With Pass-Fail, What’s the Point of Grades? (Jack Schneider)
This opinion column appeared in New York Times, June 25, 2020
Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian), an assistant professor of leadership in education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, is the director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment.
In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, countless colleges and universities shifted from to A-F grades to a pass/fail system. As officials at Wellesley College explained, the general aim in doing so is to “support one another without being required to make judgments.”
Many K-12 school districts have done the same. From Palo Alto, Calif., to Wake County, N.C., local officials have concluded that now is not the time for grades. As teachers in Wisconsin’s Madison Metropolitan School District declared, “We cannot grade with equity when students’ experiences learning at home will be so varied.” And it’s not yet clear that most schools that have made this switch will fully return to letter grades in the fall.
But not everyone is happy with this outcome.
Some parents and activists are anxious that, without grades, students won’t receive adequate feedback on their work. Others worry that altering or eliminating the traditional grading scale will undermine student motivation and reward slacking off. As one Oregon parent pointedly asked in one of many online petitions pushing for the reinstatement of letter grades, “How do I explain to my child that has great grades that she should keep working hard when anything that is D- and above will still ‘pass’? This is ridiculous.” A similar but separate CONTINUE READING: With Pass-Fail, What’s the Point of Grades? (Jack Schneider) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
