Grading, as a major assessment approach in education nowadays, is used to evaluate the students’ performance in classes. Combining the grades for all classes together, each student has a GPA, which is used to evaluate if a student is good at studying. If someone has a GPA of 3.9, he/she is considered studying better than a student has a GPA of 2.9.
It might be true when the difference in GPA between two students is significant. However, when the difference becomes smaller, say 3.9 vs 3.8, can we make the same conclusion? The student with a GPA of 3.8 may take a class offered by a harsh professor, who usually give low grade. The student with a GPA of 3.9 may intently avoid tough classes to keep a high GPA. There are so many factors that can affect students’ GPA.
A question I have been thinking a lot since college is what does a grade tell us. It seems to me that GPA almost always weigh the most in Graduate School admission and fellowship/award application. If someone have a good GPA, his/her chance of being accepted by top schools is high. Does a higher grade indicate a student is more intelligent or what? I am very confused about this.
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Ranking associated with grading system can definitely be scary to lots of students. It promotes competition between peers and hinders efficient learning. We need to come up with a better evaluation system in higher education rather than a simple GPA. With multiple assessment approaches, we can know one specific student from all aspects. The journey is long, but I know lots of universities are actually trying different ways to assess all students. That’s some progress.
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Grades and grade-point averages can be incredibly misleading. Perhaps a student had a bad day when they took the exam or they had challenges beyond the classroom when they needed to write that final paper. Perhaps a student did not have the support needed to write a compelling paper?
There are so many factors that shape grades and extend well beyond the classroom not just to social situations, but relate to deeply personal facets. Each of us learn in a wide range of ways, and it is our duty as teachers to explore those ways for our students – many of our students have no idea how they learn, because they have not had opportunities to explore this in any course.
I firmly believe that bad grades in no way reflect student achievement, but rather suggest the failure of teachers to cater to, recognize, or even to consider the different learning needs of students. Now I am not suggesting that every student should receive an “A” grade, but that the teacher is, in many ways, partly to blame for a student receiving a “D”. Perhaps the teacher was unapproachable? Did they explain a concept in a convoluted way? Perhaps they did not explain it, and some students learn better from a lecture than the lousy textbook assigned at the outset. I do not mean to suggest that teachers need to jump through all kinds of hoops for all of our students, but we should at least admit our own role in the delivery of content and for thinking about ways for our students to engage with materials in a meaningful way.
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I’m confused along with you and everyone else who asks questions similar to the ones you’ve posed. As a proponent of holistic education, it frustrates me a great deal when assessment in higher ed or grade school focuses only on academic achievement. However, some institutions are making changes…(watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4kXrTK1VMk) but that’s not where it should stop. Higher education settings also need to adopt the holistic models of education so that the trend of assessment in general can be altered and made more effective.
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Going by the blog posts that everyone has written this week, I can assure you that everyone is just as confused. I know people who are brilliant economists who ended up getting poor grades in class and subsequently did not get through to a good grad school. Clearly, the current system needs to be fixed.
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I agree with your point here, Grading if you think about is built on catalogers that measures certain criteria that sometime don’t give the students the opportunities to be creative, or don’t give the proper assessment to the cataloger.
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The fact that GPA is a very important factor to be admitted in grad school has contributed to students do not enjoy the learning process. At the end, they just focused on the grades and do not on what they learned. Grades do not always indicate if a student learned or not. Even, the most brilliant student may have a bad day (external factors) that negatively affected his/her performance on the test. It does not mean that he/she does not know the topics.
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Your post brings a lot of reflections to me. I understand with your perspective, and I agree with it. However, I also think that criticism to the grades system can be taken to the extreme, and it may demean its value. To me, the grades are very useful as a self-assessment tool. In my case, I see my grades and I reflect to see if I needed to study more, or if my level of knowledge is as expected by the class design. Thanks for sharing 🙂
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GPA always matters a lot when the students apply for a job or try to get in graduate school. I have some thoughts about this. One student with 3.9 but no research experience VS. another with 2.9 and abundant research experience from several projects. If I am a member of the application committee, I might choose the 2.9 GPA one since I believe he/she would make a great researcher.
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