Great post! I started a full-time teaching job at UCSD this year and so much of this resonates. In addition to "cop" I'd add something like "legislator": because classes are often >300 students, I spend too much time worrying about how to design "general" course policies that are the least bad while also trying to balance not over-loading myself or my teaching team with administrative work. But this still means that a non-trivial % of my time is (as you said) spent responding to student requests for exceptions, etc., most of which seem entirely understandable and none of which I'm really that interested in litigating. It also means deciding how/whether/when to enforce semi-arbitrary policies, where an exception makes sense in each particular case, but where (because of the class size) it still feels like I need *some* general rule.
I think I agree with 99% of what you've written—I do, however, think that some kind of external motivator can be really helpful. I'm not sure it's grades per se. But in my own life, for example, there are things that I *want* on some level to learn (and will ultimately enjoy knowing) but which I know I don't have the discipline to sit down and push myself to do. Those things are most useful to have classes for, and in turn it's helpful to have some kind of external push to attend those classes and do the work. But that said:
1) I agree grades may not be the right approach;
2) I especially like the idea of separating instruction from evaluation;
3) It's also entirely possible that the reason I require so much external motivation in these cases is because I've been trained in a system that centers grades and evaluation! Maybe there's a better way forward.
The other challenge with separating instruction from evaluation (which I think is broadly good) is that, at least in my experience, you sometimes see resistance from teachers. Now, that's in part because historically it's been tied to things like evaluating *teacher* performance (evaluations all the way down!) and even school funding. But it is a potential obstacle.
Legislation is a great word for it. I want to create policies that are fair for everybody, but someone approaches with a compelling reason for an exception. Do I stick to the policy, change it for everyone, grant it only for this person, or what? These are tough questions that aren't necessary for teaching, but are integral to evaluation.
I can understand the need for extrinsic motivation, but I think we can do it without creating a mandatory grading system for everyone. If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology. I could still be convinced––we all contain multitudes, and some of those multitudes don't agree with each other. But in that case I'd try to figure out what would offer the most motivation for the least cost to both of us, and I bet we could do better than grades. When I got to take smaller classes later on, one of my biggest motivations was earning the approval of my professors (also not a great reason to do work, but at least one that isn't immortalized on a transcript).
> Do I stick to the policy, change it for everyone, grant it only for this person, or what? These are tough questions that aren't necessary for teaching, but are integral to evaluation.
Exactly (and well-put). It's also just a source of stress and decision fatigue for me, and I know it's a source of anxiety for students who worry about whether and when it's appropriate to ask for an extension, etc.
> I can understand the need for extrinsic motivation, but I think we can do it without creating a mandatory grading system for everyone. If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology.
Yeah this is a great point and I agree!
On that note, I do wonder how much resistance to dropping grades/evaluation comes from a fear that the classes aren't intrinsically interesting enough to students—which of course requires some soul-searching about how best to engage students.
> If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology.
I mostly agree with this, but I think there’s an extra wrinkle when it comes to, in particular, teaching undergrads. These kids are learning how to balance having an independent life for the first time with being responsible students. For some, having extrinsic factors motivating them to show up to class might be necessary.
That said, maybe the people who aren't motivated to care about class shouldn't feel forced to. We put an absurd premium on higher education in this country.
Ungrading really helped me see the value in doing any assessment (I’m a tertiary educator, too). I wouldn’t want to get rid of all assessment, because it serves some purposes - making sure students have mastered competence of skills required to take second-year courses which follow on first-year ones, for instance. It also lets students know what they need to work on. Lastly, it can give them a metric of their progress towards “mastery”.
Some professional courses have the idea of “day one competencies” or “minimal entrust-able skills” which are the tasks you can expect someone who passes the course to be able to do. I think that is possibly a useful thing to assess.
However, none of that requires giving students some arbitrary number against a course code.
I don't. Not on a one-dimensional graded scale, in any case. I assess pass/fail whether students learned what I want them to learn. That's usually easy. All the time I would otherwise spend on distinguishing between a 7,5 and 8,0 out of 10, I spend on qualitative feedback.
This feedback is often highly critical. I can be enthousiastic and demanding at the same time, instead of needing to be defensive because I have to litigate a particular score. And because students are free to engage with that feedback without the effect of their actions on a grade in the back of their minds, I have much more in-depth conversations with them. They appear to learn more. Plus they leave with a better vibe about the topic/skills I teach (see Adam's post on students forgetting what they learned quickly).
1. Grades serve a role as feedback for *you* the instructor to let you know how well you are conveying the material. If students in your class are scoring poorly, maybe you should change something in your approach.
2. Even meaningless monopoly money type points can be motivating if they are finite. I'm using the Duolingo language app to refresh my German in prep for a Europe trip. In the app, you get 5 "hearts" per day and lose a heart each time you give a wrong answer. That I get only 5 hearts greatly increases my focus, and I'm refraining from paying for the infinite-heart version not merely because I'm a cheapskate but because the fact that the hearts are limited keeps me more engaged.
3. Ranking students does not benefit you personally, but it does benefit your institution's reputation. E.g., suppose Columbia said., "We don't give grades. We assume students are here to learn and how much is up to them. If they show up for 4 years, they get a degree. And, by the way, we decide who gets to attend here by random lottery." How would that affect the value of a Columbia degree?
4. I'm not opposed in principle to separating teaching from evaluation. But IMO, when learning something, the more rapid the feedback, the better. So too much time separation between teaching and evaluation means fewer opportunities for self-correction. Perhaps for quick feedback, you could have regular in-class quizzes that don't count toward students' grades, and less frequent out-of-class exams given by someone else in a "pure testing" environment (but I hope one not as awful as what kids have to go through for the SAT).
1. Agreed, but this can be done as feedback and doesn't require evaluation––that is, no one else needs to know.
2. I agree, though I also think we can do better than letters on a transcript, especially since those have meaning in the world, whereas hearts don't.
3. Absolutely. This is the most proximal reason why I have to give grades, and covers up for the fact that universities have no evidence they are actually doing anything useful for students. I think they are, of course––that's a very low bar to clear, for the amounts they're charging––but how much better is it than whatever else students would be doing with their time? That's much less clear.
To the 1st point, how can grades confidently serve as feedback for the instructor when there are arbitrary cutoffs? Like 50% of students can get Honors? This is a common system in medical/law and some colleges
I'm speaking of raw scores, not curved final grades, as a feedback mechanism. If the median grade on the first test you give is, say, 30%, then you are probably doing something wrong. Maybe you just made the test too hard; maybe you need to work on your pedagogical technique. But, most likely, it *doesn't* mean that you have a class full of lazy morons.
I just ended a 35 year career in higher education as an adjunct-bets job, terrible pay. Over the years I thought a lot about grades and such and tried many things-pass fail, points, starting at A and working down, starting at F and working up. It all sucked and it was all meaningless. Im ended up in a happy place. I did not give my students a syllabus (the U had one but I did not share it with students), I did not give tests, no papers but weekly assignments with open ended topics (pretty f'ing boring to read all those papers with the same topic and answers. I stopped that about a year in-life's too short) Default grade was a B+-do all the assignments on time and show up. Naps?Sure, but take them in class so you wake up with us. Evaluations-end of semester reflections-"What happened since we started?" Open ended. I told my students that in order for this to work I needed to do two things: 1. earn their trust, 2. earn their respect" If I did that their responses to the reflections would be honest, diplomatic and useful to all of us-We shared all assignments and reflections to the whole class. No one was anonymous.
If someone asked why no syllabus my answer (after I thought it through and fumbled a bunch of times was"Life doesn't have a syllabus." Heads nodded in the affirmative. We just did the work and, with large final projects-some international-they published to the web via YouTube. It was surprisingly easy to have them give up the grade bullshit in favor of real work. There is more but this is the gist of it. I had more fun than a barrel of monkeys and so did my students who also learned a ton.
Glad to not see I'm not alone in this! I'm doing pretty much the same thing (no tests; open-ended assignments - at least within the freedom that I have at my current uni). Once in a while I would receive a paper with some student's real thoughts & reflections, how they have changed over the course. This makes it feel like what I'm doing has some value to it after all (other collegeagues have complained to me that kids these days don't care about their education anymore, but I want to believe some of them still do!)
Marvelous. I can still recall with some shame how relieved I was when a student in my TA sections would make mistakes in some unarguable way, because my fear every quarter was that the luck of section assignments would give me a class with so many A-level students I'd have to bump some of them down purely for "curve" reasons.
More constructively, I'd favor something like the pass/fail or yes/no criteria Nathan Robinson's adumbrated for college admissions:
' Instead of finding the “top ten best people” we should be selecting “anyone who has proved they are capable of doing the expected work.” Competitive admissions are as irrational as grading curves. With a grading curve, only X percent of the class will get As on their papers, even if every single person in the class wrote an excellent paper, which forces you to start making silly and arbitrary distinctions in a contrived effort to pit the students against each other. The better way to grade is by developing a standard independently and giving students a qualification if they meet the standard. '
I was going to say just what you did in your first paragraph. When I was a TA for organic chemistry labs I was grateful for the lousy students that did obviously shoddy work. It meant I could freely give 100s to my excellent students without getting hassled for over-generous grading.
I feel the exact same way. I required students to do some additional assignments if they wanted to earn the highest grade, and felt such relief when people would choose not to do them: "Phew, I won't have to harm anyone with the curve." What an incredible perverse incentive when I benefit from students engaging *less* in the class.
Great post! My instructor experiences were in the military "instruction" system, which was very systematized/routinized and similar to the "prison-like" environment you discussed.
1. My curriculum was given to me in a prepackaged format, complete with a multi-month schedule that defined what I would be teaching when at 15-minute intervals.
2. Any modifications to the curriculum required a 3+ year process (and that was for minor revisions - major revisions were 5+ years). As such, we had the "official" curriculum, which is what we taught whenever auditors/inspectors were around, and the "unofficial" curriculum, which is what we taught otherwise.
3. The evaluations were also incredibly easy; every student had a defined unit that he was slotted for and an academic delay would cause that slot to go unfilled, so failing a student required significant justification.
I was senior enough and respected enough that I could teach my own stuff and get away with it (I gave an award to two people every class; the one with the highest test average, and the one with the fastest test completion average while still passing) but it frustrated me how many people continued to insist that Taylorism was the answer and we just needed to do it better. They were working on drafting mandatory speaker notes for each slide when I left.
There must be a word for this phenomenon, where you tighten the rules and people respond by secretly breaking them. It's sort of like Goodhart's Law, but importantly different. It's like there's a point of optimal standardization, where if you go below it, people just don't meet the standards, and if you go above it, people find ways to ignore them. Anyway, it sounds like what the people in charge really wanted was for everyone to be taught by a hologram.
I call it a "polite fiction." Leads to a brightly lit de jure system aboveground, and a dimly lit de facto system belowground.
There's also something called instruction creep, and at some point the "distracting complexity" reaches a point where the bloated instructions can no longer be followed.
Wow, amazing post. So many recognisable things you mention, about how you start questioning each student's claim since you know they want something from you, as well about how all that grading is for the most part pretty useless and even detrimental to the learning process. I teach secondary school by the way (next to my writing / substack job that is )
Thanks for the enjoyable read. I'm an elementary teacher, and while I agree that the current system is far from perfect, it does seem reasonable that the person doing the teaching knows what they need to evaluate. It seems reasonable that the teacher can design some way to evaluate how much your students learned (and how well you taught). Thankfully I don't have a restriction on how many A+ grades I'm allowed to give out, and I try to teach each topic thoroughly enough that every student is capable of achieving a good score on an evaluation. I find that the evaluation is most importantly a step that requires me to check for student understanding. If I find that students are scoring poorly on a topic evaluation, I know I need to spend some more time teaching this topic.
As you point out, humans love to learn. Unfortunately we are also often lazy and distracted by things that we also want to learn (who posted the latest meme/conspiracy theory on social media) that distract us from things we care about but are more difficult. Teachers and schools have to find a way to help students focus on the difficult subjects rather than the easy ones (youtube shorts). Thanks!
Primary and secondary education seem especially difficult in this regard because there are important evaluations––standardized tests and graduation exams––that are supposedly separate from instruction but in practice aren't at all, because (as I understand it) you can be held accountable for the scores your students get, so you have to make sure they meet the standards that the tests will assess. I don't know how to solve this problem, but the first step is convincing the people who are hellbent on evaluation that they cannot overcome the Evaluation Uncertainty Principle: you can either know how well someone is doing, or you can teach them well, but you can't do both.
Maybe we are thinking of different things. I would use the word assessment (or even quiz) that allows you to check if students have absorbed the concept you were trying to teach. I think that almost the opposite of your Uncertainty Principle is actually true—you cannot know if you are teaching if you don't know how well someone is doing. Whether you choose to assign a graded score to their understanding is up to the teacher, but it is kind of handy to score it so that you can have a class average and standard deviation to better understand your data. Thanks again for the interesting article.
I think it's important to note that there are significant differences between the average K-12 student and graduate students. Perhaps all of Adam's students really do love to learn complex topics, but as a high school teacher, I see the full spectrum of students every day. I also don't enjoy evaluating, and I see the value in pointing out the differences between feedback and evaluation. However, there are several idealistic assumptions about all students in this post that contradict my lived experience. There is a danger in simply blaming the teachers for not being interesting enough.
Loved this post, and your comment, Nicole. Fellow high school teacher here. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with self-grading and ungrading, and it helps reduce the policing, but some students are going to be more excited about my class than others, and Monopoly money sometimes does help motivate those students. If they were college or graduate students, they might choose not to take my class, which is what I did with subjects I hated in high school. But our education system mandates that all students should obtain a basic proficiency in certain areas, so everyone has to take my class. I didn’t get into teaching because I want to force march students up a the hill of English composition, but it feels like there’s always some element of that in teaching K-12. Is that inevitable with this level of schooling?
As a retired state university economics professor i agree with you 100%. Teaching should be focused entirely on learning--and completely separate from evaluation.
i went back for an executive MBA at 30 where all the students were between 27 and 40. classes were graded on ✅, ✅➕, and ✅➖ basis. about 3/4 of the class was up in arms that grading was more strict. my take was that i didn’t care because i was there to learn. it was the material that i was interested in. i didn’t care how or if i was evaluated because i was there to learn. at the time, it was very funny to hear so many people in that age of their lives still feeling a need for institutional affirmation. in the end, the grading system did not change, but i believe students learned more because they could focus on what was important...the material and the experience.
Great explanation of the difference between evaluation and feedback!
Great question on why the instructor is supposed to evaluate, but others get all the value from the evaluation!
I was once recruited for a job by a "Big 4" consulting firm. They made be an offer, contingent on my undergrad GPA being 3.5 or better. It was over thirty years since I was an undergraduate. I declined the job. Apparently they didn't trust their own evaluation, or my 30 years of actual accomplishments, but did trust the evaluations of some anonymous and (mostly) long dead professors. Go figure.
Whoa! In what world do someone's grades from 30 years ago override whatever they did since then? I suppose that's the power of assigning numbers to things––who knows how to value all that squishy stuff, and who can argue with a number?
Great post! I teach psychology and research methods in Cegep in Quebec (which is a weird post-secondary thing that basically includes what would be the last year of high school for a student intending to go to university, plus their first year of uni), so my students are 17 to 19 ys old, mostly intending to do some kind of Soc Sc in uni, or to placate their parents who insist they go to uni.
I've struggled with the whole 'assessment' thing for years. I'd love it if my students didn't need an external reward system (which is also a punishment system, of course) to come to class, do some work, and learn. But the reality is both that their frontal lobes are sooooo not working well yet (worse still for current students who spent a good chunk of their high school years locked down and doing online classes/exams), and they do need to learn some stuff that some of them are not that interested in right now, but that they actually will need further down the road, no matter what they do in their work lives. Being able to understand our complex world in complex ways, being able to find reasonably trustworthy info, and to use it to think and communicate clearly about complex topics are skills every citizen should have, and that they will def need in most fields of work as well as in their lives, both personally and in community.
Some things that have helped to reduce the policing/judging I have to do to the minimum;
- My tests tend to be either open-book or written with a page of notes they prepare themselves (excellent review just in prepping that!), so I can ask them to analyze/apply/integrate info, rather than just memorize it. Some students don't prep that 'cheat sheet', or can't follow the course material because they weren't in class, haven't done the reading, haven't done the small assignments ..... Those are the ones who will end up failing the course, and that's ok. 'Certifiying' that the students learned some specific stuff is a reasonably useful function, as long as it doesn't dominate the learning experience.
- Whenever possible I have an 'optional final exam'. (Unfortunately I'm not allowed to do this for Intro Psych, as the college worries other teachers' students will complain that mine have an advantage, despite my ending up with very similar class averages and grade distributions as the rest of my dep't for this course.) Any student can do it, it replaces ONE of the semester tests IF the grade on the final is higher than the grade on a regular test (so there's no risk it will bring a student's grade down). Who does this final? Anyone who misses any test for any reason, I don't care why they missed it and don't even want to know. Students who did well on other tests but bombed one, for whatever reason. Also any student who is not at the 60% passing grade at the end of the semester; I don't have to listen to the begging, wheedling and whining to get 'extra work' or to 'bump the grade up'. Also students who are at 96% and want to see if they can get to 98%. This optional final almost eliminates my having to listen to whining and to diarrhea-and-dead-grandparent stories, and gives students the opportunity to show they actually do meet the required competencies for the course. But because it replaces only one test, it doesn't over-reward the student who did bugger all, all semester, and now wants to cram and try to pass.
- Any major task, such as a big paper, research project, etc, I do in stages, and there are a few points attached to each stage, before the big grade for the final submission. Stages might be; choose appropriate articles, write a thesis statement, do an outline, write the Intro then the Method (so writing a proposal) for their research study, write a plan for their application of an intervention .... Since procrastination is a HUGE problem for students, this gets them moving on that big task, and allows me to provide feedback at each step. Part of the grade on the final report/paper is whether they incorporated the feedback. The extra time I take in going over each step and giving feedback is almost entirely compensated by higher quality work handed in for the final paper/report, making marking those faster and easier, and decreasing my annoyance in marking that paper, too. It also feels very pedagogically appropriate, since getting students to EXPERIENCE both the decrease in their stress when they do the intermediate steps, and the improvement in the quality of their work, is super useful to people who came out of high school having done very little of that.
- I give formative tasks that have few or no points attached. Little quizzes (lots of textbooks come with these, online, these days, or I prep them on Forms so they are auto-graded), reflection assignments, in-class work on the topic of the day. If it's an online quiz, they can do it as many times as they like; once they get to 90% on it, they get the 1% it's worth. If other types of tasks, as long as they DO it and appear to have thought about it a bit, they get that point. I read the first set and give brief brief feedback to everyone, then after that, barely glance at them, randomly choosing maybe 10% of them to read and give a little feedback. Work done in class we go over in class, they add feedback to their own assignment in a different coloured pen or font, and as long as the 'corrected' version is correct, they get the point (makes them actually pay attention to and write down the correct info - valuable in itself). Weirdly, students will do these quite consistently when they are worth so few points (from zero to max 10% of their course grade.)
- I give students a chance to fix their work, especially on things like papers where there weren't preliminary stages to do. I mark quite strictly, they get the paper back. They can then come to see me to talk about what needs to be improved (I encourage them to record that convo on their phones, since they WILL forget half of it later). They then fix and re-submit. All I have to do is check that they applied the feedback correctly. They can gain up to HALF of the points they'd lost the first time around, by doing this. (That way students who did it right the first time still have more points than those who needed this chance.)
My classes range from 30 to 40 students, so this is do-able, but I've also done a lot of it when teaching undergrad classes of 300-400. You just need good TAs!
Unfortunately, I don't think our whole system is going to change any time soon, and that's what it would take to get away from having to be both teacher and cop/judge. We live in a society that emphasizes competition, individuality, and the myth of meritocracy, and some people benefit a LOT from that (mostly those who already have privilege, and guess whose parents are making the rules?), so I don't see big changes coming any time soon. In the meantime, I try to reduce the stress and encourage the learning for my students, and to help interested colleagues to do the same.
Thanks for sharing this! This issue has been on my mind for the past few years too.
About Proctorio, I once saw a teacher sharing on Reddit that one of her students was crying during the test due to stress, and the program flagged her as cheating! The poor kid :(
Regarding the separation of instruction and evaluation, I don't think it would be possible because students would definitely try to figure out how the "evaluation process" goes and ask their teacher to prepare them for that (evident from the huge number of test-preparation centers around the world).
The final goal, I think, is to abolish grading altogether. This "ungrading" movement has been mentioned in other comments, so I just want to share this Youtube video I watched a while ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew - "Grading is a Scam") - there's a list of books and articles on the downsides of grading within this video.
Still, as long as testing & test-preparation remain extremely profitable like it is right now, I don't think they will go away anytime soon.
I second that video rec and the reading list in the description. I've been working in an ungrading direction with classes I've been teaching (in higher ed). It really helped me bring into focus what was bugging me (basically identical to what Adam describes here) and what I wanted to do instead. I don't think I've totally gotten ungrading to "work," but it's definitely been an improvement.
It really made me think hard about intrinsic motivation for my class and all it's activities. I had to ask: what can I teach that would be interesting/useful enough for students to take, even if they weren't going to get credit? (They were getting credit, but this seems like a necessary foundation for the next question) What activities would be interesting/valuable enough that students would do them, even if they weren't required for a grade? I find that if I can get those right (better each time!), then class is great, though the interface with the larger grade/eval world still aggravating.
Since no-one has mentioned The Case Against Education yet, I feel obliged to do so. Teachers must be cops since the students want cops, how else will they get sheepskin to show the real world? The scale of the dysfunction is enormous since the government carelessly pours billions on it, problems can grow real big on that kind of money.
The obvious but politically impossible solution is to stop subsidizing sorting and start taxing it heavily instead. Sorting is needed but it's zero sum and spending on it could be reduced to maybe 1% of the current turnover without much difference in outcome.
In the UK the testers are not the teachers at any level at least up to undergraduate degree. They are also anonymised through use of id numbers rather than names for students and the exam setters are not public information.
Exams are external (at 16 and 18) and centralised (at uni). This means that no-one pesters the teachers about what is in the test or extra credit (it is not available). Attendance and assignments in the interim are not part of the grade (there are some specific coursework projects that are evaluated, but this is the exception.)
What it does mean is a certain amount of teaching to the test as teachers play the Goodhart game, but it does limit a number of the downsides outlined here.
Great post! I started a full-time teaching job at UCSD this year and so much of this resonates. In addition to "cop" I'd add something like "legislator": because classes are often >300 students, I spend too much time worrying about how to design "general" course policies that are the least bad while also trying to balance not over-loading myself or my teaching team with administrative work. But this still means that a non-trivial % of my time is (as you said) spent responding to student requests for exceptions, etc., most of which seem entirely understandable and none of which I'm really that interested in litigating. It also means deciding how/whether/when to enforce semi-arbitrary policies, where an exception makes sense in each particular case, but where (because of the class size) it still feels like I need *some* general rule.
I think I agree with 99% of what you've written—I do, however, think that some kind of external motivator can be really helpful. I'm not sure it's grades per se. But in my own life, for example, there are things that I *want* on some level to learn (and will ultimately enjoy knowing) but which I know I don't have the discipline to sit down and push myself to do. Those things are most useful to have classes for, and in turn it's helpful to have some kind of external push to attend those classes and do the work. But that said:
1) I agree grades may not be the right approach;
2) I especially like the idea of separating instruction from evaluation;
3) It's also entirely possible that the reason I require so much external motivation in these cases is because I've been trained in a system that centers grades and evaluation! Maybe there's a better way forward.
The other challenge with separating instruction from evaluation (which I think is broadly good) is that, at least in my experience, you sometimes see resistance from teachers. Now, that's in part because historically it's been tied to things like evaluating *teacher* performance (evaluations all the way down!) and even school funding. But it is a potential obstacle.
Legislation is a great word for it. I want to create policies that are fair for everybody, but someone approaches with a compelling reason for an exception. Do I stick to the policy, change it for everyone, grant it only for this person, or what? These are tough questions that aren't necessary for teaching, but are integral to evaluation.
I can understand the need for extrinsic motivation, but I think we can do it without creating a mandatory grading system for everyone. If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology. I could still be convinced––we all contain multitudes, and some of those multitudes don't agree with each other. But in that case I'd try to figure out what would offer the most motivation for the least cost to both of us, and I bet we could do better than grades. When I got to take smaller classes later on, one of my biggest motivations was earning the approval of my professors (also not a great reason to do work, but at least one that isn't immortalized on a transcript).
> Do I stick to the policy, change it for everyone, grant it only for this person, or what? These are tough questions that aren't necessary for teaching, but are integral to evaluation.
Exactly (and well-put). It's also just a source of stress and decision fatigue for me, and I know it's a source of anxiety for students who worry about whether and when it's appropriate to ask for an extension, etc.
> I can understand the need for extrinsic motivation, but I think we can do it without creating a mandatory grading system for everyone. If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology.
Yeah this is a great point and I agree!
On that note, I do wonder how much resistance to dropping grades/evaluation comes from a fear that the classes aren't intrinsically interesting enough to students—which of course requires some soul-searching about how best to engage students.
> If someone came to me and said, "I really want to learn psychology but I won't do it unless you force me to," I'd first feel skeptical that they actually wanted to learn psychology.
I mostly agree with this, but I think there’s an extra wrinkle when it comes to, in particular, teaching undergrads. These kids are learning how to balance having an independent life for the first time with being responsible students. For some, having extrinsic factors motivating them to show up to class might be necessary.
That said, maybe the people who aren't motivated to care about class shouldn't feel forced to. We put an absurd premium on higher education in this country.
For everyone nodding along to this (like me): there is growing and global movement of educators to do grading less and/or differently, mostly under the banner of 'ungrading' (e.g. see https://www.jessestommel.com/tag/ungrading/ and https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/ for two foundational authors). There is also a growing body of work showing that "compared to those who received comments, students receiving grades had poorer achievement and less optimal motivation" (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01443410.2019.1659939?journalCode=cedp20)
Ungrading really helped me see the value in doing any assessment (I’m a tertiary educator, too). I wouldn’t want to get rid of all assessment, because it serves some purposes - making sure students have mastered competence of skills required to take second-year courses which follow on first-year ones, for instance. It also lets students know what they need to work on. Lastly, it can give them a metric of their progress towards “mastery”.
Some professional courses have the idea of “day one competencies” or “minimal entrust-able skills” which are the tasks you can expect someone who passes the course to be able to do. I think that is possibly a useful thing to assess.
However, none of that requires giving students some arbitrary number against a course code.
So how are you measuring achievement?
I don't. Not on a one-dimensional graded scale, in any case. I assess pass/fail whether students learned what I want them to learn. That's usually easy. All the time I would otherwise spend on distinguishing between a 7,5 and 8,0 out of 10, I spend on qualitative feedback.
This feedback is often highly critical. I can be enthousiastic and demanding at the same time, instead of needing to be defensive because I have to litigate a particular score. And because students are free to engage with that feedback without the effect of their actions on a grade in the back of their minds, I have much more in-depth conversations with them. They appear to learn more. Plus they leave with a better vibe about the topic/skills I teach (see Adam's post on students forgetting what they learned quickly).
A lot to unpack here. Just a few random thoughts:
1. Grades serve a role as feedback for *you* the instructor to let you know how well you are conveying the material. If students in your class are scoring poorly, maybe you should change something in your approach.
2. Even meaningless monopoly money type points can be motivating if they are finite. I'm using the Duolingo language app to refresh my German in prep for a Europe trip. In the app, you get 5 "hearts" per day and lose a heart each time you give a wrong answer. That I get only 5 hearts greatly increases my focus, and I'm refraining from paying for the infinite-heart version not merely because I'm a cheapskate but because the fact that the hearts are limited keeps me more engaged.
3. Ranking students does not benefit you personally, but it does benefit your institution's reputation. E.g., suppose Columbia said., "We don't give grades. We assume students are here to learn and how much is up to them. If they show up for 4 years, they get a degree. And, by the way, we decide who gets to attend here by random lottery." How would that affect the value of a Columbia degree?
4. I'm not opposed in principle to separating teaching from evaluation. But IMO, when learning something, the more rapid the feedback, the better. So too much time separation between teaching and evaluation means fewer opportunities for self-correction. Perhaps for quick feedback, you could have regular in-class quizzes that don't count toward students' grades, and less frequent out-of-class exams given by someone else in a "pure testing" environment (but I hope one not as awful as what kids have to go through for the SAT).
1. Agreed, but this can be done as feedback and doesn't require evaluation––that is, no one else needs to know.
2. I agree, though I also think we can do better than letters on a transcript, especially since those have meaning in the world, whereas hearts don't.
3. Absolutely. This is the most proximal reason why I have to give grades, and covers up for the fact that universities have no evidence they are actually doing anything useful for students. I think they are, of course––that's a very low bar to clear, for the amounts they're charging––but how much better is it than whatever else students would be doing with their time? That's much less clear.
4. Agreed
To the 1st point, how can grades confidently serve as feedback for the instructor when there are arbitrary cutoffs? Like 50% of students can get Honors? This is a common system in medical/law and some colleges
I'm speaking of raw scores, not curved final grades, as a feedback mechanism. If the median grade on the first test you give is, say, 30%, then you are probably doing something wrong. Maybe you just made the test too hard; maybe you need to work on your pedagogical technique. But, most likely, it *doesn't* mean that you have a class full of lazy morons.
I just ended a 35 year career in higher education as an adjunct-bets job, terrible pay. Over the years I thought a lot about grades and such and tried many things-pass fail, points, starting at A and working down, starting at F and working up. It all sucked and it was all meaningless. Im ended up in a happy place. I did not give my students a syllabus (the U had one but I did not share it with students), I did not give tests, no papers but weekly assignments with open ended topics (pretty f'ing boring to read all those papers with the same topic and answers. I stopped that about a year in-life's too short) Default grade was a B+-do all the assignments on time and show up. Naps?Sure, but take them in class so you wake up with us. Evaluations-end of semester reflections-"What happened since we started?" Open ended. I told my students that in order for this to work I needed to do two things: 1. earn their trust, 2. earn their respect" If I did that their responses to the reflections would be honest, diplomatic and useful to all of us-We shared all assignments and reflections to the whole class. No one was anonymous.
If someone asked why no syllabus my answer (after I thought it through and fumbled a bunch of times was"Life doesn't have a syllabus." Heads nodded in the affirmative. We just did the work and, with large final projects-some international-they published to the web via YouTube. It was surprisingly easy to have them give up the grade bullshit in favor of real work. There is more but this is the gist of it. I had more fun than a barrel of monkeys and so did my students who also learned a ton.
Glad to not see I'm not alone in this! I'm doing pretty much the same thing (no tests; open-ended assignments - at least within the freedom that I have at my current uni). Once in a while I would receive a paper with some student's real thoughts & reflections, how they have changed over the course. This makes it feel like what I'm doing has some value to it after all (other collegeagues have complained to me that kids these days don't care about their education anymore, but I want to believe some of them still do!)
Marvelous. I can still recall with some shame how relieved I was when a student in my TA sections would make mistakes in some unarguable way, because my fear every quarter was that the luck of section assignments would give me a class with so many A-level students I'd have to bump some of them down purely for "curve" reasons.
More constructively, I'd favor something like the pass/fail or yes/no criteria Nathan Robinson's adumbrated for college admissions:
' Instead of finding the “top ten best people” we should be selecting “anyone who has proved they are capable of doing the expected work.” Competitive admissions are as irrational as grading curves. With a grading curve, only X percent of the class will get As on their papers, even if every single person in the class wrote an excellent paper, which forces you to start making silly and arbitrary distinctions in a contrived effort to pit the students against each other. The better way to grade is by developing a standard independently and giving students a qualification if they meet the standard. '
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/admit-everybody
I was going to say just what you did in your first paragraph. When I was a TA for organic chemistry labs I was grateful for the lousy students that did obviously shoddy work. It meant I could freely give 100s to my excellent students without getting hassled for over-generous grading.
I feel the exact same way. I required students to do some additional assignments if they wanted to earn the highest grade, and felt such relief when people would choose not to do them: "Phew, I won't have to harm anyone with the curve." What an incredible perverse incentive when I benefit from students engaging *less* in the class.
Great post! My instructor experiences were in the military "instruction" system, which was very systematized/routinized and similar to the "prison-like" environment you discussed.
1. My curriculum was given to me in a prepackaged format, complete with a multi-month schedule that defined what I would be teaching when at 15-minute intervals.
2. Any modifications to the curriculum required a 3+ year process (and that was for minor revisions - major revisions were 5+ years). As such, we had the "official" curriculum, which is what we taught whenever auditors/inspectors were around, and the "unofficial" curriculum, which is what we taught otherwise.
3. The evaluations were also incredibly easy; every student had a defined unit that he was slotted for and an academic delay would cause that slot to go unfilled, so failing a student required significant justification.
I was senior enough and respected enough that I could teach my own stuff and get away with it (I gave an award to two people every class; the one with the highest test average, and the one with the fastest test completion average while still passing) but it frustrated me how many people continued to insist that Taylorism was the answer and we just needed to do it better. They were working on drafting mandatory speaker notes for each slide when I left.
There must be a word for this phenomenon, where you tighten the rules and people respond by secretly breaking them. It's sort of like Goodhart's Law, but importantly different. It's like there's a point of optimal standardization, where if you go below it, people just don't meet the standards, and if you go above it, people find ways to ignore them. Anyway, it sounds like what the people in charge really wanted was for everyone to be taught by a hologram.
I call it a "polite fiction." Leads to a brightly lit de jure system aboveground, and a dimly lit de facto system belowground.
There's also something called instruction creep, and at some point the "distracting complexity" reaches a point where the bloated instructions can no longer be followed.
Wow, amazing post. So many recognisable things you mention, about how you start questioning each student's claim since you know they want something from you, as well about how all that grading is for the most part pretty useless and even detrimental to the learning process. I teach secondary school by the way (next to my writing / substack job that is )
Thanks for the enjoyable read. I'm an elementary teacher, and while I agree that the current system is far from perfect, it does seem reasonable that the person doing the teaching knows what they need to evaluate. It seems reasonable that the teacher can design some way to evaluate how much your students learned (and how well you taught). Thankfully I don't have a restriction on how many A+ grades I'm allowed to give out, and I try to teach each topic thoroughly enough that every student is capable of achieving a good score on an evaluation. I find that the evaluation is most importantly a step that requires me to check for student understanding. If I find that students are scoring poorly on a topic evaluation, I know I need to spend some more time teaching this topic.
As you point out, humans love to learn. Unfortunately we are also often lazy and distracted by things that we also want to learn (who posted the latest meme/conspiracy theory on social media) that distract us from things we care about but are more difficult. Teachers and schools have to find a way to help students focus on the difficult subjects rather than the easy ones (youtube shorts). Thanks!
Primary and secondary education seem especially difficult in this regard because there are important evaluations––standardized tests and graduation exams––that are supposedly separate from instruction but in practice aren't at all, because (as I understand it) you can be held accountable for the scores your students get, so you have to make sure they meet the standards that the tests will assess. I don't know how to solve this problem, but the first step is convincing the people who are hellbent on evaluation that they cannot overcome the Evaluation Uncertainty Principle: you can either know how well someone is doing, or you can teach them well, but you can't do both.
Maybe we are thinking of different things. I would use the word assessment (or even quiz) that allows you to check if students have absorbed the concept you were trying to teach. I think that almost the opposite of your Uncertainty Principle is actually true—you cannot know if you are teaching if you don't know how well someone is doing. Whether you choose to assign a graded score to their understanding is up to the teacher, but it is kind of handy to score it so that you can have a class average and standard deviation to better understand your data. Thanks again for the interesting article.
I think it's important to note that there are significant differences between the average K-12 student and graduate students. Perhaps all of Adam's students really do love to learn complex topics, but as a high school teacher, I see the full spectrum of students every day. I also don't enjoy evaluating, and I see the value in pointing out the differences between feedback and evaluation. However, there are several idealistic assumptions about all students in this post that contradict my lived experience. There is a danger in simply blaming the teachers for not being interesting enough.
Loved this post, and your comment, Nicole. Fellow high school teacher here. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with self-grading and ungrading, and it helps reduce the policing, but some students are going to be more excited about my class than others, and Monopoly money sometimes does help motivate those students. If they were college or graduate students, they might choose not to take my class, which is what I did with subjects I hated in high school. But our education system mandates that all students should obtain a basic proficiency in certain areas, so everyone has to take my class. I didn’t get into teaching because I want to force march students up a the hill of English composition, but it feels like there’s always some element of that in teaching K-12. Is that inevitable with this level of schooling?
As a retired state university economics professor i agree with you 100%. Teaching should be focused entirely on learning--and completely separate from evaluation.
i went back for an executive MBA at 30 where all the students were between 27 and 40. classes were graded on ✅, ✅➕, and ✅➖ basis. about 3/4 of the class was up in arms that grading was more strict. my take was that i didn’t care because i was there to learn. it was the material that i was interested in. i didn’t care how or if i was evaluated because i was there to learn. at the time, it was very funny to hear so many people in that age of their lives still feeling a need for institutional affirmation. in the end, the grading system did not change, but i believe students learned more because they could focus on what was important...the material and the experience.
Great explanation of the difference between evaluation and feedback!
Great question on why the instructor is supposed to evaluate, but others get all the value from the evaluation!
I was once recruited for a job by a "Big 4" consulting firm. They made be an offer, contingent on my undergrad GPA being 3.5 or better. It was over thirty years since I was an undergraduate. I declined the job. Apparently they didn't trust their own evaluation, or my 30 years of actual accomplishments, but did trust the evaluations of some anonymous and (mostly) long dead professors. Go figure.
Whoa! In what world do someone's grades from 30 years ago override whatever they did since then? I suppose that's the power of assigning numbers to things––who knows how to value all that squishy stuff, and who can argue with a number?
Great post! I teach psychology and research methods in Cegep in Quebec (which is a weird post-secondary thing that basically includes what would be the last year of high school for a student intending to go to university, plus their first year of uni), so my students are 17 to 19 ys old, mostly intending to do some kind of Soc Sc in uni, or to placate their parents who insist they go to uni.
I've struggled with the whole 'assessment' thing for years. I'd love it if my students didn't need an external reward system (which is also a punishment system, of course) to come to class, do some work, and learn. But the reality is both that their frontal lobes are sooooo not working well yet (worse still for current students who spent a good chunk of their high school years locked down and doing online classes/exams), and they do need to learn some stuff that some of them are not that interested in right now, but that they actually will need further down the road, no matter what they do in their work lives. Being able to understand our complex world in complex ways, being able to find reasonably trustworthy info, and to use it to think and communicate clearly about complex topics are skills every citizen should have, and that they will def need in most fields of work as well as in their lives, both personally and in community.
Some things that have helped to reduce the policing/judging I have to do to the minimum;
- My tests tend to be either open-book or written with a page of notes they prepare themselves (excellent review just in prepping that!), so I can ask them to analyze/apply/integrate info, rather than just memorize it. Some students don't prep that 'cheat sheet', or can't follow the course material because they weren't in class, haven't done the reading, haven't done the small assignments ..... Those are the ones who will end up failing the course, and that's ok. 'Certifiying' that the students learned some specific stuff is a reasonably useful function, as long as it doesn't dominate the learning experience.
- Whenever possible I have an 'optional final exam'. (Unfortunately I'm not allowed to do this for Intro Psych, as the college worries other teachers' students will complain that mine have an advantage, despite my ending up with very similar class averages and grade distributions as the rest of my dep't for this course.) Any student can do it, it replaces ONE of the semester tests IF the grade on the final is higher than the grade on a regular test (so there's no risk it will bring a student's grade down). Who does this final? Anyone who misses any test for any reason, I don't care why they missed it and don't even want to know. Students who did well on other tests but bombed one, for whatever reason. Also any student who is not at the 60% passing grade at the end of the semester; I don't have to listen to the begging, wheedling and whining to get 'extra work' or to 'bump the grade up'. Also students who are at 96% and want to see if they can get to 98%. This optional final almost eliminates my having to listen to whining and to diarrhea-and-dead-grandparent stories, and gives students the opportunity to show they actually do meet the required competencies for the course. But because it replaces only one test, it doesn't over-reward the student who did bugger all, all semester, and now wants to cram and try to pass.
- Any major task, such as a big paper, research project, etc, I do in stages, and there are a few points attached to each stage, before the big grade for the final submission. Stages might be; choose appropriate articles, write a thesis statement, do an outline, write the Intro then the Method (so writing a proposal) for their research study, write a plan for their application of an intervention .... Since procrastination is a HUGE problem for students, this gets them moving on that big task, and allows me to provide feedback at each step. Part of the grade on the final report/paper is whether they incorporated the feedback. The extra time I take in going over each step and giving feedback is almost entirely compensated by higher quality work handed in for the final paper/report, making marking those faster and easier, and decreasing my annoyance in marking that paper, too. It also feels very pedagogically appropriate, since getting students to EXPERIENCE both the decrease in their stress when they do the intermediate steps, and the improvement in the quality of their work, is super useful to people who came out of high school having done very little of that.
- I give formative tasks that have few or no points attached. Little quizzes (lots of textbooks come with these, online, these days, or I prep them on Forms so they are auto-graded), reflection assignments, in-class work on the topic of the day. If it's an online quiz, they can do it as many times as they like; once they get to 90% on it, they get the 1% it's worth. If other types of tasks, as long as they DO it and appear to have thought about it a bit, they get that point. I read the first set and give brief brief feedback to everyone, then after that, barely glance at them, randomly choosing maybe 10% of them to read and give a little feedback. Work done in class we go over in class, they add feedback to their own assignment in a different coloured pen or font, and as long as the 'corrected' version is correct, they get the point (makes them actually pay attention to and write down the correct info - valuable in itself). Weirdly, students will do these quite consistently when they are worth so few points (from zero to max 10% of their course grade.)
- I give students a chance to fix their work, especially on things like papers where there weren't preliminary stages to do. I mark quite strictly, they get the paper back. They can then come to see me to talk about what needs to be improved (I encourage them to record that convo on their phones, since they WILL forget half of it later). They then fix and re-submit. All I have to do is check that they applied the feedback correctly. They can gain up to HALF of the points they'd lost the first time around, by doing this. (That way students who did it right the first time still have more points than those who needed this chance.)
My classes range from 30 to 40 students, so this is do-able, but I've also done a lot of it when teaching undergrad classes of 300-400. You just need good TAs!
Unfortunately, I don't think our whole system is going to change any time soon, and that's what it would take to get away from having to be both teacher and cop/judge. We live in a society that emphasizes competition, individuality, and the myth of meritocracy, and some people benefit a LOT from that (mostly those who already have privilege, and guess whose parents are making the rules?), so I don't see big changes coming any time soon. In the meantime, I try to reduce the stress and encourage the learning for my students, and to help interested colleagues to do the same.
Congratulations. I say this to every smart kid who finally figures out that the entire school system is, indeed, a prison. BY DESIGN.
Thanks for sharing this! This issue has been on my mind for the past few years too.
About Proctorio, I once saw a teacher sharing on Reddit that one of her students was crying during the test due to stress, and the program flagged her as cheating! The poor kid :(
Regarding the separation of instruction and evaluation, I don't think it would be possible because students would definitely try to figure out how the "evaluation process" goes and ask their teacher to prepare them for that (evident from the huge number of test-preparation centers around the world).
The final goal, I think, is to abolish grading altogether. This "ungrading" movement has been mentioned in other comments, so I just want to share this Youtube video I watched a while ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew - "Grading is a Scam") - there's a list of books and articles on the downsides of grading within this video.
Still, as long as testing & test-preparation remain extremely profitable like it is right now, I don't think they will go away anytime soon.
I second that video rec and the reading list in the description. I've been working in an ungrading direction with classes I've been teaching (in higher ed). It really helped me bring into focus what was bugging me (basically identical to what Adam describes here) and what I wanted to do instead. I don't think I've totally gotten ungrading to "work," but it's definitely been an improvement.
It really made me think hard about intrinsic motivation for my class and all it's activities. I had to ask: what can I teach that would be interesting/useful enough for students to take, even if they weren't going to get credit? (They were getting credit, but this seems like a necessary foundation for the next question) What activities would be interesting/valuable enough that students would do them, even if they weren't required for a grade? I find that if I can get those right (better each time!), then class is great, though the interface with the larger grade/eval world still aggravating.
Another rec is David Clark's recent Grading for Growth post on an ungraded geometry class: https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/grading-for-growth-in-geometry-part.
Since no-one has mentioned The Case Against Education yet, I feel obliged to do so. Teachers must be cops since the students want cops, how else will they get sheepskin to show the real world? The scale of the dysfunction is enormous since the government carelessly pours billions on it, problems can grow real big on that kind of money.
The obvious but politically impossible solution is to stop subsidizing sorting and start taxing it heavily instead. Sorting is needed but it's zero sum and spending on it could be reduced to maybe 1% of the current turnover without much difference in outcome.
In the UK the testers are not the teachers at any level at least up to undergraduate degree. They are also anonymised through use of id numbers rather than names for students and the exam setters are not public information.
Exams are external (at 16 and 18) and centralised (at uni). This means that no-one pesters the teachers about what is in the test or extra credit (it is not available). Attendance and assignments in the interim are not part of the grade (there are some specific coursework projects that are evaluated, but this is the exception.)
What it does mean is a certain amount of teaching to the test as teachers play the Goodhart game, but it does limit a number of the downsides outlined here.