Tag Archives: grades

A pass

By alex | Published: 3/17/2011
I don’t care about grades. It’s not that I hate them, but I do hate that students seem so captivated by them. At least at the undergraduate level, and for students who were aiming for law school or med school, where the GPA seems to have a strong effect on admissions, I kind of understood […]
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Against letter grades

By alex | Published: 12/21/2008
Next semester, no quantitative grades until the end of the semester. No As, no Fs, no 83%. At least one study has shown that grades not only do not help students, they actually impede their performance (Butler, 1987). Students tend to take a horse-race approach to grading, and pay less attention to how they are […]
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Top ten grating questions

By alex | Published: 9/8/2004
Let’s talk about grades. As I go into this below, a couple of the students from tonight’s class are going to recognize their own words. Don’t feel singled out–they are included here because they are representative of a lot of students’ questions over the last few years. 1. So, this is a writing course? Like […]
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A = Average ?

By alex | Published: 3/25/2003
In the last couple of years, I’ve gotten a number of students who come to me and say something like “I didn’t get an A? What did I do wrong?” The A is the obvious grade, and a B means, to their mind, that they missed some significant requirement of the assignment. The idea that […]
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