Grades are for sorting
July 16, 2010
Over on scienceblogs, Rhett Allain (a bad Ritalin pun?) called grades a mere shadow of the true light of learning. He went on to enumerate cases where folks confused the two and suggested raising grades instead of raising learning.
First, obviously “raising grades” doesn’t mean artificially inflating them any more than “raising sales” means buying one’s own products, so that’s a bit disingenuous.
Second, I suppose Prof. Allain does want some sort of objective estimate of his student’s performance, so the interesting (yet unaddressed) question concerns alternative methods to grades.
Third, it got me thinking about the utility of grades. If grades are dumb and possibly counter-productive to learning, why have them at all?
Grading: Now How by Why is an interesting and relevant article. Nevertheless, grades are here to stay, and the author mentions the reason for it – sorting. Consider, for example, that universities give great weight to an applicant’s matriculation GPA, even if the application is for a completely different major. But even if it’s the same, the student will re-learn all his High School material in much greater depth in a single semester. One’s level of knowledge in High School is mostly irrelevant for higher education.
A better view is that grades are a proxy not of immediate knowledge but of ability – a higher GPA means the student is intelligent or diligent or both – and thus are very valuable for employers (and other application reviewers). In this view, higher education demands learning lots of complicated material which is not directly helpful and which may be forgotten after the test, but it’s all good as long as it sorts the bright from the dull.
Of course, this still means that attempts to raise grades are misguided, for the market will eventually find other proxies to sort people by (SAT, GMAT and other g-loaded tests come to mind). But will improving learning help? Ultimately most people do not enter university to learn about the world, but rather to be ranked in society by their major’s difficulty and their own achievements in it. Grades then, are indeed mere shadows, but useful ones nonetheless, and so I don’t think Prof. Allain will be dropping them anytime soon.
