Page 239 - DEDU504_EDUCATIONAL_MEASUREMENT_AND_EVALUATION_ENGLISH

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

arts education. Students have good reasons to worry about their grades because of the Notes
powerful symbolic and social roles, that grades play in students’ lives.
• 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.
• 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 grade.
• 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.

• 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.
• Students feel that they cannot trust their teachers or their environment, they become guarded
and try to play it safe. Their reaction to challenges or criticism becomes defensive. If they
feel themselves to be in a hostile context, a context of distrust demanding that they prove
their worthiness at every turn.
• Because so much outside of the classroom hinges on students’ grades, traditional grading
imposes an outermost context of distrust framing everything that then happens within the
classroom.

19.8 Keywords

Grading : Marking with some particulr symbol or word
Components : One of several parts of which something is made
Absolute : Total and complete

19.9 Review Questions

1. Explain the concept of grading.
2. What is the need of grading ? Explain.
3. Describe different methods of grading.
4. Discuss various problems of grading
Answers : Self Assessment

1. (i) Grading (ii) record, student growth
(iii) Grade point Average
2. (i) a (ii) c (iii) b (iv) d

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 233