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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

This is an absolutely ridiculous concept to me, and I'm surprised so many people are taking a positive stance on this article.

Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying. Maybe if this was your only class and you had unlimited time to revise and revise and revise, then this concept would work. It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters.

And it's not like this matches up to life after university any better than grades do. Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop.

The author just seems out of touch. "As for motivation, I asked them, What do you want to learn? Why are you here?" -- this is the same kind of person who asks "so why do you want to work at [minimum wage job]?" as if it has anything to do with the job and nothing to do with needing money (getting good grades).

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It seems ridiculous, but it’s not.

Grades are an invalidated assessment framework:

1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress) 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit).

I’ll zero in on “track progress” since you mention that. Start with a simple question:

What is progress in learning?

You’ll quickly uncover two things:

* progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion

Here’s another teacher’s view: https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/

Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.

Task completion is an important skill, but it is currently being taught at the expense of much more important & valuable skills.

The justification for that is that task completion is hard, difficult for children to learn.

Only it’s not.

It turns out that children generally complete many tasks when they are engaged in an open, iterative learning process. They’ll even generate & complete their own!

Can you name one student who invented homework for themselves after they already knew they are getting an A+?!

“Most likely to succeed” by Harvard professor Tony Wagner is a great introduction to the academic research behind the above.

There really is a better, child-friendly way to learn.

You're missing one key point that I meant to touch on in the original post: This professor is still living in the bad system you describe. They just pretend it doesn't exist until the very end.

If they were some private school that lived outside of the GPA system, or were apart of some tutoring company, then sure it'd probably work well. But they don't.

So when I say "track progress", I mean track progress in the current system using the main thing I am (or, was) measured on: GPA.

There are private schools including home schools that live outside the GPA requirement. A few colleges remain that do not grade.

We like GPAs because they reduce evaluation to a summary statistic.

But guess what? GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education.

We fool ourselves and do our children a great disservice by creating artificial ranking mechanisms for the sake of convenience.

> GPA does not predict a good Googler. Some of the best programmers never had a formal CS education.

These two statements are independant

Yes, that is why they are separate sentences. Some great programmers never went to college!

> 1. They don’t do what they say they do (assess retained learning, track progress)

So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal anything about retained learning or track progress?

> 2. They create perverse incentives that diminish students desire to learn

No. They create incentives where none exists. The perversion is not the grade, testing, etc. The perversion is the system itself. Where kids are taken from their families to given to stranger to educate in an educational factory.

> 3. They emphasize evaluation over iteration. Iteration is by far the more important skill - both pragmatically, for building knowledge, and for emotional development (grit).

How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get some sort of feedback ( aka grade ). If you get a C in a test, that should indicate to the parent/student/teacher that the student needs to go over the material.

> * progress is non-linear & child specific * learning isn’t about task completion

I agree with the former. But task completion is most definitely part of learning.

> Grade do serve one specific kind of student persona - those who optimize getting tasks done & getting good grades for it.

You conveniently left out "learning". Those who optimize getting tasks done and learning and therefore getting good grades. How do you get good grades? By learning the subject matter.

> So getting an A or a C in arithmetic doesn't reveal anything about retained learning or track progress?

Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Many of those getting an A in arithmetics will have learned "how to get an A" instead of "how to practice and use arithmetics".

In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at all levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get the grade instead of how to think. And the actual content is forgotten after a week or a month.

> Yes, because Goodhart's law is applied. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

> Many of those getting an A in arithmetics will have learned "how to get an A" instead of "how to practice and use arithmetics".

That's just a reflection of corruption in the system and not grading itself.

> In Romania, where school is very focused on grades at all levels, pupils really do actually learn how to get the grade instead of how to think.

No school anywhere exists to teach you how to think. But that's besides the point. Does the grade reflect the student's understanding of the material?

> And the actual content is forgotten after a week or a month.

Most content is forgotten regardless of the education system.

So how do kids in romania learn to get good grades? Bribery? That doesn't show that grades are bad, but that the corruption is bad.

> It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

This is objectively false in the US education system at least. If you look at the training for standardized tests (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally necessary if you want to get into a good school) a huge amount of it has nothing to do with the material, and everything to do with how to rapidly exclude incorrect answers. All of that exclusion is based on various numeric tricks or filters with no actual understanding of why. Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time constrained, to the extent that if you do not get training in how to *quickly* answer questions, no amount of understanding the material matters.

How much time do people actually spend on this training? I am dead certain that the bulk of the time is spent on actually learning the material and not on gaming the test. This is because there are only so many tricks you can learn, and you can learn them all in a week.

> (the training that costs money, but is fundamentally necessary if you want to get into a good school

This is objectively false. Source: I went to multiple good schools and met a boatload of people who also got in without said training.

Also, that test-taking training is an overhyped and overpriced collection of cheap common sense strategies. You can learn how to do well on a multiple choice test in 20 seconds. You always pick the most likely answer. Strategies specific to things like the SATs boil down to memorizing vocab and doing a hundred practice tests. You can do this for a hundred bucks by buying a couple test prep books over Amazon. The part of the test-taking training that costs thousands of dollars is where they get a teacher with a fancy degree to babysit unmotivated children into actually doing the work.

> Moreover standardized tests in the US explicitly encourage that behaviour by being ridiculously time constrained, to the extent that if you do not get training in how to quickly answer questions, no amount of understanding the material matters.

There is actual academic research studying this, and shockingly understanding correlates strongly with being able to quickly answer questions. It's unfortunate that we can't assess millions of children by having them take time-unconstrained oral exams or projects, but the effect of training is grossly overstated. Show me any intervention (other than actually learning the material) that boosts your SAT score by more than ~30 points.

> It depends on whether the grade is the ends or not. But here the grades aren't the ends. It's just a means to achieve the ends - learning the material.

Goodhart's law makes them become the end. It does not matter if the intended grades to only be a means. If they are what is measured, they will become the end. At least for some.

> That's just a reflection of corruption in the system and not grading itself.

I am not talking about cheating or bribing. I am talking about all ways to pass a test and not retain any knowledge after an hour/day/week/month.

> Most content is forgotten regardless of the education system.

It matters if that content (and especially the existance of that content) is forgotten in a hour to a month or if that content is forgotten in years. The longer the time, the higher the chance you will actually use it. And in many cases, if after years, only the knowledge about the existance of the content is retained, it is enough. You know it exists, so you know how to find it when you need it. But it is entirely possible to pass tests and remember nothing at all a short while after.

When a measure becomes a target, the measure will be optimized at the cost of the actual target if the two diverge. If the measure is close enough to the target that the easiest way to optimize the measure is to optimize the target, then you'll be fine. If the easiest way to get an A in arithmetic is to know arithmetic, then students will learn arithmetic.

There is a reason the previous poster chose arithmetic as an example. It is very difficult to pretend to know arithmetic without knowing arithmetic. Can Romanians add, subtract, multiply, and divide?

Thinking you can keep the two aligned is naive.

There absolutely are ways to learn to pass arithmetic tests without learning to use arithmetic. It all depends on the type of test.

During an oral test, 1-1 with the teacher, is close to impossible to fake knowledge.

But with written tests, there are plenty of ways.

Cheating (rampant, wide spread, by the way) in its various forms (asking a colleague, having a cheat sheet, getting the answers from someone who took the test earlier, etc.) is the most obvious and easy way but let's exclude it.

A student can just memorize the exercises because the teacher didn't bother to create exercises unique to the test and reused them. Or reused them from a previous test.

If it is a single answer multiple choice, a student might simply develop a bullshit detector and learn to spot suspect options. It is a wonderfully useful skill for test taking when the test is not antagonistic and intentionally trying to trip you up.

There are so so so many options.

all of the issues you mentioned pertain to the method of testing. It's pretty well known that you need to have some certain quality in the tests - after all, the result of an experiment is only as good as the design of the experiment, and this is true in a testing context.

But grading via a test isn't a problem here. A good test will show a correct grade, and a student who dont know the material, and cannot cheat, will not get a good grade. This grade is a proxy to the learning that took place - memorization is a part of learning. Of course, there's more to learning than _just_ memorization, such as creativity and problem solving (novel problem solving). These areas are more difficult to test (not impossible), and the metric is difficult to define for these areas, but none of that invalidates the tests that grade a student.

I see your point about the possibility for a student getting an A to have perhaps gamed the system.

Are you saying the same is true for (some of, all of) the C students? Are you saying that C students may in some cases be superior to the students who got As (including the “didn’t game the system” ones)?

First of all, I do not believe cramming for an exam and forgetting everything afterwards is "gaming the system". This is what the system encourages and the system is broken. Cheating might be called "gaming the system", but unfortunately it is equally encouraged by the system.

There are students who will find ways to get a top grade and subsequently retain none of the knowledge.

There are students who will actually learn everything and only bother to get a passing grade because the theatre of school is boring to them.

There are also sudents who will find ways to get a passing grade, without having gained any knowledge at all, and they will be content with that.

It is a mistake to lump any of these categories together. I know people in all of them, and depending on the subject, I was also in all of them.

The affinity a student has for a teacher is a major, maybe even the most important, factor in determining the ammount of motivation and interest a student will show for a certain subject. And I believe this stays true at all levels.

>How do you determine the need for iteration unless you get some sort of feedback ( aka grade ).

Did you not read the article, where the author describes how taking grades off of her own plate allowed her to "[write] meaningful comments, [suggest] improvements, [ask] questions and [enter] into a dialogue with my students that felt more productive – that felt, in short, more like an extension of the classroom."

Strange to assume GP didn’t read the article. I did, and I have these similar questions:

1. How do I, as a student receiving this teacher feedback, know how seriously to take it? How do I know when it indicates I should spend an additional revision cycle on it, versus on another assignment (possibly from another teacher)?

2. Assuming I can figure out how to evaluate severity of the feedback and the relative amount of improvement I should do, how is this better than just a grade letter telling me how much further I can (or should) go?

3. The class still culminates in a letter grade, no? So doesn’t this create a potentially super-high-stakes environment, where I need to be damned sure I understand what the cumulative feedback I’ve received means, in terms of final letter grade?

This honestly reminds me of the phenomenon of doing end-of-year self assessments on a 1-5 scale and having to turn that in to a manager before receiving the “real” 1-5 scale evaluation from them. Massively long feedback loops, massively high stakes and opportunity for misalignment. Why the heck would you not want early and frequent evaluation?

Maybe it would help for me to understand specific examples of the assignment feedback given to students. I just see way too much risk for students to hear “you’re fine; a couple rough spots, but everyone has those, no big deal” only to flunk the class at the end of the year in a massive surprise.

Pretending that there is no place for objective metrics in school is just as silly as pretending there is no place for objective metrics in society at large. Grading may not be the perfect way to measure learning, but it is far superior than no objective metric at all. The fact is that schools exist to instill certain basic minimums of competency. We must have a way to measure whether or not those basic minimums are being met.

>We must have a way to measure whether or not those basic minimums are being met.

The teacher tells them. In written feedback. Far more nuanced and helpful than just a letter grade.

Perhaps you missed the "objective" part of "objective metric". If, for example, we want to determine a student's proficiency in algebra, it is far less useful to compare feedback from teachers with different standards, different abilities and different objectives than it is to compare the results from an objective test that is given to all students in all classes. Unlike standardized tests, teachers (and their assessments) vary wildly. The goals, expectations and abilities of an algebra teacher in Scranton, Ohio may (and often do) vary wildly from the goals, expectations and abilities of an algebra teacher in Juno, Alaska. Take ten different teachers and ask them to write an assessment of the same student, based on the same coursework, and you will get ten wildly different assessments. Teacher assessments may be useful for student feedback, but they are not useful for comparing the relative grasp of course information by different students.

if (as people are claiming here) grades don't accurately measure proficiency, their being objective won't magically make them a better measure.

If grades are utterly uncorrelated with proficiency, then you are correct.

Is that your claim? Grades have zero information content, zero predictive power, over someone’s proficiency at the time the grades are given?

It is an absurd claim on its face. I don't think tests are perfect, nor have I seen anyone make the claim that they are. But, for example, when it comes to measuring the proficiency of different students in different classrooms being taught algebra by different teachers each with their own method and style of evaluation, there is simply no replacement for a standardized test.

> But, for example, when it comes to measuring the proficiency of different students in different classrooms being taught algebra by different teachers each with their own method and style of evaluation, there is simply no replacement for a standardized test.

The problem really isn't tests per se, but the approach of ranking students by their scores and rewarding them or punishing them accordingly.

The goal shouldn't be to stack rank students for some sort of pyramid reward system but rather to help as many students as possible to achieve mastery while preparing them for future success.

A competitive environment with rewards and punishments may work for some students (usually the ones who are on top) but can discourage other students (usually the ones on the bottom) and destroy their interest in learning.

> A competitive environment with rewards and punishments

competition requires that there be something scarce (otherwise, why can't everybody have the thing being competed over?)

So a GPA score is a competition for who gets the "best" college placements, or limited funds from taxation to fund higher education.

Therefore, to solve the problem, it isn't enough to remove GPA scores (or equivalent), because another, more murky metric would be used to compete. The resource being competed for must be expanded, and more of it made available. Sometimes this isn't possible, but i dont think higher education should be a limited resource - it is worth the cost paid since a more educated populous is beneficial to the whole of society.

no, my claim is that if grades are not a good measure of proficiency, it is irrelevant whether they are an objective measure or not. I have not studied the field well enough to know whether they actually are a good measure or not.

For algebra you could create standard "objective" test. Maybe. Though, I can imagine problems with such test too (think: Srinivasa Ramanujan).

For creative writing? I don't think so.

Note, all grading proponents speak about arithmetic, algebra and other such "mechanistic" subjects. Original submission speaks about writing.

To me, it like comparing 100m sprint and Figure Skating. Results at former are precisely measurable. Results at latter is subjective, really.

Colleges, rightly have a minimum GPA to graduate. You can average grades on a 4.0 scale but not written feedback. Employers may use GPA as a metric when hiring. Written feedback can supplement but not replace grades.

Does this invalidate the author's point, given that she still delivers a GPA-compatible grade at the end of the course?

If you’re given letter grades throughout the course, you can easily predict your final grade, by computing an average (perhaps a weighted average, as specified in the course’s grading rules). In this system, you don’t know which grade your collection of vague and fuzzy feedbacks corresponds to until the very end.

> Colleges, rightly have a minimum GPA to graduate.

Brown University does not have this requirement.

Brown does not calculate GPAs, and courses may generally be taken S/NC, though courses must be passed in order to count toward graduation requirements.

The other Ivies have traditional grading systems, but I'm not sure which ones have a minimum GPA requirement per se. Harvard seems to (satisfactory or B-) but Yale seems to require "successful completion" of coursework, though there is a minimum progress requirement (8 or 10 course credits per year) and you can fail out by failing three courses in two or three terms.

> Grades allow for tracking progress across many different classes, so that you know for sure where you should spend your time studying.

Which subjects you should be studying, but not how to improve your work, or specific areas of the subject you should be focusing on. If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B?

I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback.

There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well. For some kids a grade C is great, for other it means they've failed. What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

You talk about your job, and meeting the needs of your client. Does that mean you don't read or listen to feedback from your client? If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about? Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

That's not true, though. What's important in the current system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct correlation).

What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what they'd like them to be.

My undergraduate major was within a college (within a university) in which all of the major classes were portfolio driven and the first year core classes were a mix of portfolio and graded assignments. All of the classes regularly engaged in feedback (daily, weekly, or monthly) and in a group setting as well. Students very quickly learned the criteria for A level work, and depending on the professor or assignment it wasn't always achievable.

An important part of that system is educating students so they can identify for themselves where their work can be improved, and what they can achieve given their current abilities and available resources.

> If I get an A in French, do I just stop studying until I slip down to a B?

It depends on what the student's goals are? Did the student just take french because it's required or are they taking it because they want to be fluent? All grades do is tell you what your current level is.

> I was a teacher for 15 years, and I can tell you that grades are meaningless. A kid gets an A and thinks they're done. They won't even bother to read the feedback to see how they could have improved their work. A kid gets an F and thinks they're done, they give up on the subject and again don't read any feedback.

You use extremes to justify your conclusion. Many students and parents use grades/feedback to spend more time on a subject, get help, etc.

> There's cultural and socioeconomic factors to add in as well.

So what? There will always be cultural and socioeconomic factors. People nowadays use it as a crutch.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

How will they know they've improved without a grade?

>If you get paid, no matter how badly you did the work just to meet contractual obligations, is that all you care about?

For many people, yes.

>Imagine you got paid on a scale, awarded by the client, with an A being the full amount and an F being $0.

For many others, this is how it works. You are compensated basic on metrics of performance.

> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

100% agree with this. I don’t see how it’s fundamentally incompatible with grades. If anything, a pre-post grade change, imo, would be the best indicator that they have learned how to improve.

How about this - don’t put limits on the number of times an assignment can be resubmitted. Grade each submission on the same scale. Don’t give the kids the grade right away. Give them the written feedback, talk to them about how they did, ask them if they want to do a resubmit. Once they answer, then reveal the grade. Repeat as many times as the student is motivated to do so.

I love the idea of marrying up evaluation, iteration, objectivity, and not disheartening kids early. The point about iteration and feedback is the best part of the article; I just don’t understand why it requires eliminating graded assignments.

I grew up with A, B, C, D, and F. You always knew where you stood, where you were excelling, where you were going fine, and where you needed to put in extra effort. It was simple and effective.

My daughter’s school uses this ridiculous categorization:

- M: meeting standard

- P: progressing towards standard

- T: needs more time to meet standard

- AC: area of concern

Her “grades” are usually simply all M. Totally useless as a parent. I have no idea what “M” means in terms of her competitive ranking amongst her peers, readiness for AP or advanced courses and/or trajectory for future success in college. Someone who is barely hanging on, but technically “meets the standard” and someone who is a literal genius in the subject will both get “M”. It tells me (and her) nothing.

This is classic example of what happens when system tries to make everyone feel good about themselves no matter where they actually stand. The feedback signal is now so blunt that it is fairly useless. It's like you remove all the grading in compass and how you have no idea which direction you are moving and where you have to go. As a child, grading is what motivated me to work harder and be proud of my achievement. It's the reward you get for putting in the work. It was the reason I gravitated to doing extra work instead of watching TV. This new system basically says you have to do minimal thing and there is no reward or motivation provided for going above and beyond the norms.

The argument that this will somehow help underpriviledged students is so severely misguided. I was in fact the underpriviledged student. The good grades is what allowed others to invest in me and give me opportunities. It was one thing I could own and control. I feel sorry for so many talented hardworking underpriviledged students who will have nothing more to show for than "Meets standards".

How would a letter grade change your understanding of where she ranks? And why is a competitive ranking among her peers important?

And that is perhaps the point. I believe that the intention is that you should not stress about it as long as they are doing fine. And that you should not pass that stress to the child either. The grade is only there to warn you if there is a problem. To get feedback about the areas of performance, you should talk directly to the teacher and receive more than just 3 bits of information.

Even with a much more granular grading system, as long as the grades are assigned based on task completion (correctly solving all the exercises in a test) instead of ranking, you will still have a inability to distinguish anything above top grade.

If you move to a ranking system, where grades are assigned by comparison to peers, you run into issues of fairness, because resource availability inevitably plays a role.

You seem to be implying that there is no value in a student who just barely meets the standard trying any harder or going any further. I hear you about stress. You seem to be saying though that even when stress isn’t an issue, there is no value in that student doing anything further (at that time). Am I mistaken?

Indeed you are mistaken. What I was saying is that grades are not the appropriate tool to motivate students who already meet the standard. You need other approaches for those students in order to keep them engaged. And in those same cases, grades are not the proper measurement tool. There is no distinction between a straight "M" and a straight "A" student in terms of motivation nor measurement. Students who perform should be challenged, given responsibilities relevant to their talents, encouraged to participate in competitions (these are ranked) and various other possibilities. Grades are simply not the tool to use beyond the level of "doing fine".

> Students who perform should be ... encouraged to participate in competitions (these are ranked) ...

> Grades are simply not the tool to use beyond the level of "doing fine".

I am having trouble square rooting these two seemingly opposite claims.

I think you are saying: in a school environment, use grades only to measure degree-below-standard. Outside school, use competitive ranking to measure degree-above-standard.

Close?

Close. Competitions can be organized by schools too.

These may be: competitions inside clubs, competitions between schools, olympiads, events with prises, etc.

The point is that partitipation in the ranked system is OPTIONAL and meant to encourage performance.

Grades are mandatory, are standard based, task completion based and are more a tool to detect issues.

Ranking should not be mandatory because access to resources of all kinds is absolutely a factor influencing performance, and you want to keep the educational environment fair for everyone. Every student should be able to meet the standard using just the resources provided by the system. Those who don't, should repeat the year until they do. Only one student will become a champion.

If a student is not able to meet the standard, it is a signal that a investigation is needed. Are there family issues? Does the student have a propper learning environment? Are they suffering from stress? Is there an issue with regards to comaptibility with the teacher? What can be done to improove the situation?

The same way in a good MMO adventure game you can stick to story mode and enjoy the game, but a some people will go PvP and compete for the rankings. PvP should not be mandatory, especially if microtransactions are used for items that influence the game.

And in real life, some students absolutely benefit from the equivalent of in game microtransactions, and some do not. And this is not likely to change any time soon.

Cool, I totally get it.

How do we stop higher education and employers from setting “competition rank” as the new standard?

Good question.

I believe it already happens, even if not always visibly. Reality is nor fair.

Some people will probably propose legislation in order to maintain equality of opportunity.

I do not know what the solution is.

Note: I am pro standardized tests at certain checkpoints in education. But I am against, focussing on grades in day to day school life, especially in primary and middle school. In high school, I am for frequent tests (so much so that they should not be a stress), but without those tests contributing to some ranking or having an effect at some final score. Frequent tests should be more of a feedback tool.

Sounds good. I’m not sure I know any better solution either.

I really like:

> I am for frequent tests (so much so that they should not be a stress), but without those tests contributing to some ranking or having an effect at some final score. Frequent tests should be more of a feedback tool.

Definitely would work to convey the sense of contwnt mastery to the student, and if done in a no-shame, expect-to-start-bad-and-get-better way, an excellent feedback tool.

Thank you for the dialogue!

“Doing fine” is no longer cutting it. When I was her age, doing fine in school meant you go to community college or a state university and end up in an ok middle class career in an office at best, a tough but secure job at the mill at worst. For her generation, doing just “fine” in school will likely result in a lifetime of struggling—stocking shelves and waitressing—and working class poverty.

The world is quickly bifurcating into haves and have-nots, and there are only a few seats left on the Boat To The Haves. She is in a global competitive slugfest for those seats with the approx. 50 million other kids her age worldwide. None of us like it but that’s the world cutthroat winner-take-most capitalism has left us in.

As a parent, I would expect something as basic as a report card to differentiate “achieving way beyond expectations” from “excelling” from “doing fine”.

| It's as if the professor here thinks their class is the only one that matters.

That tracks fairly well with most every class I remember.

| Professionally, my task is complete when it meets the needs of the client and I get paid. With this class, tasks are never complete. There's always more revising to do, and you never know when to stop.

Sadly that maps pretty well with client work as well. The person getting the work done always thinks it’s the most important thing you’re doing because it is for them.

My final year at uni, my grades didn't matter as I'd already locked down my classification (UK system). So yet not knowing and not caring, I somehow still managed to adequately triage my time across classes. I'm not sure that particular critique carries water with me - if each teacher is designing course objectives with their students, that process should factor in the student's other obligations.

In the US, your final average grade typically (though not always) follows you for your first 1-2 jobs, at least. So it's quite important.

The objective is a high grade, and learning the material is second, due to the system.

And to be clear, the objective in the author's class is also a high grade. They're not living in another system, they're just pretending it doesn't exist until the very end of the term.

And I'm certainly not saying the system or particularly good, but it is the system that they have to work with right now.

I am American, for what it's worth. Similarly in the UK, the best jobs are restricted to 2:1 or 1st Class Honours degrees and there's been a move towards more American style reporting of the average grade received rather than just the classification.

My point is mainly that I don't buy this system would negatively impact one's ability to time manage courses and extracurricular work and activities. And if grades were to suddenly disappear, companies would find other ways to weed out applicants.

This is an English class, and the teacher is arguing it allows her to give more specific and useful feedback. This isn't some kind of "everyone gets a trophy" thing and I don't thing any one is advocating for this in the hard sciences.

In this specific case of a writing seminar it makes a lot of sense.

> At the end of the semester, I do have to give students grades, as required by the university.

> But I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise.

I see here both tracking progress and providing a clear report on the end result of a task. This teacher seems to meet both your requirements, and probably doesn't deserve the disdain of someone that seems to hold the opinion that mindless grade chasing is the way to actually learn things.

More so, there's no indication that the answer "I am here just to get the credits and get some reading done" is unacceptable to the question of "why are you here?".

What is more meaningful?

A letter grade with no context, or written feedback/commentary on your work? A dialog around improving your work?

Seems like a far superior concept than simple letter grading.

Also as you get better, the need to revise goes down dramatically. Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade.

Meaningful learning - after having dealt with "education" I can see why the concept puzzles you.

> Seems like a pretty good incentive to focus on actual improvement and not just now to get a better grade.

Well that's great, but it doesn't help me when I also require the good grade, because the system still works around GPAs.

If grades didn't translate into real life consequences then it would be fine to use them as merely measurements. But they do affect real life, some companies ask for GPA scores, which colleges attended open doors, even car insurance companies give discounts for good GPA.

I had an uncle once joke about "Friends are temporary but GPA is forever" and as I've aged I've found it to be true in a "that's not funny" kind of way.

Why is it ridiculous? Especially for a subjective class like "English"

They aren't saying they're not giving completion feedback, they're saying they aren't giving explicit grades.

They also call out specific problems with the grading approach, and I'm curious what your solution to those problems is?

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