Comments on: The Pre-Grading Golden Age

By: chris

chris — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:28:11 +0000

Absolutely… on both sides, student and educator, there is much less reliance on complex performances.

I’m all for turning back the clock 2300 years or so in some ways– methods from the Platonic academy would be a welcome addition to the assessment repertoire.

Industrialization isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s somewhat different from mechanization, which is largely where things seem to have been going.

And thanks for the pointer to Clay Burrell’s article. Some real food for thought in the article and the discussion!

By: Jason Green

Jason Green — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:24:33 +0000

One of the things mentioned in Clay Burrell's post on this topic was the extent to which assigning grades allowed education to become industrialized. Instead of a carefully written narrative describing a student's learning (something like an academic recommendation) one could simply write a optimus, second optimus, inferior, or pejor in the book, making education much less individual. In some wasy the portfolio is an attempt to turn back the clock 250 years.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:51:42 +0000

Makes sense to me too… but I don’t think that grading systems– even with letter grades and points– have to be considered a kind of ordering at all…

By: Research at a Glance — October 2, 2008 « Lone Star Learning

Research at a Glance — October 2, 2008 « Lone Star Learning — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:33:59 +0000

[...] we are still on the core topic of education, I liked Chris Lott’s article on the pre-grading golden age. He reminds us that, in days gone by, students were recognized by the name of the teacher to which [...]

By: phaedral

phaedral — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:17:14 +0000

Cf. Gould’s “The Mis-Measure of Man” which deals more with I.Q. theory (and fallacy) but the arguments of which seem applicable to “grading” in general.

I recall my stats teacher discussing the failure of most instructors to understand their business and the artificiality of grading on a smooth bell curve. He asserted that most often the numbers he looked at suggested a double-humped curve with humps peaking at C- and B- on the “normal” curve. That makes a kind of intuitive sense to me, if only because distribution is rarely smooth and even in nature.

Gould’s argument, in a nutshell, is that ranking, “ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale”, is fallacious per se. Makes sense to me.