As a student, I scrambled for grades until I went to graduate school at Columbia University where courses were taken for “Y” (automatic) credit; for the first time I could concentrate on my education and not on grades. I was as motivated to do well in my Y credit courses as I had been earlier, when chained to the tyranny of A through F.
Grades are still paramount in students’ minds and in education reform. We grade everything—from schools to films to the restaurants we visit and the wines we drink, and even the jobs we do in the workplace. We love reducing a big experience to a simple grade.
What we forget is that the grade is only as good as the grader, and graders are only as good as the criteria they use to measure the student, school, meal, wine, or job. And furthermore, the criteria are only as good as the grader’s ability to apply those criteria consistently, time after time. Many studies show the “halo” effect of grading: student work graded just after a particularly good paper suffers by comparison. A wine taster undergoes that same “prejudice” after tasting a fabulous wine—even when bread is eaten to “cleanse” the palate. In a metaphorical sense related to all types of grading, our palates are never “cleansed.”
Yet we continue to obsess over grades. Students are admitted to college based on them, and often acquire their first jobs based on them. Restaurants can measure their popularity, and wines their marketability based on printed “scores.” No one wants to go to a school that has a low ranking, or hire a first year law clerk who earned Cs in college.
Why does nearly everything need to be graded? We don’t use the same rote measure for politicians because we realize a leader is multi-dimensional, and therefore more than his Yale GPA or grades in the Naval Academy. If President Bush and John McCain are more than their GPAs, why aren’t our students and schools?
Enter the No Child Left Behind Act, which has as its goal 100% student proficiency in reading and math by the year 2014. Most agree that 100% of anything is nearly impossible to achieve, but NCLB’s main problem is that it believes that all students and all schools can be measured by a single standard. Smart states have figured out that by lowering the standard they can increase their pass rates, but then we’re just playing games.
And games are what we’re reduced to when we oversimplify education. Ideally, colleges would get to know candidates in multiple ways before accepting or rejecting them, and teachers would measure students on more than grades on tests. That ideal does hold for many colleges and many teachers.
Yet NCLB has a pass/fail system that doesn’t accommodate nuance. Although the program has done many good things for struggling students and schools, by its own measure it will, ultimately, be a failure. How do you think we will meet 100% proficiency in 2014? We will play games with the standards and finally admit that the NCLB grading policy has failed us.
What Kids Are Reading
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre, data from libraries, and data from booksellers. The list below is taken from Amazon.com’s list of children’s books.
Books on Grades and Grading
1. The Report Card by Andrew Clements (ages 9-12)
2. The Bully Brothers: Making the Grade by Mike Thaler and Jared Lee (ages 4-8)
3. Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade by Berthe DeClements (ages 9-12)
4. What to do When Mom or Dad Says “Get Good Grades!” by Joy Wilt Berry (ages 4-6)
5. What’s an “A” Anyway? How Important are Grades? by Marni Terkel (ages 12-17)
6. Ronald’s Report Card by Alvin Granowsky, Craig and Joy Ann Tweedt (ages 4-8)
