Education and Marks/Grades

Come board exams time, there is the usual criticism of all the pressure being heaped on students, and how many of them are unable to cope with it. Manika Ghosh criticizes the government “solution” to this issue. Sure, it’s a new solution each year, but the common thread across the years?

“It appears to be a grandiose, knee-jerk idea at best for solving a complex, multidimensional problem.”

All this reminds me of this experiment from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wherein the narrator decides to do away with grades in a college course that he teaches. What follows is very revealing not just about the universities and schools but also teachers and the holy cow that cannot be criticized, at least not publicly: students.

Let’s start with how a gradeless system is scary for universities and schools:

“The real University is a state of mind… There’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but is quite another thing… It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.”

But take away the grading from the legal entity, and people begin to ask whether it’s really a place where the real University functions?

Next, take the teachers. With a grades/marks based system:

“Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not.”

But without grades?

“If the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous.”

And lastly, the holy cow, the student himself:

“(The student)’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. The push would come from inside.”

Does that sound familiar at all? I didn’t think so.

And so we realize that end-to-end:

“The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vaccum.”

Before you blame the politician for knee jerk “solutions” done for sound bytes, are students, parents, teachers and “experts” in the educational field doing any end to end thinking either?