Is the Grading System Starting to Become Ineffective? Essay Sample

Are grades an effective way to track progress on students and to help them learn? Recently, there have been debates about how the education system is still using the same system since the late 19th century. However, with the decrease in average test scores and grades for students for the fall of 2021, it is starting to show that it may be ineffective for modern-day learning. The grading system is ineffective in tracking the progress of education for students because it makes the student focus more on the grade than learning the material itself.

The primary purpose of the grading system is to track how the student will do later in their career through GPA. GPA makes the students feel less interested in the subject and focus on getting a better grade for the sake of their GPA. In the essay "From Degrading to De-Grading" by Alfie Kohn, he starts with this statement about motivational psychology, "Grades tend to reduce students' interest in learning itself. One of the best-researched findings in the field of motivational psychology is that the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward" (Kohn 368). The text can directly apply this statement to get a good grade on each assignment over time. As the student continues to do the work only to get rewarded with a good grade, they will gradually lose interest in the material.

To add to the previous paragraph, students who are more concerned about their GPA than learning would be more inclined to take less challenging classes to guarantee a high GPA. The pressure is very high for students to get an A, and there is no reason to take challenging classes to challenge themselves and develop critical thinking. Kohn elaborates more with this, "The more pressure to get an A, the less inclination to challenge oneself truly. Thus, students who cut corners may not be lazy so much as rational; they are adapting to an environment where good grades, not intellectual exploration, are what count" (369). The students cut many corners in learning to get a good grade and GPA; thus, students retain significantly less information.  Creative thinking, as mentioned before, is significantly impacted and is less of a priority for students to show when they are receiving a grade. "One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades. The more the task required creative thinking, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded. Providing students with comments in addition to a grade did not help: The highest achievement occurred only when comments were given to them instead of numerical scores" (Kohn 369). Criticism of students' work through comments alone is the best way to properly grade students instead of just a numerical value that shows them what their work is worth. Thus more critical thinking is encouraged through comments alone for the work the student has shown. 

Another reason is that it wastes much time focusing on the grade itself rather than learning. According to the essay, "Grades waste much time that could be spent on learning. Add up all the hours that teachers spend fussing with their grade books. Then factor in the (mostly unpleasant) conversations they have with students and their parents about grades" (Kohn 371). Time is spent studying the material from the teacher, but it is being spent fretting about the grade book instead of learning. To add on, it also affects relationships within the classroom setting. Kohn quoted, "The most destructive form of grading by far is that which is done "on a curve," such that the number of top grades is artificially limited: No matter how well all the students do, not all of them can get an A. Apart from the intrinsic unfairness of this arrangement, its practical effect is to teach students that others are potential obstacles to their success. The kind of collaboration that can help all students to learn more effectively does not stand a chance in such an environment" (Kohn 372). In cases where grades need to get curved, it is difficult for students to collaborate to improve their understanding of the subject and instead see others as obstacles. The curve would also make students even more concerned about their grades instead of learning more and more.

Finally, if grades were to be eliminated from the education curriculum, it would make the students learn the material more than the students being graded, who would have to know what gets them that good grade. "In another experiment, students who were told they would be graded on how well they learned a social studies lesson had more trouble understanding the main point of the text than did students who were told that no grades would be involved. Even on a measure of rote recall, the graded group remembered fewer facts a week later (Grolnick and Ryan 1987). Moreover, students who tended to think about current events in terms of what they would need to know for a grade were less knowledgeable than their peers, even after taking other variables into account (Anderman and Johnston 1998)." (Kohn 370). The experiment shows that students who were only given the subject to learn are focusing more on actually processing what they are reading than the graded students. The group who were graded focused on what they needed to know to learn. The grades lead them to retain less information from the class than the other group and do less than the good of tracking their progress.

Some would argue that grades are needed because they capture the students' academic and noncognitive factors that play a role in academic success, such as perseverance and a positive mindset. GPA is also used for admissions officers in college to review applications off of many different High School students applying compared to any other means. "It takes more time, and therefore more money, for admissions officers to read meaningful application materials than it does for them to glance at a GPA or an SAT score and plug it into a formula." (Kohn 380). However, according to a survey for college admissions officers, it would not interfere with students' prospects for admissions to four of five schools. (Kohn 381). If GPA were to be taken out and a pass/fail system were to be in place, it would rarely change the admissions process for high school students and put less stress on students to worry about their GPA.  

In conclusion, education for everyone is vital as it allows more people to get jobs that require degrees which then contribute more to challenging tasks that are complicated to complete. While GPA does serve its purpose of tracking student progress in their academic career, it does more harm than good for their education. If a different system were used other than GPA, students would focus more on actually learning the subject for the sake of learning than just for a grade. “Even the complete absence of high school grades is not a barrier to college admission, so we don’t have that excuse for continuing to subject students to the harm done by traditional grading.” (Kohn 381). The change from GPA to comments for improvement with a pass/fail would further develop the student's ability to think critically about the world around them.

Work Cited

Kohn, Alfie. "From Degrading to De-Grading." Acting out Culture: Readings for Critical Inquiry, by James S. Miller, Kindle ed., Bedford/St. Martin's Press, Boston, MA, 2018, pp. 367–381.

"Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, National Average Composite ACT Score Is Down." ACT Newsroom & Blog, ACT, 13 Oct. 2021, leadershipblog.act.org/2021/10/2021-ACT-Achievement-Data.html.