I would love to join the revolution to stop giving grades. My students are doing well this year as they struggle with complex ideas and methods of reasoning, but because there is a connection between “a grade” and how well one is doing there is a chance they will see themselves as failures. I don’t have one failure in my classes.
That is not to say nobody makes mistakes, but in my opinion the more mistakes you make, are willing to take ownership of, and ultimately struggle through the more successful you are.
So I want to stop giving grades. It’s not about that anyway, and they mean nothing really (see a previous post I made about them here). They are arbitrary designations of someone’s progress. Even when they are correlated with specific learning goals, they lose the message. Let’s focus on what is important – a students progress toward becoming a productive, healthy, intelligent individual.
I just came across your blog today, and I like it. This particular post really caught my eye. I’m glad there are other teachers out there with the same viewpoint I have regarding grades. They’re worthless, and, I believe, perpetuated only by colleges who like to have an “all-encompassing” number to justify whether a student is accepted into a program or not.
Nate, I’m glad you liked what I wrote. This has been a topic of interest to me every since I began teaching. How can we possibly reduce a students progress to a single number or letter? It’s ludicrous.
Jim, I was thinking about grades this morning on my way to school. I was thinking of how the best professional athletes don’t earn “A”s in their sports. I mean, the top quarterbacks complete around 65% of their passes. The best basketball players make about 50% of their shots. The top hitters in baseball get a hit about 30% of the time. So why do our students need to get a 93+% to earn an A and be deemed “successful”?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of feedback, but I don’t know what the measure should be. A rubric for improvement? A score for using creative approaches to calc problems? The willingness to fall and get back up? Just as you do, I want kids to be willing to try, fail, learn from it, and try again. Traditional grades don’t inspire that…