Throughout our entire educational lives, our intelligence has been quantified by a number, an average, a letter, etc. The focus has always been on getting good grades, but what exactly does getting good grades entail? Does it mean absorbing and understanding the material being taught? Or does it mean prioritizing results over input? Obviously, every student is wired differently. There are portions of students who love to learn—who value the material being introduced to them. However, there are also portions of students who don’t care at all about learning, as they only care about getting the grade they desire. It’s been an interesting dilemma in education for quite some time, ever since 1792.
It was at this time that William Farish, a tutor at the University of Cambridge, tried to think of a more efficient way of quantifying the progress of his students. He found the idea of grading their assignments with a number to be highly efficient, as it was much less time-consuming than actually communicating with each of his pupils. This new method allowed him to expand the number of students he tutored, which, in turn, brought him more wealth.
So the idea of grading was not conceived in order to help the student; it was conceived to help the teacher—in this case, a lazy and selfish one. Nonetheless, the system caught on, as number grades were reduced to letter grades in 1897. Mount Holyoke College was the first to institute letter grades, but the method quickly trickled down to lower levels of education.
Whether it’s numbers or grades, the same constant remains true: Students are rewarded with some indication of their “progress”, and, in many cases, it’s this reward that they strive for solely; the gift of knowledge is barely even on their mind. Speaking from a psychological standpoint, you can’t say students are in the wrong for thinking this way. Sure, knowledge in the long run is going to be more beneficial, but in the short term, grades are a more significant reward. After all, our society has deemed grades as the most important thing in the universe, which we will absolutely touch upon in a little bit.
Still dealing with the psychological aspect of this situation, though, it’s absolutely natural for students to seek a reward of good grades over a gift of knowledge. Good grades are an example of what is known in the world of psychology as extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is when a person is encouraged to perform a behavior or engage in an activity to earn a reward or avoid punishment. The key part of that definition, for the sake of this blog, is the part that deals with avoiding punishment. The punishment in education is, of course, failing. That’s literally what an F grade stands for—fail. And if a student fails a test, their average is tarnished. If their average is tarnished, then they won’t get into a good college. If they don’t get into a good college, then they won’t get a good job. And if they don’t get a good job, then their lives will be ruined.
That’s the way we’ve made our society out to be, isn’t it? Each part of life feeds into the next, so if you fail in one stage, you’re setting yourself up for a lesser stage ahead. Students, the majority of them, at least, want to be the most successful they can be in the grand scheme of life. What they don’t understand, though, is that in order to be successful, you have to fail. You have to hit a few bumps in the road. You have to learn from your failures and come back stronger. But our education system doesn’t teach them that. Our education system teaches kids that failing is bad—that failing is the end of the world. Students fear failing to an extreme, so they do everything in their power not to. This means taking the shortcuts. This means only skimming textbooks for what you need to know on a test. This means cheating on assignments if you’re either too clueless or too lazy to complete them. This means being less interested in the subject material because you’re only worried about the grade.
Moving away from grading in education would shift the motivation of students from extrinsic to intrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is to engage in certain behavior because it is personally rewarding. In other words, the behavior, itself, is the reward. If there are no grades and students are learning simply to learn, the fulfillment they’ll receive will be greater than any external reward they could attain. This fulfillment will only encourage them to gain more knowledge in school and beyond.
How would we assess which students are more advanced than others if there was no such thing as grades? If we’re being totally honest, I have no idea; I don’t know how we would find that solution (some research points towards focusing on task-oriented goals, but I’m not sure if this would be suitable). What I am sure of, though, is that the system we have in place right now isn’t working anywhere near as well as it should be.
Author and lecturer Alfie Kohn has chronicled the effects of grading systems in American education through studies for decades, and he has come to three main conclusions:
- Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning
- Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task
- Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking
All of these conclusions have been detailed in this blog, and all of these conclusions are causes for concern in American education. The most prominent concept students are learning is how to cheat the system. If the goal of education is to distribute actual knowledge, then we, as a society, might want to look at reform within the schooling system.