I have been thinking about grades. I’ve been a university professor for the last two decades so naturally I think about grades several times a year, but these are different thoughts, uncomfortable ones that make it slightly harder to do the job.
I’ve never been greatly invested in my own kids’ grades. It’s nice for them to do well, handy if they need a certain number or letter to fulfil a particular ambition, but in exam season I remind them: it’s convenient to get a high grade and sometimes inconvenient to get a low one, but that’s all. You will not be a better person for a higher number, nor a lesser person for a lower one.
What is at stake here is administrative, organisational; not a matter of morals, character or even intelligence. We’ll celebrate achievement and offer comfort for disappointment, but for me the joy and the disappointment are felt at a sympathetic remove. I am not myself joyful or disappointed because my child is in no way changed by his exam results. The results affect planning, but so might the weather or a delay in travel. We work around what we did not choose.
It’s well for some. Labelled “retarded” in primary school, I succeeded later, and progressed through the kind of education and professional life available only to people with good grades. Over 30 years now in universities as a student and a teacher I observed a correlation between brittleness and high achievement, my own as well as those of friends and colleagues.
I’m a university professor but I’ve never been greatly invested in my own kids’ grades
It was only after moving to Ireland from England that I had deep conversations about emigration
As a teenage girl in the 1990s there was a level of harassment that I hope is unthinkable now
My friend’s effortless joyful incompetence sets an example that’s difficult to match
Not at all high achievers have fragile egos, but a fragile ego can drive achievement. Worse than that, high achievement affirms the fragility of the ego because as long as you go on getting top grades you can go on believing that an imperfect grade would make you an unlovable person. The hypothesis is never tested, and the longer it stands, the more like truth it appears to be.
It’s not just grades, of course; a person can do the same with any form of external validation, especially where numbers are involved: money, weight, speed, step-count, sales, clicks. One’s own weaknesses, lack of knowledge and understanding, tiredness and mistakes and plain disinclination, become unbearable and inadmissible. Status takes the place of true self-esteem. Only hierarchy can confer value. And these people, the high achievers, end up in charge.
In recent years, academic staff and students have begun to dislocate education from the legacies of imperialism, to decolonise curricula. A truly decolonised education system would reject all this, the quantification of knowledge and the manufacture of anxiety and competition. Most educators know that exams do harm, and many would say the same about grades. It’s hard to see how training students to concentrate on their own fear of inadequacy and desire to beat their neighbour is likely to open paths out of the death spiral of climate change and capitalism.
Most of us went into teaching for love of the subject and the students, for the real and sustaining joy of giving people the tools to change their minds and understand more of the world
To survive – at species level, an increasingly unlikely outcome – we will have to stop doing and thinking the things that got us into this mess in the first place. We will have to conceive of the making and transmission of knowledge in ways that might be at once innovative and very old, but cannot be the norms of the industrial age. “Decolonising the syllabus” cannot be merely replacing some books by dead white Europeans with books by living writers of colour. It requires a radical investigation of the ways in which education produces hierarchical thinking.
Similarly, an education system that might create a generation of citizens who will prioritise everyone’s access to air that is safe to breathe, water that is safe to drink and food that is safe to eat over making the rich richer and the poor poorer does not begin or end with giving high grades to some and low grades to others, and probably does not involve much grading at all.
Most of us went into teaching for love of the subject and the students, for the real and sustaining joy of giving people the tools to change their minds and understand more of the world. We like giving what’s now called “feedback” to students, responding individually to individual work. Giving grades is the price we pay, but it’s always worth asking, who benefits? What would happen if we stopped?