Making the Grade

There's no doubt that the hottest topic among my classmates these days is grading in our faculty. In a nutshell, the Faculty of Education has been long known for its unusually high student grades. This fact has not been viewed kindly by students and faculty in other degree programs. The new Dean of Education apparently has a mandate, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, to reform this practice, and have Education classes' grade spread come out as it does in other faculties: perhaps not a Normal curve, but at least a negatively skewed distribution (i.e., a range of marks with most marks falling above the middle). For argument sake, let's assume that ideally, he would like to see the distribution of marks range from C to A+, with the mode somewhere around B+. That sounds reasonable enough. After all, we've all completed one undergraduate degree, and have been admitted into a competitive program, so one might expect the average performance to be a little higher than a random sample of undergrad students.

Unfortunately, the Dean's way of correcting the problem is to make an across-the-board, equal-percentage cut in final marks. I needn't go into great detail about why this is wrong. Just quickly, I'll explain: if the goal is to have grades that are reflective of student performance, an arbitrary cut in grade cannot possibly achieve this. There are other issues as well – if he's aiming for a skewed Normal distribution, to “fit the curve”, one would not have a universal equal cut. The top few would remain the same or have a very small cut, the bottom few would have a very large cut, and everyone else incrementally in-between. I'm no statistician, so I don't know how one would arrive at the appropriate formula to determine this, but I'm sure someone could. Not advocating this, either, because it would only make worse what was already done. Mostly, I'm pointing that out to encourage thought about what he is really trying to achieve, because it's not the skewed distribution, either. In any case, I think it is completely safe to say that the action taken was not appropriate.

This past week has been transformative for me. Having long been steeped in the standard university culture where grades have a particular universal meaning, at first I welcomed the idea of transforming the grading in Education. I felt that the unusually high marks marred the integrity of the program, and devalued the true achievements of the students. So, although I absolutely thought that a retroactive, across-the-board reduction in grades was an unethical and misguided move, I certainly stood behind the core idea that the marking needed to be toughened up, so that the grades would land on a wider, more customary range.

That was before I learned what the thinking was behind the way (at least some) Education courses are graded. The explanation is a simple one, but I had just never heard it before: they are being criterion-referenced graded. Rather than performance being measured in terms of between-student differences, students are being graded on their own level of mastery of the material. What others did in the course has no bearing on it at all, thus, a class-wide range of grades is meaningless. These results cannot be expected to conform to a Normal curve, no matter how skewed, because it is not an appropriate manipulation of this particular set of data. Apples to oranges.

Now, given that my thinking on student assessment (that is, little kid student assessment) is very favourable toward criterion-referenced grading, I really had to question why I felt so strongly the other way with these undergrad marks. It's not where I imagine I might lie on the range of grades – I am capable of every conceivable letter grade, as my transcripts will attest. Ultimately, I realized that it was simply that, where my own marks were concerned, criterion-referencing did not fit into my personal schema at all. Throughout elementary school, high school, and university, there was only one paradigm into which all assessment of my work fell, and that was norm-referenced.

Ahhh. So, now that I'd come around to recognizing the validity of the grading (and this was reinforced when I realized that the same situation occurs across Canada in faculties of education), I could put my support behind that grading. Right? Um, wrong.

Criterion-referenced grading is indeed appropriate, and legitimate. But the entire university structure in Canada centres on norm-referenced grades. Naturally, then, viewing these other grades, people will try to assign the meaning to them that they normally assign to norm-referenced ones – and it simply will not work. Something's gotta give.

I think that ideally, since it's an accepted practice in faculties of education country-wide, there should be some sort of formal recognition of the different grading philosophy, and all would be well. The formal stamp of approval from the universities would give back the credibility that has long been sapped from education. Significantly, everyone would be on the same page about what the numbers (or letters, as it were) really mean. Employers could go back to actually taking grades into account, along with the other criteria for hiring. And perhaps deans could hold their heads high, be proud of their faculties, and not do any below-the-belt, back-door grade-slashing that even they must know is wrong on every level.

In a perfect world.