Every day there’s another headline about colleges and universities struggling financially, as students are hesitant to spend $50,000 for a year of online learning. Other schools with multibillion-dollar endowments are being asked what their endowments are for if they are not willing to spend them during this crisis. The problems with the rising costs of higher education and the widening gap between the wealthy colleges and the rest are not new, but the pandemic is highlighting them. If some colleges and universities, particularly smaller campuses–both private and public, close in the next few years, certainly people will point to the pandemic as a cause of the closure, even if the underlying problems existed long before 2019.
I have seen this happen at my own school, where within days of our closure in March, tensions that previously existed mostly below the surface immediately became apparent. One example: grading philosophies.
As with most schools around the country, we shut down right before Spring Break and shifted to online classes for the final two months of the semester. Immediately questions arose from teachers and students: what are grades going to look like this semester? Many colleges and universities began adopting variations of a pass/fail grading system for the semester. Should we do that as well? Or should we continue with the existing grading scale?
The arguments in favor of a pass/fail grading scale usually centered on the difficulties in both teaching and learning in the midst of the crisis. Teachers were doing heroic work, but still had to convert their entire curriculum into something that could be delivered remotely, all while also taking care of themselves and their own families. Likewise students were suddenly shut off from their friends and activities, with many of them now taking care of siblings, living in challenging home situations, and trying to learn online for the first time in their lives. For the teachers who advocated some kind of pass/fail (more specifically, a pass/incomplete) scale, it felt ridiculous to try and pretend that an A vs. an A- held any kind of meaningful distinction in the midst of the crisis, with students having such a variety of outside circumstances they were dealing with.
The argument against changing the grading scale was that without the extrinsic motivation of a letter grade to motivate them, students would do less work, would not participate on the online classes, would fall behind academically, and may find themselves more depressed and anxious without the grades to push them. Yes, these were unprecedented times, and of course teachers should be understanding of that as they assign grades, but getting rid of letter grades would only make the situation worse.
My students and I spent an entire hour of an online class meeting early during the shutdown talking about grades. I was teaching 11th-grade students, and they were all very conscious that they’d always been told that this was the year to make an impression on colleges. The students were pretty evenly split: some of them agreed that a pass/incomplete system made the most sense. Others were horrified at the idea of not being able to earn letter grades. Why? Because then they can’t make themselves stand out against their peers when they’re applying to college. Several of them even mentioned that they knew how petty that sounded, but they were being honest. If everybody gets a “Pass” grade, then how are they going to be able to stand out?
Here’s the thing: both sides were right. It was ridiculous to try and pretend that grades meant the same in May 2020 as they did in December 2019, and students were struggling with all kinds of things in the middle of a pandemic that greatly impacted their learning. On the other hand, many students do use the letter grades as a motivating factor, and, particularly for our high-achieving students, they were very genuinely concerned about grades as a way to distinguish themselves from their peers and what that meant for their future. A grade is only meaningful to some students in the context of it being either higher or lower than the grade of the student next to them.
We ended up with a compromise plan: we kept letter grades, but changed the scale (“widening the goalposts” in the words of a student) and removed +/- grades. Like all good compromises, it upset many on both sides of the argument, and I genuinely understand both perspectives. Regardless of our specific solution, my point is that whenever the conversation pre-pandemic turned to grading philosophies, those two sides of the discussion were rarely stated so clearly.
There are teachers who have long felt that grades hamper genuine learning, making it hard to give authentic feedback that students take to heart. In addition, students are always dealing with things outside of the classroom, not just during a pandemic. What does it mean that one student has a quiet home life and private tutors, and another has a mom who’s sick and three siblings to take care of as soon as the school day ends? Does earning an A mean the same thing for both of them? Some teachers would go so far as to abolish grades if the school would allow it.
Other teachers feel just as strongly and make good-faith arguments about why grades are necessary to get the best possible work from students. Yes, we would love them all to be intrinsically motivated, but they aren’t, and the reality is that they will strive for that A+. That is not to say that teachers who feel this way about grades don’t care about students and what they’re going through at home, but just that it’s a separate issue: the grade is a reflection of how much content the student has mastered, an “objective” accounting.
I have my own opinions on the topic of grades, but that’s for another day. Right now, I am glad that the pandemic has brought these questions to the surface, because it really gives us a chance as a school (and as educators in general) to crystallize exactly what is important for us. Is our school’s mission to help students’ learning and self-actualization? Then perhaps grading scales should reflect those goals. And if grades don’t help the process, then get rid of them. Or is the job of our school to impart content and then measure the extent that students have mastered that content? In that case, the grading scale should accurately reflect those goals. When students themselves say that grades are primarily for them to be judged against their peers, how does that fit our school’s mission and goals? Do we want to acknowledge that reality, or push back against it?
Is grading at my school drastically changing? No, not right now. We’re not abolishing grades, nor making any big moves towards standardizing teacher expectations. But I have had more conversations in the last four months about the purpose of grades, about just how they do and do not impact student performance and learning. So if ten years from now conversations around grading at my school are substanially different, or there are concrete changes to grading policies, one could easily look at the pandemic as a “cause.” Not because the differences in philosophies were directly borne out of the pandemic, but they were highlighted and brought to the surface by the crisis.
