Grades Suck

But getting rid of them won't solve the problem.

When I started veterinary school, I was 32 and had been in the workforce for 10 years. I came back to student life with a very specific goal: To learn what I needed to be a primary-care doctor to dogs, cats, and the occasional guinea pig or other small, furry beast. Many of my classmates had similarly specific aims, whether by type of animal (horses only, for example) or by specialty (one classmate had wanted to be a veterinary neurologist since she was little). We were all adults at a pre-professional school, packing highly specialized information into our brains that we would one day need to use on a daily basis.

One day in class, I overheard some of my fellow students talking about a test we’d taken the previous week. They’d gone to the professor’s office to argue with him about the answers to a few of the questions on the exam. Not to discuss what the best response would be from a medical perspective - that wasn’t the issue. They went to argue that the questions they’d gotten wrong were poorly worded and confusing, and so they should get credit for the answers they’d given. They went to lobby for better grades.

At the time, I found this idea startling and ridiculous. Who cares about grades in veterinary school? Isn’t the point just to know what you need to know to do your job as well as possible?

In retrospect, my reaction was based in part on self-centeredness and ignorance. Since I wasn’t planning on doing an internship or residency, I hadn’t thought about the fact that those programs select candidates based in large part on grades and class rankings. I was just appalled that even at what I considered the highest possible level of education, people still cared so much about that letter or number - not because of what it said about their knowledge, but for its own sake.

But the truth is, they do matter, for exactly the reason that my classmates understood. At their heart, grades are a shorthand sorting mechanism that is used by the people who decide where students go and/or what they do at the next level of education or employment. As it was described to me by a former statistics professor, grades are a metric - and while all metrics are imperfect, some are useful. For people who have to look at a large number of applications and quickly whittle them down to a handful, grades are an extremely useful tool. They are also useful to teachers and school administrators, who need to sort students in succeeding levels of education. (I am using only examples that were given to me by actual teachers - we all know there are others.)

But they are imperfect. There’s no consensus about what grades are actually shorthand for. How completely the student mastered the material? How much work they put in? How much they participated? How quickly and easily they completed the work? How reliable they were? How well they worked in a team? And even rubrics to standardize that sort of thing can’t fix every problem. Case in point: a study preprint showing that university students whose last names started with letters that come later in the alphabet got lower grades and more negative comments, presumably because those students’ work is reviewed later in the grading process, when professors are tired and cranky. When I asked people what they thought about grades, almost nobody liked them - both teachers and non-teachers.

So do we get rid of grades? The impetus for this essay was a recent opinion piece by educator Seth Czarnecki on grade inflation. It recommended, among other possibilities, getting rid of letter grades in favor of “the mastery- or proficiency-based approach.”

In the mastery system, students work at their own pace to meet objective content or skills-based standards and are assessed based on the level of proficiency they reach by the end of each unit. For instance, rather than receiving a C on an essay about the Civil War, a teacher’s assessment is descriptive: “Faye is proficient at asking historical inquiry questions and is approaching proficiency in using evidence to back up claims”.

In theory, that approach makes a ton of sense. It takes the abstract letter grade and gives it concrete and specific meaning. Students cannot be bumped to the next level until they’ve learned what they need to know to do the work there, and they can take all the time they need to learn it. (It’s not clear to me what students who learn quickly would do in this system once they’ve mastered all the skills for a given level.) And it puts the focus where it should be - on learning something well so that you can move on and learn the next thing. According to the New York Times article Czarnecki linked to above, it’s a concept that’s gaining traction here in the US, which seems like a worthwhile change.

But would that really solve the issue of grades and grade inflation? I doubt it. Like it or not, labeling a student as “approaching proficiency,” “proficient,” or having “mastery” is still a way of grading a student. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that the same folks who badger teachers to change that grade from an A to an A+ will be back, pushing to change that grade from “proficient” to “mastery.”

Because fundamentally, the reason why most of us hate grades is due to the reason why grades exist: They determine what a student will or won’t be allowed to do in the future, based on a sorting process that ranks them by mental rather than physical ability.

As a society, we’re apparently just fine with sorting students by physical ability - that’s called sports. This kind of sorting is allowed because it’s obvious and measurable - the kid either won the race or they didn’t. In addition, we see it as based on physical characteristics that weren’t learned and can’t be changed. (To some degree that’s correct, at least when it comes to elite athletes.)

But “mental ability” is nebulous, multi-factorial, and historically subject to intense, socially constructed bias, notably along racial and gender-based lines. In some cases it can also be changed - treatment for ADHD is the big example here. And the stakes are high. Very few kids will have their futures decided by how well they play soccer. While high grades in school won’t guarantee any kind of lifelong success, they absolutely can set a student along a path with fewer roadblocks.

We can argue that the problem with grades is that they do a poor job of sorting people, but to some degree, it’s the sorting itself - and what we’re sorting for - that makes us unhappy. So maybe we shouldn’t sort in this way at all?

That, it turns out, is what the K-12 schools in the state of Massachusetts have tried to do over the past few decades, by de-leveling classes (removing honors tracks within a given subject) and getting rid of “gifted and talented” programs. Those steps have ensured that getting high grades doesn’t give a student any increased opportunity within the K-12 system. Whether that was a good idea or not is a huge subject for another day, but for the purposes of this discussion all it did was kick the can down the road. The sorting is still happening, it’s just happening later, with college and job applications. And those aren’t going to get de-leveled.

Like it or not, we’re stuck with the need for some kind of grading system. The challenge, as I see it, is not just about terminology - What does an A mean? Is that student proficient in the subject or have they mastered it? - but about fairness and opportunity. How do we ensure that whatever grading system is in place is applied to all students fairly and without bias? And, crucially, how do we ensure that the resulting grades give each student the opportunity to move forward at the rate that makes sense for them? Because in the end, it’s not about the grades. It’s about what the grades will or won’t allow the student to do.