Teaching Inquiry

Amid my ongoing series on the wicked problem of assessment, I am devoting several posts to the latest controversy (scandal? moral panic?) about “grade inflation” in higher ed.(Seriously, we are talking about podcast titles like “Has Harvard Gone Soft”?). This issue is obviously assessment-coded, but its sensitivity to current events merits its own subseries. Before unpacking grade inflation, however, I need to unpack the tensions between education’s support and sort functions.

As Adam Mastroianni has eloquently argued, it is extremely hard to instruct students and evaluate them at the same time:

“[T]he things that make me a better instructor often make me a worse evaluator, and vice versa. Instruction is collaborative: students want to learn, and I want them to learn, too. Evaluation is adversarial: students want the points, and I have to make sure they don’t get too many. Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test. Plus, instruction and evaluation compete for time: every minute I spend ranking students is a minute I’m not teaching them, and a minute they’re not learning.” 

Mastroianni illustrates this dissonance through the differences between feedback and evaluation. Where feedback is meant to be flexible, individualized, provisional, and beneficial to the student alone, evaluation is meant to be fixed, standardized, permanent, and beneficial to the public (people deciding whether to hire the student, to admit them to a graduate program, etc.).

Feedback goes with education’s support function; it is designed to help every student learn as much as possible. Evaluation goes with education’s sorting function; it is designed to identify and select the smartest, most talented, and most skilled students so they can move up the professional ladder and, in time, occupy society’s elite stations in business, law, medicine, government, academia, etc.

Like Mastroianni, I believe there is a fundamental tension between supporting and sorting students, which manifests both logistically, as in, “How does one do both in practical terms?”, and emotionally, as in, “How does one do both as a thinking, feeling human being? These questions are deeply interrelated, and trying to answer them leads to others: How does one commit to practices of universal support and simultaneously seek to determine which group of students should move to the next level and which group should not? How does a teacher reconcile coaching and cheering on all their students with keeping most behind the velvet rope after a select number enters the club? Especially when one knows that some students in the latter group started way behind those in the first group and then worked harder and made more progress from their starting points but still finished behind because of how far back they were at the start. (Here’s one more question: Which of these students would you rather have in your class?)

It will come as no surprise to even casual readers of this blog that I identify strongly with the support function. For me, supporting means meeting every student where they are and cultivating growth and learning wherever that leads. This includes recognizing (even celebrating) that students at very different starting points may progress at different rates and end up in different places. It also means recognizing that students are human beings whose capacity to learn is impacted by both internal and external factors, and that some students face more extenuating factors than others.

In writing this post, I have struggled not to frame this as a good-bad dichotomy. But as with everything related to the wicked problem of assessment, it’s of course more complicated than that. By the time students get to college, after all, they have experienced multiple rounds of sorting, likely including K-12 tracking that separated them into advanced, mainstream, and even remedial categories. And unless one is teaching at an open admissions college, the students in one’s class will have been sorted from those who were rejected by the institution. So no, it isn’t that supporting is good and sorting is bad; sorting is unavoidable.

Nevertheless, many teachers chafe at the sorting function. We want to support all our students regardless of how well-prepared, or how likely they are to be designated “honors” or “ripe for distinction,” they are in relation to each other. And our struggle to navigate this tension most obviously manifests through (you guessed it!) grades. (Just as every reason posited for what caused the American Civil War ultimately ties back to slavery, my blog posts all tie back to why grades suck.)

A growing consensus has emerged among grading skeptics, many of whom surely identify with Team Support. Principles of this consensus include (this list isn’t meant to be exhaustive):

Grades are biased and subjective even as they are alleged to be objective and impartial.

Grades motivate students to do no more work than necessary to receive their desired grade (usually, of course, an A), and when students exceed this minimum, they do so despiterather than because of grades.

Grades don’t convey much useful information about how much a student actually learned in a course.

Grades cause significant (at times debilitating) stress and anxiety for students (and teachers).

Grades encourage students to “play it safe,” both choosing what are perceived to be easier courses and hewing to what they think will meet teacher expectations rather than taking intellectual and creative risks.

Grades turn students into mutual competitors rather than mutual collaborators.

I certainly hold these beliefs, which is why I started experimenting with ungrading years ago. I wanted to support students’ intrinsic motivation to learn, to alleviate stress and anxiety around the learning experience, and to make students more comfortable pursuing innovative and challenging projects. To put this another way, I wanted students to experience my classes as exploration zones rather than performance zones.

But it has become clear to me that while grades do suck, a primary (though not singular) reason is that Team Support is always playing on Team Sort’s turf. Even if we abolished grades tomorrow, we would not alleviate the tensions between these functions. As Mastroianni puts it: “Grade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a [points] cop at the same time.”

I will have plenty to say about how members of Team Sort, in clutching their pearls over grade inflation, tend to dismiss or delegitimize the supporting function. But no side will come out of this story looking pristine. In fact, Team Support should take pause, because writ large, our well-meaning efforts to alleviate student anxiety and stress may perversely exacerbate these issues. I say “writ large,” because I still believe (I hope?) it is still worth designing exploration zones and pursuing alternative grading systems “writ small” in individual courses, but we must do so while recognizing (humbly and self-reflectively) that we are always the underdogs in this relationship.