Grades are Broken. So what?
Fixing the problem with grades without fixing grades.
“The central problem with grade inflation,” writes Thomas Guskey in an Education Week op-ed, “…is that grades often lack a clear and defensible meaning.”
In The Right (and Wrong) Way to Fix Grade Inflation, Guskey captures how and why this core issue of meaningfulness contributes to grade inflation. I’ve long agreed with the points he makes, and believe they broadly apply to grading in general, not just to grade inflation.
It all adds up to a dire assessment of assessment: grading is broken.
My thinking used to end there. It has since evolved to include followup provocations. Just because grading is broken, I now wonder, does that mean we need to fix it?
You can have your grades, and get meaningfulness too!
Late grades would make sense for a “Submits Work On Time” class. Scoring student engagement on discussion threads would be important in a “Peer Communication in Text-based Forums” course, and participation can serve as a logical metric in “How to Get Noticed” class.
On the other hand, these grading practices may tell a misleading story about the math ability of a procrastinating Calculus wizard. They cause unreliable narration of a Spanish student’s language proficiency. Applied to Outdoor and Wilderness Safety, it deprives students of a valuable signal to share in job applications with an adventure tourism hiring manager.
The problem, as Thomas writes in his piece, is the lack of clear and defensible meaning. But why do we assume that fixing grades must be the solution to this problem with grading?
Keep religion out of it
I’ve been shouted down over my hot grading takes during conference presentations. I received angry emails when I’ve blogged about problematic grading practices. Defenders of grades can be swift and passionate. And I get it. For a lot of people, grades are a sacred cow. And right or wrong, real or imagined, people are protective of their sacred cows.
So, what if we leave the sacred cows in peace? What if we address the problem with meaning without touching the problems with grades?
Solutions for what we’re solving
Something I love about credential innovation is that it is rooted in recognition and storytelling. It lends us the ability to notice, name, and credential learning and achievement in ways that contextualize the learning and achievement.
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We can publish program descriptions, detail the exact measurable earning criteria, and communicate how it is assessed. We can uptext with information about rubrics, alignments to external standards frameworks, and attach learning artifacts that function as portfolio demonstrations of how earning criteria was met.
Grades are a sacred cow, and people protect sacred cows.
This transparency can make it clear what our credentials are credentialing.
Meaning and meaningfulness are the point of such credentialing practices. And while they can address needs that grades don’t, a bonus feature is that they need not replace grades in order to do so. You can have your grades, and get meaningfulness too!
I think this is important.
When it comes to the issue of clear meaning about learning and achievement, grades are not the problem so much as they are an ineffective solution. And maybe, as Stuart Smalley used to say, “That’s OK.”
Because, regardless of how much space the sacred cows of grades take up, they don’t have to get in the way of other solutions. The efficacy of credential innovation practices has nothing to do with grades, meaning these practices can be effective solutions while functioning parallel to grades, complimenting grades, or operating independently from grades.
Put another way, well-designed credentials can reliably narrate what people know and are able to do. They can be the vehicles for clarity and meaningfulness. They can fix the problem of grades without fixing grades.
Change is hard enough without making enemies out of allies by needlessly sacrificing their sacred cows. Credential innovation is an opportunity to skip a contentious revolution in favor of bloodless and boring change management that addresses the meaningfulness problem without disturbing the sacred cows.
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