Oct 21 Entrance Slip - Marks, grades, effect on classroom

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor?

The student bird of me is thinking back to the time I was in highschool. Mostly when I was in grade 12, I agree with most of the interview key findings at the end of the article. Grades are stressful, often gets in the way of learning, and often we would choose the easiest way to achieve the highest grade, because we need them for admission. Grades are used as competition, to compare to what other people got and what my parents' other friends' kids got, and of course competition exists as in what kind of programs and options you are able to access after highschool.

The teacher bird says that it doesn't necessarily stop there. Want to get into a popular major? Good post-graduate program? Not all emphasize on grades, but having good grades won't hurt your chances, and often it's a foot in the door when they lack more accurate indicators of your ability. Even in society, we live under the economics model where we have to put ourselves out to do work to survive, and salaries put people in tiers. Of course, being the wealthiest person isn't everyone's goal nor should we normalize that, but to some degree we need to achieve a personal minimum before we get to even talk about choices and what we really like doing.

2) What are some of the unintended side effects of grading? How do grades and marks in themselves format the social relations and learning situations in a classroom, a school, a district?

Assigning grades, and using grades as an indicator of ability, create stress for students and parents. Grades are seemingly comparable, the higher the better, capped at 100 percent. This creates an implicit pyramid, where high achievers are at the to with good grades and they get all the praise, while learners who scored low are now looked down on, seen as those that need help or are bad kids so to say. There are many students that could be high achieving but the grading system just does not work in their favour. Maybe they take more time to learn and demonstrate, but at the end of the course they can synthesize and demonstrate very well. Ideally that's what matters, but a simple average of their tests would penalize their early performance compared to later. 

Using grades as a metric for whether a student gets access to certain opportunities also pose the same challenge. Higher grades, better person? Or higher chance to succeed in those opportunities? The answer is not really, and companies in the Silicon Valley have found that grades have no predicting power at all, and you might as well just flip a coin! (Though good grades get you into a reputable program, probably land your first internship, and subsequently allow you to have a greater chance to even interview at said companies if that's the end goal).

Finally, grades over schools, districts, certain region,etc, can also be problematic when it comes to resource distribution. Is it equitable to split resources evenly? Or more to "better" schools or "worse" schools? This is something Jack and Dion and I are thinking of as one of our inquiry project ideas, and we just love talking about these topics. Some schools are better according to some metric, such as Fraser Institute ranking and the FSA exams, and provincials that no longer exists, and those places also happen to have higher property prices and higher income. It's hard to say which is the cause and effect, but they are certainly measurable and affect policy making.


3) Could you imagine teaching math and/or science without giving grades? How could a teacher encourage learning without having an emphasis on grading?

 

If I was born 10 years ago and come into to this program, I would probably have a very hard time thinking what else would there be in place of grades in a classroom. However, I am lucky in that sense where we are already shifting our  curriculum to standards-based testing, and we have at least one class talking about how we do that as an educator in the classroom without simply lowering the bar, giving ourselves an unreasonable amount of work to do, and so on. To that degree, I can see how I will make an attempt to use the mastery model combined with the proficiency scale to move away from just letter grades calculated by taking averages of test scores, and I think doing that benefits students as well as teachers.