Before addressing the question at hand I would like to first take a circuitous route to a possible explanation as to how grades in school have become so ingrained in our school culture and then propose a potential way out of our current reality. In order to do this, we have to go back to the first industrial revolution, but not for the reasons you might think.
It is true that public schools in the United States began to take shape toward the end of the First Industrial Revolution, in the form of Horace Mann’s Common School model, so it is tempting to believe the public schools and the practice of letter grading got their inspiration from the industrial revolution. However, letter grading actually appears to have gotten its start at the university level in 1785 at Yale University as evidenced in the diary of Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale at the time. In Stiles diary he wrote in reference to the 58 students in the class there were “Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, 12 Inferiores (Boni), and 10 Pejores” (Stiles, 1901, vol.3). Over the next 100 years many different attempts to scale student scores were used, all at the university level, which included: numbers, letters, and adjectives until in 1897, at Mount Holyoke College (MA), the appearance of the familiar letter grade scale of:
A - Excellent, equivalent to percentages 95-100
B- Good, equivalent to percentages 85-94
C- Fair, equivalent to percentages 76-84
D- Passed (barely) equivalent to percentage 75
E - Failed, below percentage of 75 (They later changed “E” to “F” in 1898)
This timeframe actually takes us through the Second Industrial Revolution and follows closely behind another major event for public schools, the meeting of The Committee of Ten. The Committee of Ten, which first met in 1892, was actually formed by the National Education Association. The report of the Committee of Ten basically established college domination over the high school curriculum and "determined the course of American secondary education for a generation following its publication" (Butts and Cremin 1952, p. 390.). I believe, the report from the Committee of Ten combined with the standardization of grades at the university level created the perfect storm for the use of letter grades in public schools.
The application of letter grades in “factory-like” public schools at the end of the 19th century and through most of the 20th century served its purpose well for the needs at that time. The goals of compliance, standardization, and efficiency in school were driven by a workforce needing to possess those very qualities. Grading allowed schools to select and sort students in order to identify who should go on to university (about 5% as late as 1940) and who should go on to the workforce (remaining 95%). The majority of Americans graduating with a high school degree were able to get a “good” paying job and live the American dream in a growing middle-class. However, in the 21st century, even a college degree is not a guarantee of a job (see also a Call to be More Cognitive in an Accelerating World), so “sorting” and “selecting” should not be the main purpose of schools in the 21st century. Which circles us back to our question. Do grades do damage?
This is not the first time this question has been asked. There is research stretching back to the early 19th century including: .
Crooks, A.D. (1933). Marks and marking systems: A digest. Journal of Educational
Research, 27(4), 259-72.
De Zouche, D. (1945). “The wound is mortal”: Marks, honors, unsound activities.
The Clearing House, 19(6), 339-44.
Kirschenbaum, H., Simon, S.B., & Napier, R.W. (1971). Wad-ja-get?: The grading
game in American education. New York: Hart.
Linder, I.H. (1940, July). Is there a substitute for teachers’ grades? School Board
Journal, pp. 25, 26, 79.
Marshall, M.S. (1968). Teaching without grades. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.
More recent research continued to confirm the negative impact of grades including three major side effects. First, grades tend to distract young people away from learning and focus on task completion. “An overemphasis on assessment and grading can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence, the more a young learner is focused on how well they are doing, the less they tend to be engaged in what they’re doing” (Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7). Grades also tend to promote a fear of failure. The process of grading greatly promotes a fear of failure and heightened levels of stress, especially in high-achieving students (Pulfrey et al., 2011). Finally, grades tend to lower young people's’ preference for challenging tasks and potentially even lead to cheating itself. Environments that optimize on grades and high-achievement are strongly associated with frequent incidents of academic dishonesty (Anderman and Murdock, 2007). Alfie Kohn does a much better job of arguing these points in an Educational Leadership article titled “The Case Against Grades” but I mention them here because it speaks to the question, “Do grades do damage to young people going to today’s schools?” So, how can we do the impossible and break free from the system?
Actually, many schools and school districts have already made the leap including a whole cohort of teachers found at Teachers Going Gradeless, the Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Kohn’s “From Degrading to De-Grading”. However, I would also like to share an update on a pilot we are running in our district. For the past two years, Aurora teachers and administrators, along with our technology department have been working on a reporting system called SitRep (Situational Reporting). SitRep provides a way for teachers to more authentically communicate student growth throughout the year, by showing parents how their child is progressing on specific year-long learning standards. Our plan is to use the SitRep reporting system during the second semester to report a young person’s growth in one of our third grade math classes. The third graders will not receive a letter grade in math for the 3rd and 4th grading periods, but will instead see specific, periodic situational reports regarding the young person’s growth on the standards covered during this time period. If you have eight minutes you can hear more about and even get a glimpse of SitRep by going to http://bit.ly/sitrepintro.
Thanks for reading, I hope this spurs some conversations in your district.
References
Anderman, E.M., & Murdock, T.B., eds. (2007). Psychology of academic cheating.
Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press.
Butts, L., & Cremen, R.F. (1952 ). A History of Education of Education in American
Culture. New York, NY: Holt Publishing.
Pulfrey, C., Buch, C., & Butera, F. (2011). Why grades engender performance-avoidance
goals: The mediating role of autonomous motivation. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 103, 683-700.
Maehr, M.L., & Midgley, C. (1996). Transforming school cultures. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Stiles, E. (1901). The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles Vol. 3. 1787-1795. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons.
