Blowing the Curve

It’s not enough to win. Others must fail.

This seemingly innocuous article on a classroom motivational technique with a moral is, turn out, a mini-abomination. In it the author details his efforts to get his students to think differently about grading and classroom achievement by demonstrating the folly of giving all the participants in an in-class long jump competition gold medals for trying their best. The effort to counteract the "I worked hard, I deserve an A" mindset is, ceteris paribus, laudable (n.b. all else is never equal.). But comparing the evaluation goals of the college classroom to those of a track and field competition is reductive, misguided and facile.

I’m all for avoiding the ol’ “soft bigotry of low expectations”. In higher ed, grade inflation seems to be the low expectation bugbear of choice, and at least on its face with good reason. But before a rational discussion of grade inflation can occur one needs to come to terms with a stark fact about grading: grades are arbitrary, made up things under any circumstances. This is an essence of grading, not an artifact of grade inflation or any other grading norm or practice. As the kids say, get over it.

How do we grade?

Options are inherently limited. One can grade students against objective standards (criteria-based grading) or against one another (norm-based grading). In practice a blend of the two is perspectives is almost unavoidable. (Frighteningly, a third alternative has been suggested, explicitly by one of my own professors in grad school and I suspect in unspoken practice by several others: grading a student relative to the extent to which she is living up to her “potential”. How nauseatingly presumptuous [and typical] to think that you’d have some window into a student’s innate wherewithal! Make no mistake, though; it happens ).

Grade inflation can be eliminated altogether with scrupulous norm-based grading, but at high hurtful cost. The institutional prescription is simple: Mandate curve-based grading; require a mean grade of C. Problem solved. I've had some first-hand experience with grading of this sort as and its unseemly consequences. The large majority of my undergraduate classes were curve-graded. It’s a pretty weird scene. The only letter grade I ever saw was the one we all got at after the class was over. Everything else was just raw score, class mean and standard deviation. Score the mean and you knew you were on the cusp between C+ and B- (evidence itself of grade inflation I suppose). One standard deviation above separated B+ from A-, and so forth. Grade inflation was constrained ex ante. The supply of A’s is limited, reserved for the statistically deserving.

Great, right? Motivational, certainly, in the way that only needless, heartless competition can be. Fair? Depends on your definition. Before every test I’d sit sweaty-palmed contemplating the fact that no matter how well I knew the material, no matter the extent of my mastery, unless I did better than the majority of my peers, my grade would be disappointing. Struck me as unjust or at least awfully harsh at the time. Some doubtless delight in the indiscriminate Darwinian justice of it all.

These days I’m more worried about the impact of such a grading scheme on the learning environment. The side effects were not lost on me back in the day either. I never ran up against key articles being torn from journals to preclude their use by others (of course I wasn’t in law school either, and such sabotage certainly wouldn’t have surprised me anyway). You wouldn’t have believed, though, the lengths we’d all go to convince one another we didn’t give a crap about a given class, about how little we intended to prepare, about how unimportant the class or studying in general was to us. This was clotted nonsense, of course, but any posture that might move classmates to ease off on their own studies was worth a shot. If I pretend to blow it off, maybe they’ll blow it off a bit themselves, thereby lowering the mean and increasing my standing. Probably not, of course, but however unattractive, the effort involved was minimal. In sum, the dumber and less motivated you presented yourself to others, the better. In this world my classmates’ success only interferes with my own. Participation in a study group is critical to ones survival, but in your advantage only if you are among the least capable students in the group. So that made for some pretty weird and unseemly maneuvering as well.

These pressures are not good. This style of competition is entirely out of step with how the modern world works. Collaboration is more critical to success than ever before. The popular press has spelled it out: Wikinomics lays out the growing economic necessity of collaboration, Born Digital the compelling desire of digital natives to work together, A Whole New Mind the growing importance of cooperation and empathy. Maybe this enthusiasm is a passing fad; getting along with others remains a crucial component of success as an employee and as a citizen.

Whither grades?

Some (non-mutually exclusive) possibilities:

· To motivate

Students are driven by grades. In class they focus on that which is graded. Many students are motivated primarily (exclusively?) by grades. Most know enough not to ask “Is this going to be on the test,” but pretty much everyone wonders. We may decry the fact, but grading is a powerful motivator.

· To measure student learning

To what extent did the students learn what they were supposed to? This role is so important as to go without saying. Grades provide the transparency the whole system depends on, keeps students and teachers alike informed about the extent to which they are doing their respective jobs and when it’s time to cut bait. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and so forth.

· To measure student aptitude

Educators are likely loath to endorse the effort, but employers, parents, students themselves and pretty much everyone else find a good GPA a convenient and compelling hallmark of academic and intellectual wherewithal.

So which grading approach works best for each of these criteria? Motivation is a tough call. While no doubt there are those who find norm-based competition invigorating, likely just as many are demoralized. Criteria grading is a cinch for measuring learning; likewise norm-based for ability. So shall we call it a wash?

Best we not. The classroom is not a zero sum game. Rank ordering students is a distraction of little more use than affording students bragging rights and grad schools and employers misguidedly appealing, facile measures. No doubt it sounds Pollyanna-ish, but working together is among the most vital skills of the coming age. If grade inflation is the fee for avoiding the hyper-competitive individualism of norm-based assessment, let me get my wallet.