Are Grades Necessary for Learning?

Daniel Pink brings up a lot of great points during this short clip. His comments somewhat summarize my schooling experience. I do not think that grades are necessary for learning. In fact, like Daniel Pink mentioned, I think that sometimes grades actually take away from learning. Students become so caught up getting good grades instead of learning new content.

Pink mentioned that there is a difference between performance and learning goals. Performance goals can be viewed as grades and learning goals can viewed as the true learning of content. I think for me grades have become the focus so I don’t ever really have learning goals, all I want is an ‘A’ in a class. I do not care what class I take all I want to do is get an ‘A.’ Unfortunately there have been consequences to this type of approach. Most of the content that I studied for a test, I would forget after a semester. Sure, I received an ‘A’ but did learning really occur? In fact, I feel that grades are so much the focus that I would lose sight of what school is really for. I would stress about tests and hoping I passed my midterms and finals so I could get an ‘A.’ I rarely asked myself, have I truly learned the content? What am I taking away from this class? The few classes where I feel that I focused on learning and not grades, were my favorite classes and the ones in which I still remember the content.

I will soon be a teacher and I soon have to have a grading policy of my own.  In my perfect world, I would not give out grades. I would provide students with feedback. Assessment would still occur, but instead of trying to put the students’ performance into a confined box of A’s, B’s, and C’s I would provide feedback to them so they can keep improving. During my first clinical practice one of the first questions my students asked was, what do I need to do to get an ‘A’? I do not want students to ask these types of questions, instead I would like them to ask, what are we going to learn in this class?

I truly believe that learning can occur without grades. I do believe that there still needs to be assessment to document that student learning is occurring and where the students stand in their progress. However, instead of assigning a grade based on the performance, feedback would let the student know exactly what they need to work on to learn the content. Also, I feel that a grade does not mean the same thing in one class as it does in another. I remember many of my friends saying throughout my undergrad, that they never showed up to class and still passed a class with a ‘B.’ I would ask myself, how is that possible? Did they even learn anything?

I think that providing students with feedback instead of grades would help them learn because they know what the need to work on. A grade just tells students what their performance scored; it does not provide students with that next of what they need to do to improve their performance. Some teachers do go over tests and tell students what they might need to work, but the majority does not. Sadly, by not providing feedback on what the student might need to work on to learn the content; they will never learn the content, especially if the teacher is under pressure to teach content that will be on standardized tests. This probably means that students will take whatever grade they received and just go on to the next class or grade level.