October 20, 2023 - Entrance Slip - Marks, Grades and Their Effects in Schooling

I believe that assigning a letter grade/percentage onto students' work is not an effective way of determining their learning in a course. As stated in the article, many students suffer a great deal from stress and/or anxiety when it comes to testing specifically and when grades are presented as a percentage/letter. Students worry about doing well, which could result in them not doing as well as they would have with less stress and anxiety. Another aspect of percentage/letter grades is that students focus more on the grades they are receiving than on the actual aspect of learning; they use memorization to get through the unit rather than attempting to understand the materials. I do believe there are some positives to letter grades, it provides a sense of accomplishment for the student when they receive a good grade and it can help to show students where they are at in their learning. However, I believe this could be done more beneficially through direct feedback rather than a student having to interpret a percentage or a letter grade. The negatives I find using this grading system is that too much of the focus for students is on the grade itself, not on understanding the content. Using this grading system, students feel more pressured to get the best grades, they are constantly comparing themselves to others rather than focusing on improving their learning. “The competition among students resulting from grade comparison may be interpreted by some as a positive motivator, but others would argue grades are a poor substitute for self-motivated learning.” I agree that having competitiveness between students regarding grades is not a good lesson. Our role as educators should be to motivate students to want to learn, to show students why they should be interested in what they are doing during the majority of their young lives. As I don't believe a letter/percentage grade actually reflects a students understanding, I could envision teaching math and physics without this grading system. “The education system is supposed to value learning, yet we hold students and teachers accountable based on percentages and test scores as if they reliably and accurately measure learning.” As grades are the majority of students’ stresses, dismissing this grading practice and measuring learning based on how students interact with the content and allow them to solely focus on increasing their knowledge at their own pace, I believe we could see a vast change in both science and mathematics. Students' interests in the subjects would increase and thus they would take more from the classes than memorizing in order to achieve that perfect ‘A’.