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Grades are important, as they are a way to measure something intangible. The grading system is a set of symbols—in our case, letters—understood by schools around the nation, which are used to communicate something about the student. A grading system is necessary for this reason. How else would we be able to measure a student’s level of understanding and dedication of and to a particular subject? In the absence of the grading system, we would have no way of visualizing a student’s strong areas, weak areas, and identifying ways in which they have made progress over time. There would be no way of setting one student apart from the next. Colleges would be left to rely on different, more controversial ways of determining a student’s potential success when deciding whom to grant and whom to deny admittance to.
From the student’s standpoint grades can seem just as important or they can be downright ineffectual. Some students aren’t very concerned about their GPA so long as they “pass” all their classes, or receive grades adequate enough to ensure their graduation. Other students, who have hopes set on attending graduate school or furthering their education following their associate’s, bachelor’s, or even their master’s degree, rely heavily on their grades for their GPA is a reflection of many things: grades are not a measure of intelligence so much as they are a measure of the hard work and dedication a person is willing to put into something. Again, a student’s GPA communicates something about that person: it shows how much enthusiasm, dedication, discipline and drive they carry toward the task at hand (which happens to be school). Employers and graduate schools take a student’s transcripts as a communication of how the student will be in other aspects of life and work as well.
However, there are flaws in the grading system. We cannot ignore these imperfections if we wish to establish a system that truly works.
According to USCampus.Com, “Most US colleges and universities use the following grades for both graduate and undergraduate students.
Some schools allow instructors to add a plus (+) or a minus (-) to a grade. For example, a student may receive an "A+" or an "A-, a "B+" or a "B-", and so on” (“Grading Systems”).
The first issue I wish to address is the issue of subjectivity. In cases such as with multiple-choice tests, the decision on which letter grade is warranted is pretty clear-cut. If the student receives 90 percent or above, he or she receives an ‘A’; if the student receives between 80 and 99.9 percent, he or she receives a ‘B’ and so forth.
But what happens in cases where subjectivity or personal opinion come into play? College assignments and exams do not consist solely of multiple-choice tests and few courses are ever taught straight “out of the book.” While in subjects like math and science there is often only one “right” answer, a majority of subjects are not that way and rely heavily on a teacher’s subjectivity in determining a student’s letter grade. Problems with subjectivity can come about when we consider a couple of different things: standards and bias. Let’s begin with grading standards and the problems that can arise regarding that.
In assignments where subjectivity is involved (such as with essays, reflections, journals, etc.), how does a teacher or professor decide what constitutes an ‘A,’ a ‘B,’ etc.? What do they expect an ‘A’ paper should look like, sound like? In other words, how are the criteria established? Many instructors who do not teach by dictation of text- or work-book activities, I feel, must grade on a relative basis, meaning that standards vary class to class, instructor to instructor, and school to school, depending solely on how a majority of students perform. In other words, some instructors first pay attention to how their students perform and then set their standards accordingly, rather than the other way around.
Yet there are endless problems with this method of establishing standards. Consider this scenario:
Say you are a teacher reading through a stack of student reports on the theory of evolution. The first paper you read is, you feel, pretty average, so you go ahead and assign that paper a ‘C.’ The next paper you read is even better, so you give that paper a ‘B.’ The third paper is even better, so that one gets an ‘A.’ What happens then, when the fourth paper you read turns out being ten times better than the student’s to which you just assigned an ‘A’? Do you just give the fourth student an ‘A’ as well or do you go back and change the first student’s paper to a ‘D,’ the second student’s to a ‘C,’ and so on? What if we consider a scenario in which all students are of equal caliber? How, then, would one determine what constitutes an ‘A,’ a ‘B,’ a ‘C’ and so forth?
Clearly, a set of pre-established criteria is favorable when determining what grades the students will receive, but even a teacher’s pre-established grading criteria won’t help to get around the problems concerning relativism. I personally have attended four different colleges in two very different areas of the United States. The difference in standards between these four schools has been unbelievable. What I have learned is that standards are going to be very different, depending on a handful of variables, ranging from the small to the enormous: instructor, subject, school, and location are just a few.
Evidently, assigning grades based on relative criteria is not a good way to go seeing as students as a whole perform more poorly at certain schools in certain areas than students at other schools in other areas. Let’s assume that you are a teacher who sets grading standards according to the specific performance of the kids in the classes you teach. Say that another teacher at another school (which performs, on average, much more poorly than your own) does the same thing. This would pose a conflict seeing as an ‘A’ student from the other teacher’s respective class would be academically equivalent to a ‘C’ student from your class. This renders the grading system meaningless. What then, does an ‘A’ actually mean? What does it communicate to anyone reading the student’s transcript? Does it communicate that the student is really and truly in good academic standing or does it simply mean that he or she attended a school at which a majority of the other students did poorly in comparison? Is it an accurate reflection of the student’s capability or does it merely say that they attended a school where the material and standards were “dumbed down” in order to accommodate a community of college attendees who could not perform up to par with the standard that most academics consider ideal?
As if grading must not be difficult enough a task. First and foremost, a teacher wants their students to do well. Imposing too strict a standard would thus go against both the students’ goals as well as their own. Many teachers, I suspect, naturally feel that they should rely on their own students to establish what the standards should be; they feel that the students are the ones who actually set the standards and thus this method is the most reflective and the most valuable to all.
Yet we see how the problem has become a “problem” by looking at statistics. We often hear statistics informing us that certain school districts are performing under the nation’s standard. The problem occurs completely independent of the nation’s standard; it occurs because either the nation's standards are too low or else because the local standards are too high, in those particular areas. However, the only way to get students to do better is simply to employ higher standards overall, and ensure that those standards match--county to county, state to state. Higher standards motivate students to try harder, and are ultimately only to the students’ benefit. But our statistics won't reflect this unless we have a national standard in place. Again, the problem is not that they aren’t meeting the nation’s standard, it’s that the national standard is too low in comparison to the rest of the nation.
Yet another problem regarding standards is the problem of grade inflation. In A for Effort, John Leo explains, “[a]s college tuition has climbed, grade inflation has risen right along with it, perhaps muting complaints about what it all costs. At Harvard in 1992, 91 percent of undergraduate grades were B- or higher. Stanford is top-heavy with A’s and B’s too; only about 6 percent of all grades are C’s. At Princeton, A’s rose from 33 percent of all grades to 40 percent in four years” (745).
In other words, it appears as if, at many schools, students now rarely receive anything lower than a ‘B-.’ What this tells us is that grading standards have been, over the years, lowered. Leo paraphrases William Cole of Harvard: “A generation or two ago, students who mentally dropped out of classes settled for ‘a gentleman’s C.’ Now…perfunctory students get ‘a gentleperson’s B,’ and ‘a gentleperson’s A-‘ is not out of the question, especially in the humanities” (744-45). Statistics like these are startling and once again leave our current system meaningless. After all, how useful are grades if everyone receives the same (or practically the same) grade? The issue of grade inflation is perhaps some of the best evidence supporting the idea that we need to employ a universal grading standard.
A second problem that arises from the freedom of subjective interpretation is an issue I personally encountered several times while in high school: the issue of actual bias.
I am very happy to say that I have not encountered bias one single time since entering college, yet to speculate on why this may be is beyond the scope of this essay. Relevant to my point is the fact that the subjectivity of the current grading system opens the doors to bias, invites it, allows it to happen. When attending Central Catholic High School, during my freshman year, I was assigned an English teacher named Mr. Kresek. From day one, he took a dislike to me and somehow made a connection in his mind from his disfavor of me to the way that I would perform in his class. When it came time to turn in our first paper for the class, I did, and one week later, as he was handing back our papers, Mr. Kresek kept my paper and asked me to stay after class. Following the bell, he approached me, my paper in his hand, and asked me if I had written that paper. He was, in other words, wrongly accusing me of plagiarism.
This incident sticks in my mind to this day and remains terribly hurtful. The reason the bias is so evident is that this was the first paper we had ever done for the class. He had nothing upon which to base his suspicions that I would not be capable of putting together a coherent, well-written paper; his assumptions relied purely on pre-conceived ideas of how he expected a “person like me” should write. This is merely but one of many incidents involving bias which I was to further encounter throughout my high school years.
Astonishingly enough, various different research has shown how bias is still rampant within our school system. Studies have shown that people with certain “intellectual-sounding” names receive higher grades from teachers because the name subconsciously influences the teacher to think that the student should and will perform better. In another study, a group of students with learning disabilities were assigned to certain teachers as an experiment. The teachers were told that these students were geniuses. To account for their erratic behavior, the teachers were told that because of their rare intellectual gifts, the students were “eccentric.” Not surprisingly, the students were given high marks by these teachers, stemming from the fact that the teachers truly believed that these kids were geniuses, and that belief influenced their perceptions of the students’ performance.
One thing teachers can do to help lighten these problems is to check with other teachers when it comes times to set grading criteria. If possible, schools should check with other schools and try to incorporate as universal-as-possible a grading standard. To avoid conflicts, it is essential that teachers establish pre-set standards and state grading criteria clearly in the syllabus. This is not so much a problem in college as it is among high school instructors. From my experience, I’ve seen that many high school teachers neglect to state out clearly their grading criteria in a syllabus, thereby resulting in complaints of unfairness, various conflicts, and sometimes, even lawsuits. Not only should a teacher clearly state what the grading criteria are, they must also make a commitment not to deviate from these criteria in any way, regardless of any circumstances.
I have heard instructors refer to the class syllabus as a contract. That is, the syllabus is a contract that binds both the student and the instructor to the rules stated on that contract. By enrolling in the class (and by staying enrolled) the student accepts to abide by the rules that the instructor has outlined. The teacher, in drafting the contract, promises the same.
I was a student at CSUN when I decided to enroll in an art history class with a teacher who was known to be particularly “tough.” If someone were to ask me what a synonym for a “tough” teacher was, I would have said, “challenging”; I wouldn’t ever have guessed that “tough” could somehow translate to “blatantly unfair.”
In this particular class, our entire grade was comprised of an average of two tests. We were to take three tests, but the lowest one would be dropped. This was voiced to us by our professor (several times)—binding her, more or less, into a verbal contract—and also stated in the course syllabus. Having done fairly well on my first two tests, I opted not to take the third and final test (knowing that it would be dropped). I left my instructor a voice mail telling her that this was my intention. I never received a call back and thus assumed that this would not be a problem. Yet, when I received my grades, I was in for a rather unpleasant surprise. It turned out that my instructor had decided (for whatever reason) to take an average of all three tests, and thus my grade ended up being far lower than expected, despite my careful planning, and despite what the syllabus said.
While I simply left it be, other students across the world have been known to sue their schools over errors even more subtle than these. For example, in England, a 19-year-old college student named Gary Matsell sued an exam board over an “incorrect” grade he received on an exam. In Memphis, Michigan, a high school student sued because he got an A; what he wanted was an A+.
Again, the best way for teachers to avoid these types of conflicts is simply to outline their grading criteria in a syllabus. While this won’t completely make them immune to lawsuits, as long as they do not deviate from their own rules, they can easily prove their case in the event of a frivolous one. While this is a small step in fixing the various problems that arise from our grading system, it’s a practical step that all teachers can take with minimal effort. Some may argue that the best solution to these types of problems is to abolish the grading system altogether and employ, instead, a Pass/No Pass system. However, this type of system would present new problems all of its own. For one, a system that does not allow any form of distinction from one student to the next may kill some students’ ambitions.
Those like Paul Goodman strongly believe that Universities should “abolish grading, and use testing only and entirely for pedagogic purposes as teachers see fit” (746). While this is not entirely a bad idea, this pessimism about the grading system stems from the idea that the grading system is somehow doomed. In A Proposal to Abolish Grading, Goodman writes: “For most of the students [at the prestigious Universities of which he speaks], the competitive grade has come to be the essence. The naïve teacher points to the beauty of the subject and the ingenuity of the research; the shrewd student asks if he is responsible for that on the final exam” (746). Goodman also says that, “the great majority of professors agree that grading hinders teaching and creates a bad spirit” (746). Goodman holds the current grading system in very low esteem because of the point of view he holds. He states that “the competitive grade has come to be the essence,” but, if a student is the type of person who already does not see the material they learn as the essence, then abolishing the grading system is going to do little to make them think otherwise. Students who have that mindset—that they are there for the grade rather than to fuel a true passion for learning—are hard-wired to be that way. It isn’t the grading system that is causing students to view the grade as the essence; it is the simple fact that many students view college as a chore. Abolishing the grading system would not make these students enjoy the subject any more than they already don’t.
Those like Goodman are looking at the problem from only one angle. There is a positive way to view the current system. Grades enable students to set goals. When people achieve their goals, it adds more fuel to the fire, and motivates them even further—this is human nature. In addition, grades give many students a sense of achievement and pride. In some cases, grades are a tool students can use to feel satisfaction and boost feelings of self-worth.
In conclusion, the problems with the relative nature of grading and grading standards (that is, when standards are not pre-established and grades are not given out based on a set of pre-established criteria but rather, they are established based on students’ performance at a given place at a given point in time) require a drastic step. Perhaps it would be a step worth considering before we jump to abolish the system altogether.
These problems require an effort not only of individual teachers but also of the nation as a whole. A good (albeit difficult) solution would be to erect an administration that is to define with exact precision what criteria is necessary for a student to receive an ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and so forth with respect to each subject. Science teachers and teachers of other similar subjects must often deal with the problem of whether they should penalize a student for bad grammar, bad spelling, bad usage, or else just concentrate stricly on content. Instead of leaving this decision up to the subjective interpretation (which can vary extremely person-to-person and facilitate a flawed “communication”), an administration could pinpoint grading problem-areas in each subject and clearly set forth the criteria for grading in that subject.
A universal (or at least, national) standard set of criteria for grading would help to solve many of the problems our grading system faces today.