News: Imagining College Without Grades – Inside Higher Ed
This article presents a serious question – What are grades for? What do they help us, as faculty, do? Where I teach, we have mandatory grade ranges in our core classes to combat grade inflation. The rationale is that an effective class will necessarily produce a normal distribution of grades – a few students will get A’s, and few students will get C’s and the rest will get B’s. I think it’s time we question this fundamental assumption.
As a teacher, shouldn’t I want my students to perform at their highest level? If I am teaching at my highest level, shouldn’t student performance reflect that? In this system, I have had classes where they outperformed the grade range. Is that somehow bad?
I think we need accountability in our teaching. We need to be able to assess the performance of our students – are they meeting the learning objectives of our classes? However, a required grade range assumes a consistent rate of underperformance in my class. I have a problem with that as a philosophy of teaching. In addition, as many have noted elsewhere, this focus on grades often distracts from a focus on learning.
