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.
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).
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.
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. '
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.