Jonathan Lash, the president of Hampshire College, wrote recently that grades and test scores are of little value. Hampshire College doesn’t use standardized test scores when it admits students, and once admitted, it does not give grades.
He wrote:
A few years ago I was speaking to a group of parents whose children had just started Hampshire College. A father asked a question that was on many minds: “How can your college be rigorous without grading student work?” Before I could respond, another parent stood up and asked, “May I answer that?” I nodded with interest.
“I run a company,” he said, “and I have a few thousand employees in multiple locations. They’d be mystified if our managers started to give them grades. We manage by setting goals, evaluating progress, and mentoring employees on how to improve their performance. What would a letter grade tell them?”
At the college where I serve as president, we do evaluate student work; we just use a higher-quality method. Our students receive written evaluations not only on every assignment, but also for every course and learning activity. These evaluations are designed to be formative teaching tools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The best “assignment” I ever gave when I was a junior high school social studies teacher was when I asked the students to make a video depicting a scene in American history. I told them they could work in small groups … and … there would be no grades. No other guidelines, except for the due date. When asked why they should do it, I simply said, “Because I’m asking you to do it.” A few weeks later we viewed the videos. The best learning experience they (and I) ever saw. The videos were fabulous. No grade. The best work. Yes, it does work.
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it is encouraging to hear that it worked.
Unfortunately in my current situation if it doesn’t get a grade then it doesn’t get done. This a side effect of the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality that we have in society. If there is not a reward then it is not worth doing.
This type of mentality drives me crazy (yes, most days it’s short trip). There is so little appreciation for hard work and accomplishing a task.
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To drext727:
I have always been student, and was once TA and substitute teacher many years ago both in VN and in Canada.
IMHO, to strive to be better than others seems the nature in human trait and instinct.
It is up to teacher’s skills in how to reinforce and to motivate learners with dignity and joy to be their best and their own satisfaction. Whenever learning is for the learners’ satisfaction, the result is in creativity whether it is individual taste or in co-operation to be admirable among learners without cruel judgment.
Again, please remember that people have their own pace and path that they must go through with their own expectation. Teacher must be patient and pleasant with learners including notorious Trump’s style, BUT DO NOT TOLERATE a crude behavior.
Praise to the best and motivate the trying, NEVER PUNISH the lacking of self-motivation (= kids with emotional abusing from many sources that are beyond social BASIC acceptance)
Theoretical knowledge cannot empathize the practical knowledge. I just saw a movie “Hacksaw Ridge”. Could anyone really understand the energy in Private Desmond Doss who went through life and death situation, without a break throughout day and night, to save 75 wounded soldiers including his Sergeant Howell and a few of Japanese soldiers who are enemies (= that is the true conviction in humanity)
People called his work a miracle. I have experienced a survival in shipwreck in 7 hours in China Sea. I would never call my survival a miracle, BUT a “BLESSING” from God.
Energy, patience and our conviction in humanity will have God’s blessing. Please do not mistake between a TRUE CONVICTION in humanity and “FORK TONGUE” from devious conviction with its own contradiction that is seen throughout their devious words and deeds.
In short, bad deeds can fool the gullible but are shown on the doers’ living in a constant fear in their current lives and in many upcoming reincarnated lives. Back2basic
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Why use them? Simple. It is in the interest of big money. Logic, real education is out the door. To worship the golden calf, money, is the bottom line now.
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I’ve been really disappointed that there hasn’t been any support for existing public schools while putting in Common Core.
I really feel these kids were used as data collectors- they were betrayed. The adults in government told them if they sat for long and difficult tests the adults would support their schools. The adults didn’t come through.
Why did they spend so much time and money developing Common Core if the real objective was just to force public schools to take more difficult tests? Why weren’t they honest with the kids who trusted them and complied with the testing mandate?
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You said
I really feel these kids were used as data collectors-they were betrayed. The adults in government told them if they sat for long and difficult tests the adults would support their schools. The adults didn’t come through.
I don’t think the adults told the students that support for their schools depended on taking the tests. Even so, poor performance does become an excuse to close “underperforming” schools.
I do think that students and teachers have been betrayed and they are still being viewed as valuable insofar as they provide data galore for almost any use other than insight into the wonderful world of human minds, aspirations, fears, and so on.
The new push is for accelerating learning. This comes from someone doing a calculation that closing the achievement gap will take 50 years or more at the current rate.
That nonsense comes from Bellwether and from academics who think that shoving more information into students at a faster pace is just what the world of education needs.
That theory is the latest and greatest pitch for “innovation” in education…more, faster, quickly test x and then y and continue these iterations and wow—you can get impact and continuous improvement (never mind the collateral damage).
For more on this silver bullet theory, pushed by USDE and foundation see
http://wtgrantfoundation.org/evidence-at-the-crossroads-pt-8-building-an-improvement-infrastructure
Evidence at the Crossroads Pt. 8: Building an Improvement Infrastructure By Donald J. Peurach JANUARY 12, 2016 See also Innovating at the Nexus of Impact and Improvement: Leading Educational Improvement Networks.
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I am, once again, proud to be a graduate of Hampshire College.
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Grading in education is the process of applying standardized measurements of varying levels of achievement in a course.
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I am imagining what the world of education would look like if the philosophy of Hampshire college were the norm rather than at the fringes.
For one thing, I think education in general would be less coercive. Students would presumably feel less controlled, since the carrot-and-stick method of grades and test scores would be replaced with something more qualitative. I imagine that this change would make students happier in the long run, as they would have more autonomy.
Moreover, the so-called “achievement gap” would cease to exist: for the gap is defined, as far as I understand it, in terms of quantitative measures, namely test scores. If students didn’t get numbers attached to them, there would be no gap to measure. I think a lot of progressives would find this troubling, and would protest, “How can we measure whether white and minority students are being treated fairly in education without data comparing how well different groups are doing? Just doing away with the test scores does not change the fact that one group is learning more and better than another.” But this complaint is misguided. It assumes, first of all, that test scores accurately measure meaningful learning, which is doubtful. But more to the point, if we had no “achievement gap” to distract us, we could focus our energies on the more meaningful gaps in our society, gaps in opportunities; if we had no test scores to quibble over, we could spend our money and time assessing how fairly all the resources of our society are distributed; we could ask, for example, whether everyone in our society is equally able to set their own educational goals and pursue them, whether poverty is decreasing or increasing, whether people are getting healthier and happier equally, and whether there are economic opportunities available to people in every community.
That said, I think it is worth noting that simply abolishing grades and test scores as a matter of policy would not be enough. There would also need to be a broader cultural shift away from problematic assumptions; assumptions that, for example, competition is the best way to achieve quality (the evidence actually suggests that competition, in general, makes us worse at what we are doing and less happy in the long run); that measurable outcomes are the only ones that matter; that education’s primary purpose is job training because (another problematic assumption) material economic outcomes are the most important; and that human beings, especially children, are basically lazy and mischievous, and therefore need to be controlled. From Lash’s article, is seems that these assumptions do not dominate at Hampshire College. But I think they still reign supreme in our culture at large.
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The point that was missed by Mr. Lang and the person who employed “thousands” is that goals in companies are still only achieved by the hardest workers and the TOP employees; or should I say the A employees. The other workers just skate by, seeing no reason to work harder than they have too for their paycheck. If you’ve worked anywhere, you know there are hard workers and lazy workers. Now you disincentivize the TOP performers as they see that minimal effort is rewarded the same as TOP level effort.
Pass/Fail is like a “saftey net” system where we push as many marginal performers through as possible. Grades are a goal real students set their sights on and reaching for that “A”, pushes achievement higher. Pass/Fail lets students just get by and does not reward hard work and effort. With Pass/Fail, if you are C level or A level, you both get into medical school. I prefer the A doctor. Evaluations are very subjective and usually biased and give professors too much power. Now a student will spend more time bringing apples to the teacher than studying to improve grades. Students will fear to challenge or disagree with a professor because they need that good evaluation. If a professor doesn’t like you that could come out in the evaluation too. It is harder to manipulate grades from test scores and protects students from professor bias or that professor that just doesn’t like someone because of their personality.
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Dave,
People should be measured by valid and reliable measures. Standardized test scores are neither. They are normed on a bell curve. The tests measure family income. Students may be highly gifted or proficient in other areas–the arts, mechanical skills, athletics–yet fail the tests created by people who don’t know them or their talents or what they were taught. I can ace any standardized test you give me, but there are so many things I can’t do that are valuable.
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