Messiness in Numbers

Writing this series of essays has taken me longer than anything else I’ve ever written because every time I sit down to write, I can hear all the rebuttals to my overarching thesis — that grades are stupid and dangerous, and teachers can and should abolish them. Grades encourage accountability and give students feedback on their progress. They communicate that feedback to parents and administrators. They help college admissions officers decide who to accept. In some cases, they help judges decide whether or not a kid in trouble has learned their lesson and returned to the straight and narrow. They serve many purposes. This I know. I myself love getting As. I have played all the games, jumped through all the hoops. I have also spent more than a decade trying earnestly to develop fair, accurate, and useful grading practices. In the end though, my gradebooks have always reflected, more or less, what research has demonstrated again and again — that more than anything else, parent income level predicts students’ academic performance.

I know that grades provide a widely familiar short-hand and that they seem to follow a fairly common-sense logic. I also know that I’ve had many colleagues who wield their points power in bizarre and petty ways. One gives only two As each semester, as a rule. One takes points off when students don’t staple their essays “correctly” (i.e. according to that particular teacher’s complicated neurosis). Another largely prints kids’ names on the board to shame them into turning in missing assignments. I could go on and on. If you stop for a moment, I bet you can remember a now-that-you-think-about-it, strange and arbitrary grading practice that you encountered at some point in school. My parents purchased me extra credit each year, sending me to school each August with armloads of that ever-lucrative currency: boxes of tissue for the classroom supply.

Studying education in college, I always wondered when they would reveal to us what exactly a ninth grade B-paper looks like in relation to a 9th grade C-paper — or to a 10th grade B-paper. They never did. Sure, I learned to make rubrics. Grading with rubrics takes me forever. I hate knowing that as hard as I might strive for objectivity and fairness, there’s a high likelihood that my scoring gets informed by my personal and political biases, my mood, my level of hunger. I’m also not great at concentrating hard enough for long enough time to make sure that I’m making equivalent judgment calls across all 150+ papers. I get defeated AF knowing the messiness of my…