The Protestant Grade, and the Spirit of Students
What’s in a grade? A student’s soul.
This semester is ending with a particularly grueling bout of grade grubbing on the part of students — far more than I’ve ever seen in my now 8 years of college and university teaching.
“… but I worked so hard.”
As a believer in research (theoretical empiricism, applied rationalism, Bachelard, Bourdieu, blah blah blah) I’m forced to ask the empirical question about why so many emails and so much “worked so hard.” I don’t particularly buy generational arguments about so-called millennials — the “Greatest Generation” always considered itself to be great, not solely on the basis of its achievements, but also in relation to the other not-so-good generations. So, is there something beyond “kids these days” to blame for the spike in emails claiming to have tried oh-so-hard?
It turns out that grading was actually intended to be an evaluation of the moral character of a student… not necessarily their work.
The history of grading in the United States began as early as 1785, with Yale President Ezra Stiles awarding grades of students in Latin. According to Mary Lovett Smallwood’s 1935 Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American Universities, Yale began keeping a “book of averages” in 1813 that connected this ranking in a 4 to 1 nominal system.
That 1785 system is important. As Stiles would write in a memo to the College:
Language matters, and how Stiles presents the information is important: Students were awarded one of four ranks in their examinations. The students were evaluated on the basis of their work.
This of course makes sense for the year: Yale required it’s presidents to exhibit “assent to the Confession of Faith and Rules of Ecclesiastical discipline agreed upon by the Churches of this State, A.D. 1708.” (see J. Pierce, Diary Excerpt, describing the Inauguration of Timothy Dwight as President of Yale College). That Church, that state, was Puritan and more broadly protestant. As Max Weber famously wrote, Puritans believed that only a select few were predestined to go to heaven. However, unable to tell who might be predestined to heaven, the Puritans sought out grace in the actions and moral character of others. Grading the intellectual successes, here, then, is a ranking not of the work of students in Latin, Greek, English, Rhetoric, Geography, Logic, Math, and Natural Philosophy, but a moral ranking of Grace among those students as manifest in their work. It is undoubtable that students at very least had this perception of their grades… a failure (Pejores) was literally indicative of a one way ticket to hell.
And, by 1883, according to an annual faculty report from Harvard University, the first “B” came into existence. The grading system began with B… although not necessarily at a particular rank.
The letter system and associated 4.0 ordinal system was born at Mount Holyoke in 1897 — notably a “Female Seminary” at the time, which changed its ABCDE system to ABCDF in 1898. Seminaries, importantly, were considered dangerously liminal places where clergy and religious authorities were spiritually between normal person and graceful leader, often starved of some material pleasures that would arise as temptations — a point made by Timothy Dwight when at first he refused to become President of Yale in 1795 because of the institution’s “immoral spirt.” It is in this context where the grade of E or F, designating failure, resulted in removal from the seminary in fear that a student’s predisposition-towards-temptation-made-evident-by-their-F would infect the predestined souls of the successful. The grade of an F, as it spread throughout Protestant America, was a sign that a student was only Christian by title and not by soul.
So, in the deep consciousness of academe lay sleeping a very important detail: grades are about the souls of students. And, given the merger of Christian spiritualism and capitalism in the present United States, our students believe their grades to be a manifestation of the hopelessness of capital… to receive an F (or even to be average) is to be banished to the hell of average pay qua poverty.
And so, students’ appeals to work ethic, their craven attempts to reveal how much the content of their character speaks to their destiny for good grades, is built into the moralist structure of grading and academe.
But why the spike?
In a society that has abandoned Puritan ideals that predestination trumps fairness, students are unwilling to accept the embodiment of failure they perceive to be placed upon their heads by people society views as disposable (i.e. teachers and professors, evidenced by their monetary value). The cognitive dissonance is made material through their proclamations about professor’s moral designations (i.e. grades) as “lacking any real authority,” and “unfair,” and “about your own insecurities as a failed professional” (all things I have had said to me by students). And, while we rationally-minded liberal arts professors may try to remind students that their grades reflect their external mastery (or not so much) over course materials external to their worth as humans, the unconscious moralist structures inculcated by civic religion do not allow them to accept our disavowal of the means of damnation. As Claude Levi-Strauss might argue, grade grubbing is a manifestation of the “deep grammar” of society that originates in moralist dichotomies of chosen/not-chosen, pass/fail, destined/damned demarcated by evaluations of labor. And who wants to be damned?
Grade grubbing is soul grubbing.
