Do Grades REALLY Matter?

Grades clearly matter to a range of stakeholders, the most obvious being learners but also the educational inspectorates, the funding bodies & politicians all take a serious interest in them. However, before they can be considered, there are a number of enduring controversies about grades that readers should be aware of.

Firstly, educationalists & sociologists disagree about the actual mechanics & equity of grade attribution. The most ardent supporters of educational grading are Functionalists, like Talcott Parsons & collaborators Davis & Moore. For them, it is the aggregation of IQ plus effort that determines the grade, so it is a worthy & meritocratic system. Grade differentiation is desirable & functional as it aids the selection of the right people for the right roles. Those with higher grades get the functionally more important jobs. These require rarer skills & those securing them are paid more as a result. For Functionalists, educational grading is an essential motivational force that contributes to the public good & helps to ensure a healthy vibrant economy. If only it were that simple.

Arthur Jensen said that grades are largely determined by IQ & that is something mostly inherited. So we are what we are' & education merely rubber stamps our genetic inequity. So for Jensen the notion of agency or self-determination is clearly limited. This evokes visions of a student coming home with a failed essay, or term paper & blaming their parents for it.

For those on the left, educational grading is a sham, a symbolic process underpinned by economic & social inequality. Well known studies in the 1970's by Raymond Boudon, Pierre Bourdieu & the equally famous American neo-Marxists Bowles & Gintis criticised the nature of education in a Capitalist system. For Boudon poverty made grading an unfair process, whilst for Bourdieu, students lacking Bourgeoisie culture were at a disadvantage to their middle class peers. For Bowles & Gintis grading was designed to reward compliance & deference to authority, it was not there to reward the deserving or the independent minded. They referred to this covert learning process as the hidden curriculum.

Finally, for interpretivists or micro sociologists like Howard Becker, grades are often determined by a labeling process. Interpretivists argue that an ideal student typology exists & the closer one fits that typology, the more likely one is to achieve, or in this case receive, high grades.

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