I agree with the ideal that student records should ultimately be evaluated
by people who really need to do so, say those admitting or hiring or
recommending, etc. And thus be evaluated by different criteria perhaps than
the ones we might apply.
Still, students need feedback, and however detailed our appraisals may be,
in my experience, in our culture, most students really want and need
_relative evaluation_, i.e. 'competitive' evaluation ... not because they
like competition, but because they want and need to know where they stand
in relation to other students.
That does not have to be done by grades, and grades are probably not the
best way to do it. Grades evolved to serve the joint convenience of many
user-groups, and serve none well (except maybe the Registrar, who, as a
computer, soon won't care).
But it is not likely to be the case that any form of relative evaluation
will create the same kinds of problems Eugene wants to avoid? and does that
mean that a larger cultural and social constraint, far beyond our
classrooms, produces these problems ... I rather think it does, but would
like to be persuaded otherwise.
I don't simply mean that there are important competitive gates in our
society. I mean that most of us are raised in a culture with deep
assumptions and biases and values that give rise to both our educational
forms of competitive grading and those institutional gates. That are
embedded in us even if we explicitly reject the ethics and ethos of
competitiveness, whether in education or other arenas of life.
What are the deep origins of the need to feel that others are not better
than you?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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