So just a last comment or two in the discussion before I get too busy with
other matters ...
On the big question, sideline to the grading discussion, of course isolated
individual actions can seem in retrospect to have had consequences, but
there is no traceable causality across the scales involved; indeed they do
contribute, but to the extent that they are isolated, the consequences are
unpredictable (and usually trivial at the higher scales), and to the extent
that they are determinative (always an illusion in my view) they are not
isolated, though not necessarily collective either: they must simply be
complemented and reinforced by other events. This is a view from the
individual act to the large-scale social system. If we move only from a
lifetime of concerted effort to impact on a local institution, then the
scales overlap enough to allow us some gratifying sense of accomplishment.
Even then, it's mostly luck.
I have no interest in 'rationalizing' grades. I would do away with them
tomorrow entirely and replace them with conferences and written summaries
of areas of progress and needs, partially negotiated with the student (this
is more a matter of curriculum than grading; I also favor laissez faire
curriculum, but that's a separable issue). I was only trying to chart a
realistic course for possible ameliorative change, reducing the worst
features (grades to legitimate oppression beyond the academy), while
retaining those that, still very poor in functionality, do have some
meaning (global evaluation relative to known standards).
The best that can be said for grades, and it's not much, is that many
students really cannot function adequately in all feedback is
individualized, if they know only where they stand in a negotiated system
of curricular expectations that is unique to their interests, agreed goals,
and agreed criteria. This view of evaluation is a sort of scaffolding for
self-evaluation in which the mentor helps the student to become able to
this job, in limited areas, for him/herself. A noble goal, but not all that
is needed by many students. They also want to know how they compare to
other students, whose work they do not know. As teachers we are in a
position to make comparisons to vast numbers of contemporary and past
students in a way that the individual student could not possibly do.
Perhaps for many purposes these comparisons are irrelevant, but not for all
purposes recognized by students themselves.
More global comparisons, on a wider stage, a larger social scale than
individual teaching and learning, function both in relation to real and
existing (if often arbitrary and unfair) standards of performance and
judgment, not just in relation to other or former students, but to those
aspects of standards which are not local to particular tasks and
accomplishments, but are more global to performance, or habitus, in a
discipline or a curriculum. It is indeed more useful to have specific
critique of a particular performance if the goal is simply to improve it.
But not if the goal is to make a decision how much of one's life to devote
to activities where you know you are not likely to be judged by others as
outstanding, or even adequate. Higher education is very much a time of life
when many people are making career decisions (even if never final ones).
There are standards by which they will be judged, and those standards are
more evident very often in the painful, global, otherwise content-empty
symbolism of grades than in any other way.
Perhaps there is a deeper emotional and cultural issue here. Many of us do
not like to cause pain to others, to tell them just how badly they are
doing, how little progress we see, how unlikely it is that others will
judge them highly enough to make it worthwhile in the long run for them to
continue to pursue a particular goal. We would rather have some impersonal
symbolic mediation; and perhaps they would too. There are also cultural
differences in how difficult it is to tell someone that they will never be
a great opera singer vs. telling them that they aren't likely to excel in
ways the culture deems more related to general intelligence than to
specialized skills. I would rarely take responsibility for offering such
career judgments; there are always cases where we are wrong. But students
do need, and often want, some such information on which to base their own
decisions. American higher education in particular seems to me entirely
unwilling, except through grades, to share with students honest faculty
judgment about their prospects.
This, too, is in a sense a matter of different timescales. To evaluate one
performance or product is not the same as evaluating a whole term's work,
nor several years' work. The longer term evaluations are not simply the sum
of the short-term ones; they have different functions and different
criteria. The most comfortable forms of evaluation for us are the
short-term, highly specific ones; it is so easy then to show the few simple
things that could be done to greatly improve the work. When we move to the
longer time scales, however, it often becomes clear that what is wrong
cannot be so easily, or explicitly, fixed, or that the timescale for
improvement is realistic in relation to the timescale of a student's life
ambitions.
While sociological functionalism always has to be complemented by critique,
there is still much to be said for the basic principle that long-surviving
practices have multiple functions and that very often many aspects of
social life have come to be dependent on them. If we want to intelligently
change our involvement with grading, we need to understand as much about
its functions as we can.
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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