Grading, Assessment, or Feedback?

Three champagne glasses with red, orange, and green liquid inside. The liquid slants from top left to bottom right in a continuous line across the three glasses.

Mark Barnes wrote on the education SmartBlog that teachers should use narrative feedback instead of grades. His excellent suggestions for providing feedback on student writing highlight a critical difference teachers must keep in mind as they plan how they want to grade their courses. Though the words feedback, assessment, and grading are often used interchangeably, they identify very different processes designed to achieve very different goals. Examining these differences can help provide clarity and priority in how a class is managed.

In my previous post, Outsourcing Grading, I claimed that grades do two things. Grades assign credentials by saying students passed a course, achieved a goal, or mastered content. Grades also sort or rank students by performance, giving us the ability to discuss “B students” as a group or “above-average” students as a means of exclusion. They label performance based on arbitrary evaluative criteria.

I say “arbitrary” because there is really no way to determine what an A means. Even if we look at percentages, the most common means of devising grades, we would be stumped by a simple question: An A is equal to 90% of what? If it’s work done, does that mean that 10% of the work was never attempted, or that 10% failed to meet standards? (In that case, did the other 90% only meet or exceed those standards?) If it means that 90% of the student’s answers are correct, does it matter which 90% they were? And then there’s the issue of extra credit, which makes any claim of percentage patently inaccurate. If we admit that numeric scores look more objective than they are, we devise other systems. Those systems also have trouble with clarity and precision. If an A means something a bit more admittedly subjective, such as “exceptional achievement”, how do we know what that level is when we see it?

The inherent vagueness of grades is a self-fueling, all-consuming fire. Teachers need to specify their expectations, and each teacher (or course) will likely phrase those expectations differently, based on different standards. Students, then, spend much of their effort trying to interpret and prepare for those expectations, all in the name of preserving a GPA (in order to be a member of one of those groups I mentioned). What grades actually do is create tension between those with the authority and those who want to be labeled. They create reductionism: How meaningful can 15 weeks’ worth of work be if we consider that work in terms of a single letter, which, unless it’s one of three (A, B, or C), generally means the work was worthless? They create an obsession with scoring that really should never happen in the first place.

But what do we tell ourselves grades do? We try to believe that they assess. We want to think that an A means “great work”, and that they identify strengths and areas of improvement.

When was the last time you only needed to assess one element of something? How can a single grade in something as complex as a course assess anything meaningful? How can a grade on something as extensive as a paper assess anything substantial? This, by the way, is why rubrics were invented: By creating multiple categories of things to look for, scorers are able to actually assess multiple elements of student writing. Ed White takes on this challenge in his argument for holistic essay scoring, but graders and writers must understand common writing expectations for his methods to work. Both writing rubrics and holistic scoring are topics for another time; for now, I’d like to focus attention on the presumed generic meaning of a single letter grade.

Assessment is the process of determining the quality of something, typically a student’s ability, skill, or knowledge. I question whether a single letter can possibly indicate quality of a thing so large as performance in a semester-long class. And even if it can, what standards are used for that assessment? There is virtually no way for a letter to convey any real meaning related to assessment unless some other text accompanies it, in the form of elaboration, explanation, or correlation. In that case, the grade is not the critical element; it is instead the comment to which the grade points.

Comments associated with performance sounds an awful lot like feedback. Feedback can be rich, meaningful, and relevant to the student doing the work. It is an indication of what is working (or not), how/why it is working (or not), and what about it could be improved (or added/removed). Feedback is like a judgement without a verdict. It indicates quality and gives support, correction, and direction, but it does not presume to reduce the response to student work to the level of a final declaration of quality or final determination of success (or failure). In short, it is designed to help students, not label them. Feedback happens in the margins of a paper before a student re-submits the final draft. Feedback happens in a classroom when a teacher clarifies or redirects a student’s thinking after that student volunteers an answer that is off the mark. Even though it may occasionally bruise an ego, feedback is designed to help.

Of these three concepts, which is most aligned to the purposes of school? That depends on our perspective. Because one main function of schools is to provide credentials for its graduates, we can say there is value in the assignment of otherwise arbitrary grades. But the process of being in school is shaped by the feedback students receive from teachers, rather than the final grades they are given. Teachers should be compelled to provide feedback, not grades, to their students. Feedback helps, whereas grades only label.

All of which brings me back to the post by Mark Barnes. He encourages teachers to “de-grade” their classrooms by incorporating narrative feedback as an alternative. That excellent suggestion requires teachers to re-think their role in the classroom. As feedback providers, rather than grade dispensers, we are challenged to see work and goals through our students’ eyes and help them create the best work they can produce. Grades can come later.

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