AGAINST+GRADING

The practice of grading is so widely accepted that one is entitled to assume that the argument for it has been settled in its favour. So here is a one-sided rant against it. Acknowledging that we can't dispense with grading altogether, this rant is intended to provoke a closer scrutiny of our grading practices.

There seems to be a good deal of evidence to show that motivation through salaries, stars, grades, etc for something which is intrinsically valued destroys the intrinsic motivation, and makes the performance dependent on extrinsic rewards.

Personally, I regard grades as anti-educational, but I have to give grades for everything my students do, because the system not only requires it, but would fail without it. The reason why I continue to participate in a system that I don't believe in is that there is no alternative system. That's why I grade as little as possible.

Students have been conditioned by the system they are in to accord value only to that which is graded. The student who is raised in that system rarely retains any kind of intrinsic motivation, because we adults have persuaded him/her that whatever is worth doing needs to have a pay-off. (There are a very few colleges in the US that have dispensed with grading altogether, replacing it with detailed comments on work done.) If you closely observe children BEFORE they are sent off to schools where they pick up this conditioning, you will find that they learn a good deal WITHOUT extrinsic motivators, such as learning how to express themselves adequately to an adult, or learning to play with a ball or a bike, to make some sense of the world - a sense that they subsequently modify through later experience, of course.

For some reasons that are probably still poorly understood scientifically, we generally have minds that learn naturally until we go to school. Once in school, we imbibe artificial notions of success (in terms of dependency on extrinsic rewards, obedience to commands, etc.). That's when we learn to dispense with the natural tendency to learn, and learn to learn only in response to extrinsic motivations.

The atrophy of the capacity to learn something for its own sake, led only by one's own curiosity and interest, and the capacity for self-assessment of progress in learning is, in my opinion, one of the most harmful aspects of what passes for education. It accounts for the unwillingness or inability of most adults to learn anything that they value for its own sake, or to engage in any kind of thoughtful self-evaluation of their own actions. We have been trained to become dependent on someone else's judgment rather than forming our own.

This is not to deny that we need the judgment of more experienced people, or the comments of experts, to help us judge our own performance or attitude or understanding. Learning has to be a process of dialogue with an "expert" and with oneself. But our emotional dependence on their approval - our inability to function without it, or our easy discouragement when the judgment turns out to be negative - is what is problematic. Learning is a perpetual life-long process, and the best thing a student can take away from school is the habit of learning, and of valuing one's learning through conversations with people who know better. Grades, prizes, stars, ranks, etc., simply destroy this habit and replace it with a harmful habit of dependence on external rewards, as many educators, managers, etc. are only now beginning to recognize. This is excellent for a socio-economic system that demands standardization and conformity, but hopeless for individual growth.