Excerpt of a new book on the ways assessment of students in schools undermine learning.
Here’s the excerpt from “Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning ” by Schneider and Hutt, published by Harvard University Press :The most obvious problem with grading is the fact that it’s so effective at motivating students.
To be clear, getting good grades doesn’t preclude students from developing a deep love of learning. Moreover, straight-A students may learn some important skills and develop productive habits as they scramble to compile their perfect report cards. But the crucial point is that our system is set up in such a manner that learning may be incidental to most of what happens as young people progress through the education system.
In pointing out that students are motivated to earn good grades irrespective of what they learn, we want to be clear that we are not blaming students or their parents for this behavior. Collectively, in the United States and around the globe, we have accepted a system that strongly incentivizes students to act strategically — to hustle their way to good grades by working smarter, rather than harder.
Who cheats? Such questions are difficult to answer, given the powerful incentive for students to keep that information to themselves. Nevertheless, it seems that a majority of students find themselves operating outside of the rules at some point. According to one survey, 64 percent of students reported that they had cheated on a test. And as one researcher found, parents were often complicit, doing “most of the work” on important take-home assignments.
Students from all backgrounds can be demotivated by grades. But once more, it tends to play out in ways that exacerbate inequities. Young people from low-income families and historically marginalized racial groups are more likely to start school behind their more privileged peers. And, as research demonstrates, they are likely to stay behind. This is a complicated matter, associated with a number of variables. But key among them is what researchers refer to as “academic self-concept.
The more that hangs in the balance for students, the harder it can be for instructors to “hold the line” and ignore the larger ramifications of their grading decisions. Consider the college professor who teaches an introductory course at an institution with a large percentage of first-generation students eligible for federal grant aid. The professor knows that such students often struggle academically in the first year as they make the transition from high school to college-level work.
Some schools have responded to grade inflation by trying to place student grades in a larger context. For instance, many high schools provide information about class rank — a way to place a student’s GPA in context. Similar efforts have been undertaken to varying degrees at the college level.
In contrast to short-haul communications, which generally occur within the several blocks or several miles that most students live from their schools, long-haul communication travels much farther. Carrying information via the official transcript … grades end up communicating with unknown audiences — college admissions boards, scholarship committees, employers — at great remove from the specific school or community in which the grades were originally issued.
Human capital theorists, and economists more generally, have their own explanation for this. Grades, they argue, provide a useful signal about a person’s skill set. The same is true about credentials and degrees, which at their most basic level represent a bundle of at least passing grades. Depending on the instance, a credential may be enough of a message about one’s qualifications for a job.
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