I ranted about grad­ing to my class today (that’s not my class above, that’s Joon­hwan Lee’s the­sis defense!). My basic argu­ment was that before grad­ing, approx­i­mately 150 years ago, we gave detailed, con­crete, faceted feed­back to stu­dents because there was no other way. We didn’t feel com­pelled to con­vert all of a student’s skills and knowl­edge into a sin­gle num­ber or a let­ter grade. And, not only were there won­der­ful ben­e­fits to this form of feed­back, but that form of assess­ment was devoid of all of the prob­lems of a numer­i­cal assess­ment. Stu­dents can­not “game” a ver­bal assess­ment, but they can game a test. Teach­ers could spend the time they would nor­mally spend grad­ing pay­ing closer atten­tion to their stu­dents’ progress.

The worst part about mod­ern grad­ing is that most employ­ers don’t care. They might use grades as a low-pass fil­ter, to ignore appli­cants with less than a 2.5, but what they really care about is what a per­son can do. They want exam­ples of writ­ing, of think­ing, of deci­sion mak­ing. They don’t want numer­i­cal prox­ies for these, they want to see the results of these skills.

So who cares about grades? Stu­dents, fac­ulty, and uni­ver­si­ties. That’s good news for me, since I’m uni­ver­si­ties are run by fac­ulty and fac­ulty guide stu­dents. Now its just up to me to con­vince a few thou­sand col­leagues over the next 50 years that I am right.