For perhaps the first time in my teaching career, I had my grades completely finished before the new year. Exams completed, comments entered, and everything ready to post when we return. I’m glad to be finished, but every semester I am reminded: I hate grading. It’s not the act of marking up translations (though that’s not particularly fun either), so much as the assigning of grades that I simply don’t enjoy. I’ve spent some time over break thinking about why that is.

As I was completing all these tasks, I was also reading the flurry of articles on the topic of grade inflation, spurred by a Harvard professor complaining that the median grade at his institution is an A. Following this, there were of course plenty of articles saying this is a bad thing, others claiming this is a good thing, and others explaining why it is a thing here to stay.[1]

Conor Friedersdorf’s defense, while I don’t agree with all of it, does get to the crux of my distaste with grading: what should matter is whether or not a student is learning, not the grade itself. But like everything else that’s important in life, learning is hard to measure. Grades are a crude attempt to measure that, just like standardized test scores.

In my classroom, the struggle I have with grades boils down to this: students expect grades to reflect their effort, while I am trying to assign grades based on their knowledge of the material. As much as I try to tell students that the C+/B+/A- on their paper doesn’t reflect their value as a person, there is often much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the grade is lower than they expect. They cannot understand how, if they tried hard and did all the work, I could possibly withhold from them the reward of an A or A+. In my head, the grade on an assignment or report card is simply a shorthand indication of how much Latin I think they know. But when they read it, it too often feels to them like an arbitrary score that I dole out capriciously.

As a result, I find myself giving the students more opportunities to “earn” that higher grade: optional assignments, quiz retakes, “augmented pointage”, that type of thing. So I may have Betty with an A who truly knows as much Latin as could be expected at her level. Then Veronica may not be quite at that same level of mastery, but also has an A on her report card because she took advantage of some extra opportunities.

When I first started teaching, this bothered me, but every time I would contemplate becoming more strict with my grading, I held back. Why? Not just because I want to avoid conflict (though I do hate when they cry), but because I really do want them to focus on learning more than the grade. And if Veronica gets a C on a test, but then corrects her mistakes and brings her grade up to a B-, is that so bad? No, maybe she doesn’t know Latin as well as Betty, who got a B- the first time around. Then again, maybe she just had a bad day taking the test. At the end of the day, she’s learned a bit of Latin, and so we move on. What if every student who struggles on a test takes that same opportunity, and the class average ends up higher as a result? Isn’t that leading to grade inflation. Sure, but they all corrected their mistakes and (maybe) learned something from it. Doesn’t seem so bad.

I do worry about grade inflation. I do want those A grades and honor rolls to mean something, and agree with the professor who says there’s not much point in having a range of grades if only the top few are ever actually given out. But at the end of the day, I can’t control how students view grades–there are too many factors. As much as I want to deemphasize grades, the students have too many voices telling them they are all-important. In the end, I’ve decided to not stress about those grades so much. I look at my class averages, but I try to spend more time focusing on the central question: How well have they learned? Hopefully, over time, I’ll learn more ways to get my students to think the same way.

[1] Actually, my favorite take on all this was the New York Times’ satirical “leaked grading rubric” from Harvard.