Anti-Climacus

LINK: Very interesting post on grade inflation at Crooked Timber. In particular I liked:

I now think that is just a wrongheaded view about what grades are for. For two reasons. First, in nearly 20 years of teaching in research universities I regularly—in just about every class—come across students who are smarter than I am and more promising than I was at their age, but there have only been 4 or 5 students whose work placed them unambiguously well above the rest of the top quarter, and only one whose work stunned me. Reserving an A (or A+ or A++) for them takes grades too seriously. How could the one stunning student know that he was being rewarded with a stunning grade? And why should he care? The student in question, I know, would have found the very idea of reserving a grade for him absurd, laughable, arrogant, and vain. A professor can reward, or ‘mark’, those students’ work much more effectively with verbal or written praise, or with a request to meet to discuss the paper, or with frank admiration of a thought in the public forum of the classroom. Only a student unhealthily obsessed with their grades would be more motivated by a special grade than by alternative forms of recognition. I have not yet come across a student whose work is extremely good and who is sufficiently grade-obsessed that adding a reserved high grade would motivate or reward them at all in the presence of any of the alternatives I have mentioned.

In my more limited teaching experience, I've found this to be true. Very good students, or students who do very good work, are often not very motivated by the grade. This past semester I had one student (my best) ask me to give a more thorough critique of what they had written: the student recognized that they had met the tasks the paper demanded, but expected of themselves something even better than that. And students who work very hard (I've had a few) and write something notably better than their past work, or else just very good, it's less the grade than what it symbolizes that matters--they like getting the good grade, sure, but they especially like that their work has been noted as very good, especially if I take time to tell them so.

I would also tend to agree with Harry's point about the pedagogical function of grades, especially for students who are used to doing well--a slightly lower grade on an assignment where it is obvious they have not put in their best work will often elicit better future results than giving them the grade that, by virtue of their paper-against-everyone-else's, they "deserve."