Grading And Student Expectations

Jejak PandaSenantiasa Menyambut Kedatang Anda Untuk Membaca
bandarqqOn February 17 the New York Times published an article titled “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes.” I posted a link to the article on my wall in facebook, and received more comments to that posting than I have ever received to any of my blog posts! The article claims that students today have a strong sense of entitlement that causes disputes over grades when the students receive marks lower than what they feel they deserve. A secondary point is that students expect relatively high grades, B’s to be exact, merely for showing up to class and completing the assignments. In general, the people who commented on my posting were other teachers who wanted to share horror stories of students (and parents) with entitlement issues.

I’m sure those of us who teach can all rattle off a few such stories. I had a young man in class at UConn a few semesters ago who would get angry with me when he received anything less than an A on a paper, and at one point informed me that I was going to keep him out of medical school. Mind you, I made him work hard to revise his papers, but ultimately he received a B in the course. Another time a young woman who skipped twenty-one of twenty-eight class meetings stormed out of my office screaming that I had ruined her life when she failed my class.

My worst case occurred several years ago in a high school Advanced Placement class. For the last assignment of the third quarter, two students turned in the exact same essay. I googled it and found it quickly. Both students received zeros for the assignment. For one student, this zero dropped his quarter average to a D-. The other student wound up with an F, which prevented her from participating in athletics that spring. To make a long story short, her parents begged, pleaded, argued, even got other adults from the community to try to offer services to the school in exchange for a grade change. I didn’t budge and my administration left the decision in my hands. Part of the parents’ argument was that grading was subjective, and even with the zero on the plagiarized paper there was no reason I couldn’t reconsider an earlier paper and change a minus grade to a solid letter grade, which would have been enough to pass her for the quarter. My argument was that it was the last paper of the quarter, and if I were going to engage in any grade massaging I’d be more inclined to alter the other student’s grade so that he failed, too.

I felt bad for both students. I liked them both, but I had no qualms about serious consequences for plagiarism. In fact, I think the school could have done more, like expel them from the National Honors Society. But that’s another subject. However, these situations bring up another issue for me, and that is the complicated issue of grading, which I think shares blame with student entitlement.

How many of us have spent a weekend or more slaving over student essays, writing thoughtful and helpful comments, even extensive letters at the end of each paper that address in detail the strengths and weaknesses of the work, only to return the papers and watch the students turn to the last page, look at the letter grade, and then toss the paper in the waste basket? It happens time and again. Or we return papers and every kid who got a plus or a minus grade turns in a so-called revision which has nothing more than corrections of surface errors, and expects to have that B- magically become a B or that C+ magically become a B-. This sort of behavior from students is maddening and common.

What would happen if we didn’t give letter or number grades?

Three years ago, my third year teaching Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, I refused to give grades on the papers. I told the students that my experience teaching the prospective teachers told me that they were all good writers and would likely end the semester with good grades. In fact, I had never given below a B in the course during the previous two years. (By contrast, in my American Literature sections I rarely found myself giving A’s and often gave out C’s or lower). I informed them that if the quality of anyone’s work seemed inferior, I would speak with them. Otherwise, papers would only be receiving narrative comments and revisions were expected. The reaction? You’d think I had just taken away the heroin supply of a roomful of junkies. Students with 4.0 GPAs writing beautiful papers for the course would approach me after class, in the hall or in my office, and in hushed tones ask, “Please, can you tell me my grade? Just give me a hint? Is it below an A? Please? You have to tell me!” I’d say that I hadn’t recorded a grade, but if they’d like we could look at the latest draft of the most recent paper and talk about what they might consider doing to improve. They’d say, “Improve?! Oh my God, I don’t have an A, do I?!”

My point is that grades become a narcotic, and in the end don’t tell the student or the teacher much about the quality of thought or writing exhibited in the work. I have to wonder how many of the arguments mentioned in the Times article could have been avoided if there were no grades but only narrative feedback. It’s not a completely alien idea. Yesterday the Norwich Bulletin published a piece on an alternative high school in Lisbon that uses only narrative evaluations. Perhaps I am being unrealistic in my idealism, but I’d like to scrap the current grading system and replace it with narrative evaluation. Of course then we teachers would have to do a lot more writing. It’s interesting to consider how much resistance that would produce.