past them as soon as we make the decision to do so. All we have to do is reject the propaganda and start asking ourselves what it is we really want to know. The literacy and interpersonal skills of a job applicant? A potential grad student's willingness to do busywork? The earning power of a potential mate? The more honest we are, the faster we can slough off the corruption of grades and move on. And when we do, maybe we'll be surprised at how well we learn when we aren't bound by measurements.