in triplicate

Academic grades, as conventionally understood and used, have three distinct audiences, and they serve a different function for each audience. Grades are problematic largely due to the ways these functions are at odds with each other.

The three audiences are:

• The student. In the context of a single course, assessment and feedback are necessary parts of the educational process. They let the student know how they’re doing as they go along. Traditional letter grades are a crude form of feedback, and where they are used students rarely have a chance to meaningfully respond, other than to try to adapt for the next assessment. Alternative grading systems often treat the entire course duration as a traning period, in which the student can respond to feedback through revision, reassessment, or other forms of demonstrated proficiency following an initial evaluation.
• The institution. Let’s be as generous as possible and assume that the primary goal of the college or university in which a student is enrolled is to educate that student in such a way that they reach their fullest potential. This requires communication among the numerous instructors that student will encounter throughout their studies, and also coordination with the other offices and institutional bodies that are present to support the student. A grade can be a succinct summary to the next instructor in a sequence about how developed are the student’s prerequisite skills. It can also be a signal to the institution about how well the student is progressing in their overall academic career. (This is the reason for “mid-semester” grades that can be used to alert the school when a student needs assistance or intervention.)
• The outside world. Outside of the institution (and inside as well, to an extent), grades become currency that the student can trade for prestige or opportunities. This currency may be in the form of a GPA (to which all of the individual course grades contribute, despite being largely incommensurable with each other) or, for a more granular view, a transcript (which provides the opportunity to craft a narrative about the grades). Of course, not all persons or organizations outside academia value this currency in the same way. But “good grades” provide an inexhaustible supply of recommendations, and “bad grades” are a perpetual obstacle to be minimized or navigated around.

Thus grades are expected to operate at three different social scales, and also at three different time scales. The feedback to a student within a course is short-term, the communcation with the institution is medium-term, and the message to the outside world is long-term (or as they say, permanent). Much of the “objectivity theater” surrounding the assignment of grades is based on the pretence that these three purposes can be fulfilled by a single summative object.

The fact that the third use of grades has both the largest audience and the longest-lasting effects means that it becomes their dominant purpose, their telos. Student anxiety about grades, for the most part, is caused not by an intrinsic dislike of getting feedback about how they can improve their understanding and performance in a subject, but by the belief that in the end what has the greatest practical impact is the final letter or number they can show to the outside world when the course is done. Institutional concerns about “rigor” are based not on the needs of the student, but the needs of the school to present the final scores to the outside world as meaningful indicators of their students’ quality.

Those of us engaged in the practice of developing and implementing alternative grading systems are primarily focused on the first and smallest-scale purpose of grades, providing a useful feedback process to the student. Yet our systems must also interface with the institutional and outside world audiences. At those interfaces lie, in my view, the most difficult ethical questions of grading: how do we support students beyond our time as their instructor? how do we provide an honest evaluation that meets the needs of all three audiences? to whom are we primarily responsible? is the merging of the three functions into a single metric flawed in such a way that it needs to be overthrown?

Honestly, I think (at the time of this writing) that grades are most useful at the institutional level. If it were not for the outward-facing use of grades, they could serve as a quick, qualitative (not quantitative) shorthand in communicating among the internal parts of a college or university what are the needs or successes of an individual student. (To be supplemented by more personalized detail as necessary.) Within a course, as we’ve seen, any number of assessment/feedback systems can work, as long as they’re built on clear communication and building trust in the student-faculty relationship. As for the presentation of grades to the outside world, well, that’s where the dirty work happens.