On “From Degrading to De-grading”
This article. This article. This article. I have to print this and keep a copy with me at ALL times. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOREVER. GRADES DON’T MATTER. THEY ARE ARBITRARY AND ARE NOT A SIGN OF KNOWLEDGE. IF ANYTHING IT IS AN INDICATOR OF SHEEPLE-NESS.
But I still want an A. I was somewhat of an intelligent child--like taking 2nd-grade math classes during kindergarten nap time. I grasped concepts fairly quickly with minimal effort and always had my hand raised with the correct answer to the teacher’s question. My grades were kind of shi-ty though. Were it not for my above 90-th percentile scores on the EOGs I would have failed 4th and 5th grade. Teachers (and my parents) were always surprised (and appalled) at my unsatisfactory marks and couldn’t understand how a child who was constantly reading and liked to do math for fun was failing her classes. They didn’t consider grades to be an arbitrary way of telling how well you followed directions and could regurgitate another person’s way of thought. Like 10 points off for not putting your name on the top? That’s an entire letter grade. My grade of 85% doesn’t show that I knew 95 percent of the material. Grades are misleading. Again, I have felt this way for a long time. I wasn’t aware of the research supporting how I felt. One of the most interesting bits of research presented was that grades change the quality of students thought-processing. As a student, I definitely can identify with not wanting to think as deeply about an assignment and to only use information that I knew the teacher would appreciate just to get the grade. The article was interesting to read and made me want to become a teacher so that I could tell all of my students that grades don’t matter. If more high schools adopted a no-grade model, I feel that many students’ quality of life would be greatly improved as a main source of stress for many of us is our grades.
