As a child and a teenager, I wasn’t graded. I could tell when I wasn’t doing something particularly well. That meant I had to work on it more. It felt a lot better being good at things, so I tried to do that as often as possible.
When I went to college, I got graded on everything I produced (except for the truly lovely sketches of mermaids, brick walls, and hanging lamps that soon embellished every notebook I used). I found out exactly where I ranked, compared with everyone else in every class I was taking. And then I knew exactly what I was capable and incapable of. Well, not exactly. I knew that every number I was given mattered. I learned very quickly to tie my identity and self-worth into those numbers. Even as I learned just how arbitrary the grading system really was.
Nobody could agree on what exactly the numbers and letters were supposed to signify. My expository writing instructor, an impossibly beautiful graduate student from Russia, failed everyone in the class on our first paper. I ran to the chair of the writing department, thrust three printed examples of my writing into her hands, and insisted that there had been a terrible mistake. She smiled at me patiently. “You’ll do fine. She’s just making a point. Wait it out.”
You had to work all night on seven short essays to get an A from my Gender and Spirituality teacher. In Abnormal Psych the grade rested on your ability to memorize the professor’s individual quirks and favorite catchphrases, which appeared all over his sprawling multiple choice exams. He rarely referenced the material he’d assigned.
(if he liked miniature schnauzers, you had to make sure you knew all about it. source)
In Intro to Music Education, the instructor disliked me. She wouldn’t call on me when I raised my hand, and she took random points off my exam answers. Once, I held my test up alongside my friend’s, and confirmed my suspicions: we had answered one question in almost exactly the same way, and she had written a minus 2 next to mine, and left his clean.
I got an F when I missed an exam for Yom Kippur and forgot to make it up the next week. “I am a lay cantor,” I was explaining to the professor, standing at his desk, in front of the rest of the students. “I perform Yom Kippur services, like, with the rabbi. I mean, I’m leading the services. It’s a lot of work. It’s really stressful.”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” he said. “You didn’t make up the test. You’re irresponsible.”
When I made friends with a professor, I always got A’s from him/her. Especially if I went to office hours a lot. (Except for in Conservation, which I couldn’t get the hang of, despite long conversations with the professor, and which had those expressionless, inhuman scantrons.) In fact, I ultimately got an A from the professor who gave me the aforementioned F on the missed exam. I went to his office and got to know him. And then I asked him to mentor my independent study research.
In graduate school, the terrifyingly brilliant professor of Theory and Method, who dressed entirely in black and carried a pocket watch, gave everyone A’s, after idly tormenting us for three hours every week. I gasped when I saw the grade.
New professors were almost always the worst. They graded harshly to prove that they were tough, and, I always felt, to continue the cycle of abuse. Their dissertation panel had been merciless. It was time for someone else to suffer.
In some classes, you had to be talkative to do well. I raised my hand a lot, which, until I was in seminars and higher level courses, made all of the other students hate me. Social life or GPA? Your choice!
In some classes, the teacher thought you were sucking up if you raised your hand a lot.
Certain grades depended on working with a group. You had to design, complete, and present projects together, and the professor always said, “Remember: if one of you fails, you all fail.” It was supposed to be a less traditionally structured, more inclusive, more feminist way to run a classroom. It almost always meant dragging along the students who couldn’t keep up or weren’t even slightly interested, or feeling hopelessly left out when everyone else took the project in a direction you didn’t understand or actively disliked.
Some professors said at the beginning of the course, “I have only given three A’s in my entire teaching career. Those A’s were awarded to three geniuses who went on to win the Nobel Prize in each of their disciplines and several other disciplines as well. You are not geniuses. I can tell by looking at you. When you do reasonably well, you will receive a C. C signifies satisfactory performance. If you are exceptional, you will receive a B.”
When my friends started TA-ing classes at various universities across the country, they called me to read the worst of their students’ submissions. “Kant seemed to be suggesting that all people love each other and do unto their neighbors as their neighbors should do unto them.” And then they told me that they’d been strictly instructed to give no more than four C’s per round of testing. They had to encourage the students with high grades. It made them feel better and prevented them from dropping out and discontinuing their payments.
(actually, he looks pretty loving. source)
“Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “You’re giving the kid who said Kant was Jesus a B plus?!”
“Yeah, isn’t that insane?”
“Do you really have to?”
“Yeah. The professor yelled at me last time, when I failed the kid. It’s an intro class. We have to be nice.”
Grading is useful. It organizes huge groups of students into conveniently measurable categories. A, B, C, D…They line up so neatly. But what do they really mean?
My GPA was high. In fact, I spent the four years of college working towards the goal of graduating summa cum laude. And I accomplished that goal. But when I look back at my transcript (because I do that all the time…OK, if I looked back at my transcript), I see a collection of random situations that I dealt with in dramatically different ways, some more effectively than others (some in between bouts of miserable crying in my room).
There is no mastery of subjects, or even a state approaching mastery of a single subject. It’s just a jumbled set of interactions with teachers and other students and a desperate will to somehow stay ahead, even though it was never completely clear why staying ahead was so important.
* * *
Wild fun list: Turn up the music and dance alone in your apartment/room.
Thank you to Lisa Nielsen at The Innovative Educator, for asking me to be a regular contributor! And for inspiring this post. She suggested that I read this article, by Alfie Kohn.
As someone who teaches in the university, and in fact teaches a writing course meant to prepare students for their future work in various disciplines, I cannot stress enough that grades are not merely arbitrary, based on teachers’ whims. Does having to grade at all suck? Absolutely. But what’s worse is that by the time students enter college they need grades to feel comfortable. What often seems arbitrary to students are pedagogically driven differences between disciplines. For example, what makes an A english paper is not the same as what makes an A philosophy paper, because the two disciplines have different goals and different methods to serve those goals. Within a department faculty will disagree about the most important learning objectives and how to teach to them. That diversity, although confusing for students, is part of the richness of higher education. We just need to do a better job helping students take advantage of it.
Just hopped over from reading this on Google Reader in order to thank you for articulating so perfectly the absurdity of grades. Like you, I wasn’t graded until I entered undegraduate school. For the first couple of years, the ethical and social implications of submitting to a grading system (I always performed well, but hated that I would get ranked above others and that it turned the whole learning experience into a competition) led me to argue some of my professors into leaving marks off my assignments, and just providing comments. But eventually I gave up. Because assessment through numbers and letters is such a staple of schooling in most institutions — people can’t cope without it.
Having just completed graduate school and worked as a T.A. I can attest to the fact that the most meaningless activity I ever engaged in was grading. Not that I blew it off — I took it seriously. But I also knew how poorly it represented the big picture when it came to the work students were or were not doing. It was totally stressful. And my hatred of quantifying peformance in that way is a huge part of the reason I never, ever want to be in a situation where I’m teaching folks and have to judge them in that fashion.
Wow–I’m impressed that you convinced professors not to grade you. Well done. I didn’t even think to talk about it with them.
lately this conversation regarding grades has come up a lot in my life. i just graduated from college (like…literally. this week!!!!) and did so with decent grades. though i never quite admitted it, grades, for me, have always been an important aspect of my academic career. in order to feel accomplished, i needed to get A’s in the classes i knew i could get A’s in. but something happened this semester. i shut down. i stopped caring so much. why? because i realized, finally, my grades do not at all reflect my intelligence. they reflect how hard i chose to work. or, in a more pessimistic view, how well i can bullshit through a class (because let’s me honest — that’s all any student does nowadays). i finally, FINALLY accepted my intelligence as something tangible. i AM smart. and no, i do not need a stupid letter to tell me so nor do i need to be ranked number one among my peers to believe it, either.
also, I LOVE THIS: In some classes, you had to be talkative to do well. I raised my hand a lot, which, until I was in seminars and higher level courses, made all of the other students hate me. Social life or GPA? Your choice!
…perfectly summed up my academic career!
congratulations on graduating!! And on the realization that you’re smart no matter what your GPA says.
It took me until senior year to relax. And even then I wasn’t good at it.
I remember when we had Hindu Phil together, you told me you HAD to get an A in all of your major classes. I was kind of terrified but I was pretty sure you’d do it. 🙂 I chose to be happy with magna cum laude and didn’t make friends with my professors and didn’t get into the fancier grad schools I applied to, so you probably knew what you were doing a little better than I did ha.
Ha! I don’t remember. I probably sounded frightening.
Are you happy with what you’re doing? I’m never sure what “doing college well” means, unless it relates to being happy later on 🙂
No, I’m miserable. But that’s because I decided to do Teach for America instead of grad school right away, and learned that public service is not a pleasant way to go. I plan to go to grad school in the next year or two, which I what I originally wanted, so I’ll keep you posted on whether or not it makes me happy. 🙂
Oh no! Teach for America sounds like such a great idea, too. But I’ve heard from a lot of people that they are incredibly stressed out after like a month. Do you think you’ll end up back on the east coast for grad school?
Well, I have lots of thoughts on Teach for America, and I don’t mean to say that it is a bad idea. Psychologically bad for many, perhaps, but not necessarily bad. For me, the stress came from losing a lot of faith in humanity via the community I was in and other teachers/administrators at the school. As for grad school, I will probably go to any school that will take my 3-years-out-of-college-ass :), but I REALLY hope not to stay on the east coast. I may be done with it permanently. Midwest is the way to go for me!
**sidenote** I really enjoy both of your blogs and I’m so glad I met you at school so I can feel like a know a celebrity when you write a book someday 🙂
This sounds so familiar.
There were a small handful of classes that I felt like the teacher provided any meaningful feedback on my learning process. In those, the grade didn’t even matter, because I was /learning/.
i’m so glad Lisa “found” you. and then intro’d you on her blog.
very happy i now get to read your thinking. more people should get to read your thinking. it’s very honest/transparent/liberating. we need more of that. life is too short for pretense and pigeonholing.
thank you dear.
I think this whole grading issue is interesting. I was always an A student and I went to USC’s Marshall Business School where they graded everyone on a curve so x number of students got As, Bs, etc. It was extremely competitive and I liked it. I plan to homeschool my kids so this discussion about grading is on my mind. I LIKE knowing that I got 100% or 60% on a test. Getting a good score validates all the work I did to learn the material. I guess I don’t understand why people have a problem with finding out if they really understand the topic or not. On the other hand, if it is going to ‘damage’ my kids to test them I am open to other options.
I understand where you’re coming from. I liked doing well on tests, too.
But grading doesn’t necessarily reflect how well you know the material. My friend is a PhD student at an Ivy League school, and she has to give her students good grades, no matter how well they do. It’s a little horrifying.
Also, I don’t think taking tests has to “damage” kids. But making test-based learning the majority of learning for kids seems (and has been proven to be) unhealthy.