Since I began my teaching career, I’ve noticed one common factor preventing students from engaging in meaningful learning across region, race, and socioeconomic status – one factor most responsible for killing learning before it even starts. That factor is not one of the usual suspects, such as behavior problems, lack of resources or standardized test concerns, though those certainly do have a great impact on learning. Instead, that factor is one disguised as a motivator for students: grades.
The myth that grades inspire students to learn is just that – a myth. In reality, grades deter students from wanting to partake in challenging learning tasks and drive students to outperform their peers at all costs.
Below are some harmful student behaviors for which grades are responsible. Until we as educators, parents, and a society put the focus where it should be – on learning rather than arbitrary numbers – I fear our students will continue to succumb to them.
Grades encourage academic fraud. In my experience, many students are so focused on receiving an A and an impressive grade point average, they’ll do just about anything to get there. I regularly encounter students cheating on tests, copying classmates’ homework, and plagiarizing from the Internet in an attempt to get the top score.
These students feel their worth is measured by those numbers and letters scrawled across their report cards. Who can blame them? Grades are a determining factor for all sorts of things: privileges at home, discounts at stores, and admittance to college. To them, the end goal is what’s important, and they’ll use any means to get there, sacrificing integrity and honesty included.
Grades discourage students’ willingness to accept challenging tasks. If I had a dime for each time I hear, “Does this count?”, I’d have enough money by retirement to purchase a private island. It’s the first question students ask, even before I’ve had a chance to introduce an assignment or discuss its purpose.
Rather than concerning themselves with what they could gain intellectually by completing a task or how it will help them in the future, students are instead interested in how many points I’ll put in the grade book. If I don’t assure them it’ll “count” in some way, you can bet very few will do it.
Grades impede critical thinking. By the time my students are juniors, I no longer hand-hold them through assignments like I might when they are freshmen. Instead, I try to help them spread their wings, to exercise their brains and encourage higher order thinking.
When engaging in discussion about a text or completing a project to show their analysis of the central ideas within it, I give them the basic criteria and ask them to put forth their best thinking. I can’t tell you how many students have a nervous breakdown, wanting to know just exactly what I’m “looking for”, right down to precisely how many words each sentence should contain and how many points each is worth. “However many it takes to convey your synthesis of the ideas in the text” is my stock answer, but it fails to satisfy what it is they really want: me to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it.
They are so reliant upon their teachers to break down every aspect of an assignment into its individual steps and the point values attached to each, they fail to learn how to think for themselves.
As our system and society are structured now, grades are an essential aspect of student evaluation. But they’re not doing our students any service. As long as we keep putting so much emphasis on the numbers, the importance of the learning will continue to slip between the cracks.
Laura Sauer is a high school English teacher in Michigan. She holds a BA in English and is pursuing her MA in Curriculum Development and Instruction.