The Enigma of Grade Abatement
This image comes from The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a manga suspiciously available for free at this Imgur link. It doesn’t lessen how disturbing and disorienting the story is to spoil the ending, which sees people warped and destroyed by pushing themselves through a hole in the side of a mountain. They are drawn toward a hole they mysteriously feel is theirs, then driven through the mountain by an implacable and atavistic need.
We Learn What We Do
This is the third full year and fifth year overall that I’ve used grade abatement in my classroom. When I first built the program, students ended each quarter with an essay delving into every aspect of their work:
Back in 2013, it was even more extensive, asking students to spend an enormous amount of time focused on this GAP score, which ostensibly revealed their academic success more precisely and intuitively than any traditional grade could:
The thing is, GAP scores are more precise. They can be unpacked and used to assess student growth and output in the skills and traits that actually matter in the world. There is no gamesmanship, no grade inflation, no opaque logic — just the evidence that comes from real learning.
The idea of switching back at the end of each quarter to something more traditional ought to have been anathema to me all along. After a quarter of grade-free, student-centered progress, I’d find myself reading thousands of pages of GAP reports or holding endless hours of conferences. When I wrote about it, I fixated on numbers:
What stands out to me now is that I write, “The problem is obvious,” and then completely miss the actual problem, which is spending that much time thinking about numbers at all. The essay published before that one, which covers skills and traits that matter, got lost in the focus on what went on the report card.
One of the explicit goals of grade abatement is to remove the stress and salience of those high-stakes moments, either by turning them into a collaborative act of gamesmanship or by making them straightforward and evidentiary. Yet I was placing emphasis on another summative moment, which turned GAP reports into a high-stakes and highly pressurized test, instead of what Neil Postman describes here:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
Which is why that quotation is the first thing students see in the most recent iteration of grade abatement. It’s a guide that explicitly mentions every other guide, placing an end-of-quarter score in the context of an authentic learning experience:
In that guide, I think I’ve laid out the best version of how grade abatement should work at the end of a quarter, with links to the different mechanisms that support that process. It works because it’s not about the end of the quarter — that’s just one more arbitrary line in a system obsessed with dissection.
The Fault Exposed by the Earthquake
Sometimes buried in all this rhetoric is the simple fact that we need a number. That number validates success and identifies failures. It promotes change and organizes our feedback for each other. And, not incidentally, colleges won’t let us do anything else but put a number on a report card every nine weeks.
The issue here is that older versions of grade abatement produced that number through the kind of nightmarish grind that accompanies every other high-stakes event, especially in English. It led strong students to helplessness and panic, and weaker students to gamesmanship and anger.
It will take some time to build the habit, but it’s possible to make the end of each quarter a moment of ameliorative and insightful reflection — a moment of what Wagner calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence,” different from what we do every day only in that it produces that necessary number.
Here is the post given to students on November 4, 2016:
