Take note! Once again, @mekkaokereke is saying something important that too many people simply have no clue about.
There are some closely related questions I always like to ask when grade inflation comes up. (short thread)
@mekkaokereke Suppose every student does excellent work. Should every student get an A? If that happens, isn’t it a •good• outcome we should applaud?
If it happens consistently, should we raise grading standards? If so, does that mean grades should change meaning over time after all — that we should embrace grade •deflation•?
People think they have clear answers until they actually start thinking.
(To be clear, these are questions to reflect on, NOT to toss off an opinion in my replies.)
2/
What’s the point of grades? Is it:
FEEDBACK: “You’re good at this, not so good at that.”
GATEKEEPING: ”You did well enough at X to take class Y, get into institution Z.”
RANKING: “Hey, employers, grad schools, you suck at interviewing, but don’t worry, we’ll tell you: this student is better™ than that student.”
MOTIVATION: “Work hard or the institution will punish you”
CREDIBILITY: “We only grant degrees to people who actually did something”
These are all in •direct• mutual tension.
3/
I don’t have an easy answer. I do have two observations.
OBSERVATION 1: Nobody has clear answers to this. When people have confident certitude about grades and grade inflation, it’s usually because they haven’t really thought clearly about this tension, and instead have feelings based in an intellectually muddy cultural value system that has more to do with hierarchy and their own position of (non-)privilege than it does with learning or what’s good for individuals and society.
4/
OBSERVATION 2: Whatever the answers may be, time spent thinking about impact on students — quality of learning, who’s included and who’s excluded, long-term outcomes, human well-being — provides 1000x better returns than time spent haggling over grading policy.
5/
My own view — which you’re probably picking up by now — is that nothing I do as a teacher has a lower value-to-cost ratio than assigning grades.
Grades are embedded in our institutions in ways that make them hard to just wish away. They do serve some purposes, but we should view them as almost pure cost, a harmful stopgap, a problem to be mitigated, not a virtue to be elevated and defended.
(I have a much longer screed on this, which I’ll post once I finally get my blog up and running.)
/end
@inthehands I was teaching college seniors during the first semester of lockdown and I graded on a curve from A+ to A- because…