I have been thinking about grades lately and I am pretty sure they are dumb. The main problem is that it seems that many many many people (politicians, parents, students, administrators, some other faculty, and zombies) think that the grade is the THE THING to worry about. Really, it is just a pale representation of the real thing.
This brings me to the allegory of the cave. I know you remember this when you read Plato’s The Republic, right? Here is a picture that explains the whole thing:
I don’t know where this image came from, it was on a boat load of other websites, none looked like the original. But, I salute you allegory-cave-drawing-person.
The basic idea of the cave is that people are in a cave (duh) looking at shadows of puppets of real things. They don’t see the real things. They can’t see the real things unless they leave the cave.
Back to grades
All these people are seeing the shadow that they call grades. What is the real thing? Learning is the real thing. I think that we (as a society) have fallen into the trap of thinking mostly about grades because it is easy. Measuring real learning is complicated and difficult. You can’t easily evaluate the level of understanding of 1000 students with a multiple-choice test.
Here are some cases where people might be looking at the shadow called “grades” and thinking it is a real thing.
- Official hired to raise math scores. I can raise math scores. It is pretty simple (and I wouldn’t even need 160k salary for two years). Just take all the students scores on the math tests and add 20 points. Oh, maybe they meant that this person was hired to raise understanding of math? No one said that.
- Parent to child or teacher: WHY AREN’T YOU GETTING BETTER GRADES! Did the parent mean “why aren’t you learning more”?
- “Louisiana needs to raise college graduation rates”. Again, isn’t this simple to fix? Just graduate more students. My favorite saying “if you have to have a piece of paper that says you graduated from college, it probably wasn’t worth it.”