Assessing assessment

Grading is right up there with courses in terms of being a major structural stumbling block that nonetheless could be a building block in formal higher education. Wise heads seem to agree that 'assessment' is an important part of learning, but that it need not imply or employ 'grading' in the usual letter-grade sense.

One of the contemporary champions of good, well-designed, and/or authentic assessment is Alfie Kohn. In case you are not familiar with his work, here is a link to a piece he wrote called From Degrading to De-Grading. In it, he advocates for authentic assessment and does a good job of defining various forms it can take --none of which involve letter-grades, as you might imagine.

A logical conundrum that Kohn in some ways does not forthrightly address is the piece of writing linked to above is this: any system that can be set up can also be gamed. So, in setting up a new system to replace the letter-grade system, we would unavoidably be creating a new game. Most folks stop right there and throw up their hands at the futility of doing anything re: grading, so we get stasis (all talk, no action, conversation without composition, etc.). So in order to move the process forward I think we could try broadening the context a bit by thinking deeper about games:

1) Assuming there is no intrinsic motivation present for a student to learn certain subjects, a game framework provides an agreeable form of extrinsic motivation for them to meet this externally-imposed requirement. The serious-games community in educational thinking is on this path: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game 

Assessment or evaluation in this category simply means getting a good score as defined by the rules of the game. The games don't have to be computer-based. For example mastery-based learning typically makes a game of sorts out of sequenced units of readings-and-quizzes, the aim of which is to get a perfect score and thereby attain mastery re: a body of content. No letter grade needed for game-based or mastery-based learning. You either get a good score in the game or not, or in mastery-based learning you either get enough of the questions right or not (sort of like the written part of a driving test). 

2) Students at my institution, UNCSA, are arguably already playing an earnest-game (more serious than a serious game, even). The game is in the genre of "Bet-against-the-house!" and it is called "Get a day-job in the Fine Arts." The extent to which we can tie content and assignments to their success in this game is the extent to which we win by helping them win. For example in my bailiwick a requirement to create a professional e-portfolio gets no push-back because this is perceived as helping them win the larger game they are playing. If I use fine-arts exemplars of creative thinking, rather than liberal-arts exemplars, I get better traction with students at UNCSA because it helps them win the game they are playing. So I focus on fine artist exemplars like Laura Karpman, and only mention liberal arts exemplars like Walter Ong. 

So in this context we already know that students are playing a high-stakes game that they are invested in. Motivation here is ample and intrinsic. Hence no letter grading is really needed. Assigned work keyed to their earnest-game simply needs to pass muster, and if it does not then presumably the student is automatically worried. I think this is pretty much the leverage art-area professors work with, whether they have to give letter grades or not. Their fine arts teachers are in the process of engraving the students' tickets into the arena of day jobs in the fine arts. 

3) It's a big undertaking to introduce additional, larger types of games like "Having a life of the Mind" or "Living a well-rounded Life." These games are earnest as well, and are typically played by students who --unlike any of the students at UNCSA-- are engaged in serious study within the liberal arts. Introducing games, in addition to producing stressful overload and overhead costs, involves teaching students the rules of the new game(s), promoting them as more important than the one they came here to play and win, etc.

We can tell them that getting good at having a life of the mind will help them win their earnest-game in the short-run (by making them more interesting, articulate, and better at the 'soft' aspects of their art or craft), and also help them in the long run (by helping them maintain satisfaction and edge professionally, and by broadening their fall-back net in case they either don't win the earnest game they are playing, or win it but find it hollow). But these matters are at least one step removed from their intrinsic motivation, and the content is not typically presented in game or mastery-fashion. So there is little to no intrinsic motivation or time to take the earnest game of the liberal arts seriously, nor is there really much extrinsic motivation. Beyond being intellectually skilled (able to read and write in a variety of media including but not limited to text) and moderately informed of the intellectual content of their art areas, there is no need really for the BFA to include the liberal arts. So, not surprisingly, those of us operating within this motivational chasm have tended to rely on the artifice of fear-based letter-grading --even though neither students nor teachers really need or benefit from it. It is a pox on both our houses!

So...

If we want to remove letter grades we would need to remove the need for them in the currently predominant category 3 system. I think the best strategy to remove the need is a variant of a category 2 type of deal, in which we seek to do things such as: 

1. Treat each student as a person, much like they are treated in their art areas (in this way we can embed a big chunk of the Humanities in our actions rather than relying so much on our our curriculum and teaching).
2. We would/could also align our assessment practices with what is done in arts areas, which would be perceived as helping them win their game.
3. Devote more of our effort to framing what the liberal arts needs of film students are, compared to music students and so forth.  Beyond a core set of courses designed specifically to educate students about all of the arts, I'd argue that there is a need for a more defined sense of curriculum and electives based on arts area. I sense for example that that film students need to read a body of literature in the liberal arts that is quite different from what a design student needs to read, and right now it seems very hit or miss to me whether or not students get the appropriate advanced liberal arts work. And, as noted above, if the advanced electives were more closely tied to their earnest-game they might be much more easily convinced that doing the work well could be a game-changer for them. If we got this type of thing established, then the need for letter grades might be reduced or at least rendered as insignificant as I imagine it is in the arts areas.
4. Here is an article on collaborative grading (meaning that instructors collaborate to assess how each student is doing). This is an extremely overdue measure for us to take on the liberal arts side of our institutional house. We need to be assessing students, not isolated work done in isolated courses. The article is by Veronical Boix-Mansilla and is called Productive Shifts: Faculty Growth through Collaborative Assessment of Student Interdisciplinary Work.

In closing, a great example of the harmfulness of grades is IMO in Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament in which he imagines a scenario in which music was taught like math --with high-stakes grading, laborious memorization, and so forth. Obviously not many people end up wanting to do math, and grant funds flow to anyone basically who thinks they have a clue as to how to teach math better. This is a particularly relevant cautionary tale at our school because we get the benefits of how the arts are typically taught: in other words the students who come to our school are with few exceptions excited about their work. If math were taught as an art, there may be more students who would care passionately about it and hence pursue it as a major involvement. Another angle or artifact of this is that arts-oriented public schools seem to fare pretty well.  Reynolds High School in in our local area (it's in Winston-Salem NC), which gets way way more applicants for an arts-infused high school than they can admit.

Finally, a quick note of humor about a type of grading practice that one of my colleagues assures me is ancient. See video below for a 29-second introduction to this timeless form of grading!