Grading’s Latest Woes

The way we “grade” learning, still today, is archaic and misguided. It invites misalignment between graders, a false sense of security on behalf of the learner, and a general sense that we really don’t know how well our young learners are meeting their reading, writing, and problem-solving goals.

And this just doesn’t happen in our K-12 system. Archaic and misguided grading practices are alive and well in our institutions of higher learning. For example, read the following article from The Atlantic titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A”:

“During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.”

“They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.”

“Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skill class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. ‘A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,’ the committee wrote.”

“And yet, these students report being more stressed about school than ever. Without meaningful grades, the most ambitious students have no straightforward way to stand out. And when straight A’s are the norm, the prospect of getting even a single B can become terrifying. As a result, students are anxious, distracted, and hyper-focused on using extracurriculars to distinguish themselves in the eyes of future employers.”

“Of course, plenty of Harvard students are still devoted to their schoolwork, and rampant grade inflation is not unique to any one college. It affects all of the elite academia. But Harvard is a useful case study because administrators have examined the issue, and because as goes Harvard, so goes the rest of the sector. And now Harvard is, at long last, embarking on an effort to reverse the trend and make its programming more academically rigorous. In doing so, it’s confronting the question that would be absurd if it weren’t so urgent: Can the world’s top universities get their students to care about learning?”

“The road to grade-inflation hell was paved with good intentions. As more students applied to Harvard and earning a spot became ever harder, the university ended up filling its classes with students who had only ever gotten perfect grades. These overachievers arrived on campus with even more anxiety than past generations about keeping up their GPA. Students sobbing at office hours, begging their professor to bump a rare B+ to an A-, became a not-uncommon occurrence.”

“At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades. Resisting the trend was hard. Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A-. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.”

“The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them.”

“Taken together, this has led to a regime in which most students get near-perfect grades, but the grades mean something different to everyone. Outside observers might still think of grades as an objective assessment of a student’s work, and therefore a way to differentiate between levels of achievement. But many professors seem to conceive of them as an endlessly adaptable participation trophy. Claybaugh recalled a recent talk with an experienced science professor who told her that some students get A’s for excellent work. Others get the mark because they’re from less-privileged backgrounds and demonstrated improvement throughout the semester. And still others get A’s because they were doing strong work before a mental-health crisis derailed their progress. ‘So pretty much everyone gets A’s,’ Claybaugh told me. ‘That’s where we’ve ended up.’”

…

“When everyone gets an A, an A starts to mean very little. The kind of student that gets admitted to Harvard (or any elite college) wants to compete. They’ve spent their lives clawing upward. Khurana, the former dean, observed that Harvard students want success to feel meaningful. Getting all A’s is necessary, but insufficient.”

“This has created what Claybaugh called a ‘shadow system of distinction.’ Students now use extracurriculars to differentiate themselves from their peers. They’ve created a network of finance and consulting clubs that are almost indistinguishable from full-time jobs. To apply, students submit resumes, sit for interviews, and prepare a fake case of deliverable. At this point, the odds of getting into some clubs within Harvard are similar to the odds of being accepted to the college in the first place. The Harvard junior told me that she hadn’t considered going into consulting or investment banking before she arrived in Cambridge. But because clubs are so exclusive, everyone wants to be chosen. She ended up applying. ‘There are a handful of clubs that you can just join, but the clubs people want to join are typically not the clubs everyone can join,’ she told me. ‘Even volunteering clubs or service-oriented clubs have an application process. They’re highly competitive.’ Things have gotten to the point where some students feel guilty for focusing on schoolwork at the expense of extracurriculars, she told me.”

…

If Harvard can’t get “grading” reliable and valid, who can?

Isn’t it time to move away from the “letter grading” system, a system that no one can really explain?

Isn’t it time to create a new system of evaluation – let’s call it a learning report – where adult learning leaders and their young learners can engage in discussion and negotiation about how well young learners are meeting their learning goals?

It just seems to me that, in 2025, we should be better than “letter grading.” It’s just so 20^th century.

Til tomorrow. SVB