Page 235 - DEDU504_EDUCATIONAL_MEASUREMENT_AND_EVALUATION_ENGLISH

Unit 19 : Grading - Need, Problems, Components and Methods

19.6 Problems of Grading Notes
The problem with traditional grading is that students have good reasons to worry about their
grades, and yet being grade-oriented undermines the most important goals of liberal arts
education. Students have good reasons to worry about their grades because of the powerful
symbolic and social roles, that grades play in students’ lives. Most undergraduate students are at
an identity-forming stage of their lives, and so they are looking within and outside of themselves
for clues about who they are and what they should do with their lives. It seems obvious to
students to look to their grades in order to read what the world is telling them their strengths
and weaknesses are. This way of thinking is often explicitly reinforced by parents, professors,
and prospective employers.
Grades also have acquired increasingly powerful social force. Grades are not at all private
communication between teachers and students but have a quasi-public role in students’ lives. The
occasions in which students are asked to reveal their grades are frequently some of the most
significant moments in students’ lives and connect with some of students’ most important
relationships. There is so much that can rest on grades—parental approval; scholarships; students’
being allowed to continue studying; their being allowed to participate in other meaningful,
perhaps identity-forming activities such as athletic participation or study abroad; and their future
opportunities such as eligibility for jobs or graduate school.
Grades are essentially numerical and thus can only be appropriately applied to what is measurable,
but not everything that is measurable is always measured in a course of study. A Student too
oriented towards getting good grades can miss or neglect those components of the course that
are not graded. Furthermore, what is measurable is not always what is most important in liberal
arts education.
There are many qualitative ideals underlying the purpose of liberal arts education that cannot be
measured on a comparative scale of quantifiable achievement. In fact, some of these qualitative
goals cannot be definitively judged by a teacher—students themselves are in a better position to
evaluate these dimensions of their learning.

Research in cognitive science and developmental psychology reveals that human learning is
extraordinarily complex. While professors can look in on some aspects of the learning process
and judge whether students are putting certain words, numbers, or symbols together correctly—
even reading past the words and numbers to more general conclusions about students’ conceptual
development—there is much about students’ learning that remains invisible even to the most
attentive professors. Students themselves are in a better position to judge many of the qualitative
dimensions of their learning, as well as some quantitative dimensions, such as their sense of
improvement, the intensity of their effort and engagement, whether they did all of the reading,
how well they paid attention in class, and how significant their learning was for them. But
traditional grading can discourage the development and refinement of students’ abilities in these
respects, because strong self-motivation and keen self-awareness of one’s own learning can bring
a student into conflict with professors’ judgments. Ultimately, such conflicts are resolvable through
thoughtful, mutually respectful dialogue, but our society and our educational system do not
teach students how to work through such difficulties, and so the easiest psychological tactic is for
students to suppress their self-motivation and subvert their intellectual self-awareness to the
authority of their teachers. But developing self-awareness and developing self-motivation are
exactly some of the qualitative ideals underlying the purpose of a liberal arts education.
When teachers strive explicitly to structure their classes in ways that foster the development of
self-motivation and push students to engage authentically with their education, they can feel that
their ideals are consistently undermined by their students’ efforts to play it safe and try to please
the teacher. Authentic engagement with the educational process is inherently frightening and
difficult, exposing the student to a world larger and stranger than previously imagined, demanding

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 229