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THE grading picture in the teaching of writing, and sometimes in the teaching of literature, has changed from what it was when I went to school. Today, fewer English essays are graded. More final grades are based on portfolio evaluations. More final grades result from “contracts” between student and teacher regarding what work will receive what grade.
But the “system” has not changed. People whose work, thought, and professional commitment are generally progressive nevertheless have been reluctant to oppose the grading system. Some of these people have not paid attention to the issue and have written about what they consider more important concerns. Others have examined grades in an effort to find “solutions” to the problems they pose. Certification in the university still proceeds on the basis of a grade transcript. In some subjects, grades are determined in the same ways that they were forty and fifty years back; in many subjects grades are decided only through multiple-choice, machine-gradable exams. In spite of definite advances in how work in English is evaluated, there is reason to think that the concept of evaluation represented by the grading system is even more active in today's universities than in yesterday's.
We in English are eager to respect the “system.” We like to peace in academic life, the civil yet exciting character of teaching, and the sense that a degree in English is a step toward thoughtfulness and responsiveness to others and to issues beyond ourselves. It makes sense that we have become involved with the political concerns of the disenfranchised and that we have, as a result, tried to reduced the competitive tenor of education and certification in English. Yet we are members of one of the professions that certify their students on competitive bases, and we are extremely slow to revaluate our ways of evaluating others. The slowness is due, in part, to differences between politically secure groups who advocate “de-grading” and politically less secure groups who feel that a system of strong, decisive evaluative judgment is the path to real enfranchisement.
I count myself as one of those who think that evaluation of others takes place all the time, that all of us evaluate one another sooner or later, that students evaluate teachers, that teachers favor some students over others, and that it is a teacher's responsibility to help decide whether a student gets credit for a course. But I don't count myself among those who think that my evaluation of a student's work ought to be represented on a permanent record beyond the notation of college credit. I think that my responses, immediate and cumulative, to students' work ought to be recorded, but on the same sheets of paper were the students respond to my efforts, as well as to one another's. Students and teachers should appear in both the subjects and the predicates of their “sentences,” their expressed notions about one another. These sheets and “sentences” should be part of the mutual teaching process, embedded in courses and discussions but not used as instruments to place either students or teachers in hierarchies of status in their respective work communities. How to create such sheets of paper with such intracommunal functions is the problem I am posing now. I think that if we are to take seriously the interpersonal activity of mutual evaluation and if we are to include it in the processes of acculturating young people and of changing ourselves and our society, we need to have such sheets of paper, and soon.
The status of students in the university is governed by a contract between each student and the university: students pay tuition to support the process of certification. Faculty members are agents of the university and are “hired” or contracted to certify students. Most of us think of formal grade evaluation as an ordinary or even “natural” way to do our duty of certification. The “proof” that a faculty member must ultimately show of the validity of the certification judgment is the work done by the student, which, presumably, other faculty members can inspect and judge comparably. Only judging whether contractual obligations have been met will fulfill our duty to both students and the university. It is understood that the grade evaluation is an administrative shorthand used to communicate to the public that both students and faculty members have fulfilled their contractual obligations. The shorthand “works” because the university trusts its teachers and administrators in the same way that any business trusts its employees: qualified people are assumed to be doing their jobs. This description is enough to show that giving scaled letter grades is an administrative extra rather than a necessary part of the university's work. Viewed as a contract, the certification process does not need to differentiate students hierarchically.
Obviously, much more is involved, since most university faculty members accurately understand that a school is not mainly a business even though it is partly one. What routinely happens, however, is that the business practices and thought styles of the university overwhelm its teaching functions, a process encouraged by academic ideology, whose androcentric hierarchical accents create a major role for performance ranking. Teaching and learning, however, do not require ranking at all. To show how this is the case, as well as just how deeply academic ideology is embedded in the university classroom, I describe below some situations from my own class.
In the spring of 1991 I taught a course in first-year writing called Writing and Thinking. My aims were to teach without the atmosphere of judgment that saturates many university courses and to establish autonomy and independence for students by fostering continuing mutual evaluation . In part this approach meant that students could participate in saying how the course was run. Mainly, however, it meant that their evaluations of my role, as well as of the roles of other students, were welcome. Students were encouraged to give these evaluations both as independent essay commentaries toward the end of the course and as parts of the essays that went into their portfolios of work. I have eleven essays describing and evaluating various features of this course. I and ten of seventeen students wrote and signed them around the end of the semester. If you read through all the essays, examining both the substance and the varieties of effort, you will get, along with evaluations of the course, a sense of what went on in it, something you will not get if you merely note the seven A's and ten B's that I recorded on the student's records. In addition, students presented oral and written evaluative comments throughout the course.
While I am going to report, in part, on the “progress” represented by this experiment, I want to reflect on how and why such progress is limited by ideological circumstances in the university and in society. I want to stress that the curtailment or elimination of the grading system is a good way to oppose this ideology. I will consider two cases, one more sanguine and usual, the other less sanguine, less usual, but finally just as instructive.
Ms. S was one of the best students in the course, a cognitive science major, extremely able, devoted to school, and more than ordinarily bold. Here is part of her assessment:
What are my overall views of the course? Well, I don't think that it is a bad course, but it is far from my favorite. I think that the main reason for this opinion is due to the fact that writing is not my favorite activity, and the amount of writing that I have had to do for this course has been a great weight for me to bear. I would much rather write a computer program that write an English paper. Also, some of the topics for the papers have not been stimulating, such as language use in textbooks, language use in college course, and so forth….
I suppose that one reason why I found these papers boring was by the end of the semester, we had written approximately five essays on our courses. … Also, I am not as fascinated by language use as Bleich is, so analyzing it in many situations, especially academic situations, did not pique my interest. I found analyzing language a very difficult task, but I generally welcome difficult tasks….
Overall, I give this class a B. I think that is has helped me to improve my writing, although that was not the state objective of Bleich. Also I think that I am able to analyze various uses of which I was not aware before. I have mixed feelings about not reading literature; I think it has its benefits and disadvantages. I don't believe that the amount of work was too much, but I think that if we had read literature and analyzed it, the work would have seemed more balanced between reading and writing. … Overall, though, I feel this class was a learning experience and I am glad that I took it.
This critique is a summary of thoughts and feelings that Ms. S had throughout the course. I heard some of them from her in conferences a few weeks before she wrote this essay. While Ms. S and other students did not complain very much, it was clear that she and others did not understand to observe why were so many projects in which I asked them to observe the language use in their courses and report on it, nor did they like doing so many. The ways their courses were conducted and their textbooks written were so familiar, so predictable, that they could not see what “new” things could be learned about the topic. They naturally thought that “literature,” a staple of all English courses, should have been more prominently included in this one, at least to relieve the “boredom.” So this response represents a substantive critique of the subject matter in this writing course, and it provides something important for me to think about in presenting other courses in the English department.
But consider what else is in this critique: Ms. S's statements that she would rather be writing computer programs and that she is not as “fascinated by language use” as I am. These observations also represent the feelings of other students: some wanted to be playing ball; some wanted to be doing biology; some wanted to be going to Mexico. Most, in fact, were not as “fascinated with language use” as I am. No, I was not able to render my own projects important in the minds of many of the students. But, obviously, I succeeded in getting even the less persuaded students to announce, as part of their work, just where they stood. Ms. S conceptualized, more or less accurately, what the course was about. She compared its concerns with her own, and she was even able to further her aim of improving her writing in spite of my denial that such improvement was one of my purposes in offering the course.
This tension between her interests and the movement of the course as I announced it led to her giving the course a final grade of B. (In case you are wondering, the grade I recorded for Ms. S was A.) Now suppose this B was noted on some balance sheet measuring my performance as a teacher, but the rest of the essay was not retained. What would someone examining this tally think? The existing logic of grading would make it reasonable to conclude that this course was “OK” but that it had problems—a conclusion I would not contest. But should my salary increment be based on this judgment? Should it be based on the average of grades awarded anonymously by all the students in the class? Should a faculty member's total status—the prospects reappointment, tenure, or promotion—be understood on the basis of a letter grade or of an average of anonymous letter grades?
I think the answer to these questions is clearly no. But, on the other hand, should I and other faculty members know, the rest of Ms. S's essay, including her self-perceptions and statements of interest? Yes, we should, and hearing responsive critiques such as hers should part of our work as teachers. Furthermore, isn't it true that if student critiques were a part of the teaching process but not a potential element in someone's judgment of us from “above,” we teaches would all be much more eager to hear them, as well as to take them seriously? Genuinely mutual teaching in fact requires such evaluations from students, particularly if, as we all admit, the teacher and students in any classroom assemble so that all teach and learn.
If we as teachers do not want just a lonely letter or statistical accumulation of letters to bear on our livelihoods, must students not feel the same? Ms. S's “livelihood” is learning to become a cognitive scientist. In the service of this livelihood, she wrote essays that were consistently half again as long as the suggested number of pages. In the service of this livelihood, her attendance was perfect. Her level of commitments, efforts, and achievement was as much as or more than anyone could reasonably expect, according to the usual ways in which we teachers observe and judge these items. Yet the grading system in which she was working nevertheless creates some serious doubt about the status of Ms. S's achievements. Here is an excerpt from one of the other; commentaries on the course:
…If were being strict and formal, I would not make up words nor would I make opinionated comments concerning other classes.
However, I am not sure that I would take such liberties If I were taking another course. I think that the type of course that this is allows me and other students to take certain liberties. Bleich has actually encouraged us to take liberties, such as straying from the suggested topics and making up words where there are no existing words to describe our point. Although it seems as though the students are taking liberties, they are endorsed by the teacher, so are they really liberties?
Ms. S notes here what all students know: regardless of what a teacher says, the customs and ideology of the system necessarily give teachers authority to render a final, binding judgment of students' work. Ms. S judiciously puts her point in the interrogative, since it is not clear that there were no new liberties in this course. But what casts doubt on the liberties that she and other students took was the necessity that I as the teacher declare them available to begin with. This point is not hairsplitting, because Ms. S rightly implies that any teacher's authority is simultaneously a manifestation of the university's authority , and it is not clear that an individual representing the university may tinker with the contract between it and the students even though I and other faculty members routinely do such tinkering.
At least in part, Ms. S views her achievements as having been preauthorized by the teacher. Furthermore, she may not have wanted to move along the lines she did if I as the teacher had not announced that I would like her to do so. The point is not that teachers should not take such steps—we should, in fact, take more of them than we do now—but that these steps are seriously compromised by the ideology in which they are taken and that they oppose. Neither students nor teachers should have no exercise academic freedom i opposition to the institution at which they work. While there is definitely a place for parental-style supervision of younger people by older people, this overseeing is already compromised by the coercive systems of institutional judging that force students to keep their attention mainly on their grade-point averages and only secondarily on their substantive achievements. To put the matter in even simpler terms, individual efforts to teach academic freedom are ultimately undercut by a grading system that inhibits it.
Let me advance to the less sanguine case—a student group that did not work. The essay that I cite below was written in the first place because the author did not consider it possible to overcome the lack of motivation of the three other members of her group. Each of the three was experiencing different degrees of coercion by the grading system, a situation that made it less possible and, they felt, less necessary for them to work with other students. That is, my relaxed grading rendered the course less important to the three members described by Ms. N and encouraged their retreat to a purely individualistic frame of mind. This situation was so painful and frustrating for Ms. N that the only way she could think of for coping with it was to depart from the project they all thought they would do as individuals and to write an account of how and why her group failed. Her motivation could only focus on the need to face this collective retreat. Here first is a sense of her general feelings:
Bleich would come over to our group during class and check on us to see how our discussions were coming along. We all used to answer that we were doing find and show him the notes we took, but all along I think Bleich knew we were not doing well. He used to sit down with all the other groups and have long discussions with them about things. I never knew what they were about but I assumed he could only be helping them, even if it did not directly relate to their paper topic. A few times he tried to do the same for us but we quickly pushed him away saying that we did not need his help. Was this because unconsciously we knew that our group was not working successfully and we did not want him to know? For me at least, this was not an unconscious thought. I knew this group was not working out, but did my other group members know this? Where they doing the same thing I was doing which was ignoring the situation? I wonder if they even cared that we were failing as a cohesive group?
As I remember what happened in class, this description is accurate. Group work created a new degree of independence for the students, which included the choice of declining my involvement. Because the majority (in this group of four) did not want my participation, I was involved with them considerably less than I was with the three other groups.
At the end of this essay Ms. N suggests that “maybe Bleich can try to get to know his students better and make an educated guess as to who would work well together before putting us into groups.” This point is well-taken, since there is a great deal that I and other collaborative-classroom advocates need to learn about how to form groups. Neither I nor the students knew how to handle the situation so that all could benefit. On the other hand, Ms. N's essay brings insight into just what the features of this situation were; here description provides some guidance about how might educate myself regarding group formation in class, even though there will never be a simple formula that ensures success.
Her guidance consists of a description of what she thought lay behind the retreat of the other three group members:
The worst offender in this case was Mr. J. He was a really nice guy who was pretty easy to talk to when it came to sports, fraternities, or drinking, but school just was not his forte. Mr. J played on the baseball team and always had games or practices during the week; therefore it was a rare occasion when he made it to class both days a week. … On the days he was there, however, we usually had a tough time getting much of anything out of this mouth. He liked to stare at the ground and “take it all in.” … When we were choosing our topics … his only response was, “I don't care, as long as it is easy to write about.” … We never had to worry about what Mr. J wanted when making a decision about something. … We all knew that if you told him what we wanted to do, his response every time would be, “Yeah, whatever, fine with me.”…
Mr. T was the one who decided to do our final project on families and gender relations. … He wanted a topic that would take the least amount of time to write. He was not considering what the other people in the group wanted to do. This quality, I found, was a pattern with Mr. T. The work we did revolved around what he wanted to do throughout the whole semester. … I think I should have said something to him. … I suppose I could have found a nice way to tell him but I guess I was too scared.
Mr. T did have the most enthusiasm out of the other two group members, besides myself. He wanted to get a good grade in the class so he made sure he was always there and made some noticeable effort to show Bleich that he was trying. … He always had something to say, even if it meant interrupting someone else. But as I look back, his reasons for doing things such as initiating these conversations or making sure Bleich knew he was putting his two cents in, all seemed to point to his benefitting himself. Mr. T's most important goal was to get an “A” in English to add to his other good grade and impress his father.
Ms. K … was not someone who stood out in my mind.… She was very different from anyone else in the class … open-minded … very liberal, and had very strong views on sensitive topics [such as homophobia and cruelty to animals]. … Ms. K was not as aggressive as Mr. T but she still made her opinion known in a more subtle way.
…Soon she stopped [giving her opinion] and she became very quiet not only in group discussions but in class discussions also. Later, she confided to me that she did not like to speak out anymore because someone in the class thought she was constantly on the defensive. … I found that when she did speak [in group discussion] it was directed more toward me than anyone else in the group. I think maybe it was because I was a girl and could relate to her better than anyone else. … I guess sometimes girls just instinctively stick together.
Ms. K tended to carry the attitude that she had more important things to do than deal with this course. She was always busy with her science courses and because this was her major, she always put that first. She also wanted to write about family and gender relationships, but her reason was that she could sit down and write it without having to think too much and get it out of the way so she had more time to study for biology and chemistry. Her lack of enthusiasm, as well as her feeling of being an outcast, really had a big effect on our group.
I also do not want you to get the idea that I was perfect in this whole situation. I could have done or said something to get them motivated and make them want this to work. Instead, I just let everything pass by me and wrote a paper about it at the end of the semester. … I could have done more to get everyone more involved. I also could have assumed the leadership position, instead of Mr. T, and our group may have turned out differently.
This essay suggests a connection between academic (androcentric) ideology and the possibility of students' using their independence to work with and learn from one another rather than merely trying to secure the teacher's (and the university's) highest judgment. Before getting to this, however, note that Ms. N, like Ms. S, proceeds in a discourse of self-inclusion. Her judgments of others are related to those she gives of herself. She took the unusual step of writing this critical statement because during the course she was “too scared” to step in and try to change what she knew was not good. She was hesitant to challenge either Mr. T or the total function of the group. In describing Mr. J and Ms. K, she implies that their attitudes could not be changed even if she too, an initiative with them and that the overall relationship of the four students could not be quickly improved by any of them acting alone.
Ms. N's essay also shows that some students had been judging others all along. However, these judgments were not mainly evaluations of the texts that each produced but, rather, much deeper appraisals of one another's motivations. In most evaluation contexts, one is not permitted openly to honor such motivational judgments, even though all teachers make them most of the time and, in part, base grading practices on them. In the light of the authority we privately give to these perceptions of individual motivation, don't evaluative, comparative letter grades actually misrepresent our actual, important judgments and radically reduce them to something unrelated to what students need to hear about their work in a course? Shouldn't there be forums within courses for both students and teachers to air perceptions that are of such genuine consequence of each person? In my course, wouldn't it have been best if the system permitted either a student to solicit my intervention or me to make an initiative without the student seeming to be “ratting” or I to be “meddling”? (It remains true that often students successfully take initiatives and I successfully intervene. But, again, both they and I are then aware that we are moving outside the system.) That is, if working collaboratively and not grading were the customs; it would not be considered ordinary for students to work alone, and it would be ordinary for them to solicit help in their attempts to collaborate, I think that the possibilities of both ratting and meddling were created by the underlying need of students to remain in the competitive condition of looking out for themselves alone, as a further look at Ms. N's report suggests.
Consider now the substance of Ms. N's descriptions of her fellow students, particularly with regard to gender-identified behavior. Mr. J's accessibility as a colleague was limited to his comfortable topics of “sports fraternities, or drinking.” Although Mr. J felt fortunate to be in college to begin with (because of his economic hardship), he kept rigidly within his fully masculine comfort zones. One might want to call him “shy” on observing his habit of looking at the floor, but since the main point is his ideological orientation rather than his individual psychology, his behavior can be understood as resulting from a legitimate choice of the homogeneous athletic community over the heterogeneous classroom group. Because this course was a college requirement, Mr. J had to do the minimum in it, but he was free to choose to do no more. This minimus, as I am force to allow, was a certain amount of work. I suppose I could fail a student because his group “failed,” but that would teach only what students already know; if you don't do what the teacher wants, you fail. No, I must honor the individual contract between the student and the university, and so Mr. J, who wrote very interesting essays, obviously passed the course in spite of the group's failure as judged by Ms. N, with whose judgment I agree.
Mr. T also failed as a group member. While his behavior seems to be the opposite of Mr. J's—forced enthusiasm against honest boredom—Ms. N's accurate description of him also places him squarely in a masculine community of action, as he tries to impress me (the masculine teacher) and ultimately his demanding father. To these ends he interrupts others in discussions, defines the total group projects, and behaves artificially. Ms. N's description directly relates. Mr. T's quest for an A to these behaviors and motives. To her, he is no less taken with narcissistic purposes than Mr. J. These two young men make characteristically masculine-identified social choices—either drop out altogether because one has “bigger” things on one's mind or appropriate a complex but tenuous social situation to fit one's private needs. The grading system makes such choices perfectly all right. According to Ms. N's essay, the other three students (herself included) willingly went along with Mr. T because his proposals required little collaboration and thus fit in well with the “default position” for all students. And I, as a participant in the grading system, must honor these choices. It was out of the question to punish these two students. At the same time, it is probably also true that I failed to teach them what I had to teach. And since I am male, I may very well be considered to have been insufficiently responsive to the situation in which the female students in this group found themselves.
The last judgment is encouraged by Ms. N's description of what happened with Ms. K, who had political opinions that drew criticisms from others in the class, including candid objections by other women. Because Ms. K's descent and birthplace were non-Western, she was already “different” from most of the other students in the class (there was only one other non-Western student). From private conversation with Ms. K, I learned that she was already living with feeling different (line an “outcast,” as Ms. N reports), and the actions in the class did not ameliorate her circumstances. She was an articulate, accomplished, and forceful speaker. All the students regarded her as having one of the two most impressive vocabularies in the class. In addition, she was a science major in anticipation of becoming a veterinarian. There was no doubt at all about her willingness to contribute to and participate in the classwork.
But, as Ms. N reports, Ms. K became “quiet” and developed the attitude that she had more important things to do. This attitude was more or less the same as Mr. J's except that it was stimulated in her by social events and discussions in the class —by negative response from classmates as well as the detachment shown her by (mostly) her masculine group members. One of her ways of coping with the group meetings, which were unpleasant because of the self-absorbed behaviors of the men was to relate mainly to Ms. N. Ms. N calls the two of them “girls” possibly because they felt a sense of reduced importance as colleagues engaged in a common project with the two young men. It seem obvious that a student like Ms. K, whom the class knew was struggling as a cultural outsider, would benefit from other students' understanding and initiatives toward her. But she had a forceful mien and did not behave like someone seeking admission to a privileged group. Although all students did not treat her as Mr. T and Mr. J did, it is also true that the individualism inculcated in university students not only permits but finally encourages them to adopt the ideologically governed default position. Ms. N's report suggests that in this group the women did not necessarily want to go to the default position but were forced into it by the men's having naturally” taken it themselves, as well as by the need of Ms. K as an outsider to survive.
The need governing Mr. J's behavior was to pass the requirement and play ball, while that controlling Mr. T's was to get an A and meet the ideals and demands of his father. Mr. T was extremely deferential to me; he behaved as if he would do just about anything I asked if it guaranteed success in the school system, an attitude that was the opposite of Ms. S's, as can be seen from her challenging criticisms. But at no time did Mr. T consider “S-style” behavior one of his choices. There was no question in his mind that the one and only meaning of academic success was securing the approval of the teacher in the form of the best possible grade. Nothing else counted for him as success in school.
So this group failed, and yet each student got a respectable passing grade. I cannot fail students for following the customs of the academic system. I am not sure I can even require students to work in modes that the system does not accommodate, though I do so anyway. My teaching strategy is to encourage and teach self-evaluation along which evaluation and to reduce my grading to an utter minimum. Notice that Ms. S, a relatively well-adapted student, who work successfully in a group and in the class, nevertheless included and perhaps even relied on the language of grades to present her course evaluation. She used this language not because she was a science major but because she, like the students who were not as comfortable in the course as she was, held academic ideological presuppositions.
Prominent among these presuppositions is the idea that evaluations of work and school experience should be ranked. Androcentric ideology almost always seems to demand the hierarchical organization of experience and “data.” In the academy, the grading system is one of the main manifestations of this ideology. Grading coerces total self-reliance by individuals and sends collaboration more or less underground and into a subversive position. It invites each student either to compete with others or to withdraw from them—the only two choices many men seem to think available to them. The choices of cooperating with and relating to others are present in male students' lives but are frequently confined to social venues and appear most usually in gender-homogeneous contexts such as sports, fraternities, and drinking. As a rule, women in my classes, over the past twenty-five years, while often suspicious of “group work,” have only rarely reduced their efforts when grading is removed and collaboration encouraged. They almost always express relief at the lifting of the yoke of regular grade judgments. There was no question that in the course I describe above, every female student was eager to collaborate, while only some male students were.
Perhaps a note of self-reflection is in order. This essay, in its willingness to argue a point forcefully, participates in the masculine tendency to polarize issues, a technique that depends on separating one issue from its many contexts and examining it as if it could really be removed. I know many female and feminist teaches who have dealt with the burdens of grading by broadening the range of classroom tasks and projects, thus aiming to reduce students' preoccupation with grades. Following such initiatives means “naturalizing” the evaluative process, making it less formal and binding, more casual and more oriented toward ongoing growth and enlightenment. Because I value such intermediate moves and have seen their good results, I oppose the grading system in the hope and expectation that a variety of new initiatives can be taken with the encouragement, rather than the resistance, of department and university administrations. The tendency has been to think that grading is the only way to govern certification. But if teaching and learning in schools are really more urgent than rank-order certification, then ways can be found for this value to be recorded in our collective institutional practices.
The author is Professor of English at the University of Rochester. This paper was presented at the 1991 ADE Eastern Summer Seminar at Skidmore College and has been expanded for publication.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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