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| Yes | 15% | 82 votes | Total: 553 votes | |
| No | 85% | 471 votes |
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Add to FavoritesThe best way to inspire a student to do better is to reward him or her for their effort, drive, passion and talent to encourage them to do their best at everything that they do. By using the grading system that we have now, emphasis is placed on meeting the requirements and doing what you have to do to get the "A". Instead of just doing enough to get by, students need to work as hard as they can to excel past the requirements. Students get too wrapped up worrying about making the grade, and they lose what attending a college or university is about: To grow as an individual, and to become a trained thinker.
By using a grading system that ranks a student's performance, it encourages students to "make the grade" as opposed to "make the most of your experience, and grow as much as you can". Students and educators miss out on a world of opportunity by focusing on grades rather than growth.
If that's not enough, Grading is subjective and based on what the teacher feels is appropriate. However, many college and university grading systems that give the same credit for work that was excellent to students who are doing just enough to get the "A". When two students have completed a course and they both end up with the same grade of an "A" or a "4.0", but one student went over and beyond the requirements, they will still receive the same reward and recognition in terms of grade. Or what if you have two different teachers teaching the same course?
As a writing tutor, it's interesting to see the vast differences in professors grading standards when they're teaching the same entry level English composition course. They focus their grading on different standards. Because the professors set the standards, a student with bad writing skills may be getting reinforced for his or her poor work from a professor with low standards.
I guess the university system has to certify people based on something, or else the potential for unqualified people passing with degrees would rise dramatically. Evaluating effort, drive, passion and talent to do the best work you can do in a particular subject is difficult, but the whole educational system from the way things are taught to the way students are evaluated need to be restructured. The educational system is broken.
Grades are just another system of control to keep students distracted from what they really should be doing: Growing. The people that benefit most from colleges and universities are the people that realize grades are not as important as expanding your skill base and focusing on learning the most you can during your time as a student.
When hiring prospective employees, a company is more likely to hire students that are driven, who participate in leadership opportunities at the university, students who put tremendous amounts of thought and effort into everything that they do. Those are the real students who are going places.
Students who go to college just to "get a degree" end up selling shoes at Foot Locker, or making burritos at Taco Bell instead of going on to becoming successful in their chosen field.
My advice: Stop focusing on the grade, and focus on what is going to make you a better person and what is going to help you succeed in life. Do the best you can do in your classes, and be able to say you have no regrets that you should have worked harder in a class.
Grades should be abolished in college and university courses. A new system of rewards based on effort, drive, passion, and talent should be implemented.
Learn more about this author, Jered Slusher.
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No
The primary difficulty with abolishing grading scales, is that few people have an alternative system that goes beyond the theoretical. The evaluation of the traditional grading scale is an exercise in critical thinking, as it requires us to identify the question, evaluate various sources of information, and come up with a conclusion. This isn't to say that we should stick with something that is fraught with difficulty, but sometimes change simply for the sake of change results in a worse situation. As many have stated in the past, "be careful what you wish for".
Grading in its current form has many critics, from those who claim it is racially-biased, to those who claim that it doesn't actually measure learning, to those who feel it is unfair for certain learner "types". Some of these claims may be true, but research is definitively mixed, and even the concept of a "learning style" is highly controversial. Again, we must return to the question: what do you suggest as an alternative?
Similar criticism has been levied on standardized testing, but critics have not come up with an alternative that will be fair for a larger percentage of the masses. The difficulty that we have with education (and other things) is the idea that something is mostly good for most people but not perfect for everyone. It is easy to criticize something for the structural flaws, but it difficult to design something better.
If we return to the grading argument, we must remember that learning is a two-way street. In a perfect world the instructor (or facilitator) and the students would engage in a wonderful partnership of knowledge acquisition and self-discovery where grades would be unnecessary. Unfortunately this is seldom the case, as some percentage of students must be poked and prodded to complete the assignments and some are motivated to learn only if it is "on the test". This may seem like a very dim view of education, but it is the reality of some settings. That said, there are many great teachers out there who continue to promote learning and produce outstanding results.
One recent trend in educational theory is to suggest that we need to be more "learner-centered", as if we have been ignoring the learners for the last 400 years. But, like many systems, it lacks definition and the resources to implement it effectively. For example, it would be great if teachers could sit down with each student, assess their specific skills and educational aspirations, and design an individualized education plan for maximized success. However, few teachers have the time or resources to creates such an environment, and we cannot escape the reality that some students would choose to learn nothing if left to their own ambition.
Certainly grading is not a perfect system. But we struggle in this world when we try to create universal systems of evaluation that are not based somewhat on quantitative measures. As mentioned previously in this article, if experts can come up with a system that has greater success than the traditional scale and can be realistically implemented, then I'm sure educators would embrace it. Until that time, grading should be kept as the scale of choice.
Learn more about this author, Todd Pheifer.
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