Grading and Learning

The trees outside of Knobview Hall have begun their seasonal transformation, displaying a beautiful range of oranges, reds, and yellows. It's still early enough in the season that many of the greens keep on fighting their losing battle to resist the inevitable cycle of seemingly decadent summer life and austere wintry barrenness that I vaguely remember from my campus visit here in southern Indiana last February. And it's time to grade.

The school year emulates the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, and as a lifelong participant in education, I cannot dissociate the fall from the newness of learning endeavors. Fall has always been my favorite time of year, in part because I prefer coolness to the humid, life-sucking constant blaze of summers in my native South, but also because of the energy of the new school year. It's invigorating to welcome new students, especially freshmen, to college and to start the complex, challenging, and rewarding work that we will do together throughout the semester.

But at some point every fall--or, if I'm going to be completely honest, every semester, and maybe multiple times during the semester--I slam into a wall. I've been teaching long enough to see it coming, but it still hurts when I smack straight into it, as I always do. Several weeks into the semester, the novelty of the course wears off and we're faced with the reality of the institutional power that I hold over my students.

Let's face it: Professors are not making life-or-death decisions when we assign grades to students. Our power over students is ludicrously small, but it is a power that students have been trained to take very seriously; and they often resent this power when they don't get the high grades they think they deserve. You can say "I don't give grades, you earn grades" until you've said it so many times that it's the only relative truth you can hold in your head any longer, but students don't see it that way. You can build syllabi that look more like legal fortresses than instruments of learning, designed to foresee as many objections and dilemmas as possible, but no syllabus will divert students away from charging you with being "unfair" or being "too hard" when you hold them accountable for not completing their work.

We are Prometheus, giving unto the cold, huddled masses the fire of the GPA to sustain them in their time of need for the warmth Pell grants, scholarships, internships, and future gainful employment. (I wonder how far that Promethean metaphor for faculty can take us, if we consider that the gods cast Prometheus out, but that's another post for another year.) This is how our students see us. How can students help but see us this way, since public education has become all about the grades students score on high-stakes exams?

So how do we handle this responsibility? Some reject it entirely, arguing that grades have no real meaning, and that they ultimately impede learning. Well, I'll concede that grades may at times impede learning. That wall I mentioned earlier? I forgot to say: It's invisible. And frigid. And it only appears when students have gotten grades back for the first time in the semester. Suddenly, we aren't pals any more (I never wanted to be) and they're going to stick it to me by skipping class or showing up and frowning at me for 75 minutes to show me just how unhappy they are (you're not hurting my feelings, not-buddy). That invisible wall can absolutely get in the way of learning because suddenly students are more concerned about an abstraction of their progress than what we are actually doing in class.

But I cannot accept that grades have no meaning just because they are, in fact, abstractions. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no Ideal Grades floating out there in the Real. (Wouldn't grading be so much easier if Plato had been right? We could just hold up essays and compare them to the Ideal, and then go get some coffee.) But grades are markers that carry (or perhaps we should say that are burdened with) significant sociocultural value.

I'm not opposed to considered other means of letting students know our assessment of their learning in progress. Some liberal arts colleges write letters to students comprised of summative remarks about their learning in the course. Time consuming, sure, but I see the merit. But in the meantime, we have a mutually agreed-upon system that denotes how students have performed on assignments and in courses. So for me, we can't outright reject the grading scale as it currently exists: Arguing that grades are some kind of institutional hocus pocus veers on the blatantly irresponsible. Blaming the institution seems too lazy to me, since we as faculty members can consider ways in which grading can be turned toward productive learning. We are responsible for assigning these grades: I don't see any deans or provosts walking into my classroom and pointing at my students and saying, "That one gets a D because I don't like his hat. This one gets an A because she has the university planner that we put out so much money for. That one smells funny, but I think he's quirky, so I'll give him a B+." So we should bear in mind the importance of the task and try to make the best of a grading system that kind of works for most students more often than not. It's better than Maebe Funke's crocodile in spelling.

It's hard to get an A in my classes. Freshman Me would never get an A in my class because he was too lazy to turn in work on time or to put much effort into what he wrote. Students who finish my writing courses with Bs should know that they have done quite well. Students who earn Ds should take it as a helpful hint that they need to decide where their priorities lie and find new ways to motivate themselves if they want to do better. But really, do grades do much more than that?

We can use grades as punitive tools--little grenades loaded with shame and self-loathing shrapnel. But we would do better to think that grades have power, although they are much less powerful than students tend to believe. Teachers can harness what little power grades have in productive ways. We can be as explicit as possible in our courses about how grades are reached, and what those grades actually mean. Every semester, on the first day, I write this sentence on the board: C is true north. C is the goal. Anything better than a C is cause for candy and puppies. We don't need our students to like us, and we shouldn't feel like grades somehow affect our ability to help students learn. That cold, invisible wall inevitably comes up at about this time every semester, but for most students, it goes back down when students have gotten over the initial shock of a lower-than-expected grade.

Teachers in writing especially seem to carry this burden that students are negatively impacted by the grades they receive. As much as it hurts me to say it: We aren't different, writing teachers. We aren't special. Many, many students we teach just aren't going to like our classes. If you take this dislike personally, you're probably missing the point of what you need to be doing. We need to help our students learn how to communicate in varied contexts, so the least we can do is be honest about how grades work: they aren't all powerful, but they aren't meaningless either. They are tools we can use to help students become better learners.