Jorge Mahecha

“They only study for the grades”, claim some teachers and professors, dissapointed that students are some sort of utilitarians that only care about a cold transaction where they do whatever is required of them, just in exchange for a number, and not caring for learning at all. I find this claim for misguided idealism highly dissapointing for many reasons. The first is that always I’ve heard that kind of complaint, it almost invariably comes from a humblebragging overachiever whose entire academic experience is nothing but top grades. It feels as authentic as a billionaire telling people not to worry about the money. But on a more practical basis, claiming that it is somehow wrong that students care only about grades and not about learning, reveals a misalignment between grades and learning that is the signature of a poorly designed course, where evaluation manages to be disconnected from performance and where it is possible to get good grades, indeed even a top grade, without having learned much at all. It sounds unethical because it is unethical.

Grades are important because there are high stakes depending upon them. Admissions process to competitive schools and colleges take grades into account. A grade means than an expert, i.e., the instructor, certifies that the student has reached a certain level of mastery in whatever the course subject was. In some professional contexts, grades and certificates could even be the basis for being accepted as a practitioner in a professional community. So it would be honest to stop pretending that grades do not matter. They matter and they matter a lot, and in most circumstances students are interested in getting good grades, even in courses as boring as yours. Apologies. We all know your course is not boring, but very specialized.

If what really matters in a course is not what ever activities earn a student a good grade, there is a serious disconnect between the evaluation system in the course and whatever elicits learning in the course. I had the chance to experience such a disconnect as a student in one of my undergraduate courses. It was Plant Science. One of courses I’ve been most engaged with in my undergrad. It was a couple times a week, maybe Tuesday and Thursday at 7:00 AM and it lasted for two hours. After a brief review of concepts we had to start a discussion. What is there to discuss about plant science, you might wonder. It turns out there is a lot to discuss about plan evolution and about how a particular morphological feature is advantageous for plant reproduction and growth. The instructor was in charge of the concept review, and then he started the discussion. In a course of over 25 people,two students discussed. One of them was a Biology major named Gustavo, if I remember correctly. The other guy was me. I never imagined doing that much independent reading on plant evolution as I did for that course, but I had to do it because otherwise how would I defend my arguments in the upcoming discussion?. I enjoyed that class a lot. Then, we had midterms. I failed miserably. The questions were all about plant parts and structures. I knew that was the style of the midterms with that professor (Eblis Álvarez), and I honestly tried to memorize as much as could. But I just couldn’t. And I got pretty low marks on that midterm.

But I kept on reading for every class, and discussing with Gustavo, who was in favor that if aliens arrived to earth perhaps they should not contact humans as there was no objective basis for considering humans the dominating species in this planet, based on biomass. I couldn’t agree with that, and I kept debating and reading well outside the scope of the recommended readings for the class. I also tried to memorize the stuff I knew I had to memorize. And it was time for the end term examinations. My performance was very mediocre. My final grade for the course was a mere 3.1 over 5. I met Eblis one last time to discuss my final exam and my class performance. He congratulated for my deep involvement in class discussions. Then he looked at my grades and I still remember how surprised he was that my grades were so bad. From his point of view I was one one of his best students. So he decided to approximate my 3.1 to a 4.0. This is like turning a C- into a B+. Never again I experienced such generosity in grading. Many of my classmates who never uttered a word in class discussion got the same B+ I got or even better grades. To me Eblis, was a great teacher. But very obviously there was a disconnect between learning and grading that nobody cared about because they memorized what they had to learn for the exams, looked at old exams to learn the questions and got good grades. And as long as they got good grades, there was not reason for them to complain about class discussions. Students tend not to complain about getting A as a final grade, disregarding how much they learned.

Lack of correspondence between learning grades creates perverse incentives. I remember a graduate course I took in my first masters about that arcane and long forgotten fad called “learning organizations”. It was so poorly designed that the course syllabus was the contents for a book called something like “the fifth discipline, schools that learn” by Peter Senge, not a word more, not a word less. Abstruse organizational cybernetics and other disconnected contents ended up in a final work that nobody understood really well, but everyone, absolutely everyone, got a 5.0/5.0 as final grade. Not even this perverse incentive managed to shut the strong criticisms of many students with that course -after all, it was part of a master’s in education. What did the sacred cow professor in charge of the course did? Changed the grading system from numeric to pass/fail. Roberto Zarama was not going to put any more effort in a course for a Master’s in Education degree.

Poor correspondence between grades and learning might end up giving poor grades to student that have indeed learned a lot, or good grades to students that ave learned very little or might not even be very sure about what is it that they had to learn. It also leads instructors to trivialize course design and not reflect deeply on what students should learn and what is valid and strong evidence for that learning. If doing that sounds difficult is because it requires professional instructors to do so. Students are motivated to get good grades, always. As instructors it is our duty to design courses where earning a good grade is unequivocal evidence of deep a meaningful learning.