Our grading game is failing students

When confronted with failure, it’s easy for students to feel ashamed or believe success is too far out of reach. But if we can help students redefine what a mistake is, we can teach them a valuable lesson about improvement and learning. Teach your students that the purpose of school isn’t to have all the answers already. It’s to learn new things and grow as
individuals. This mentality helps students develop self-confidence.

Einstein and Newton, Sir CV Raman and Thomas Jefferson, Tagore and Galileo were never given grades. Today, grades define the contours of our educational system. Our society is structurally dependent on grading performance. The best jobs go to the students with the best grades at the best universities, who in turn accept students with the best grades. I don’t like seeing my students fail, but I don’t understand how promoting children who are not up to the mark is beneficial.

We want students to dream big, take risks, and engage in out-of-box divergent thinking. Grades, ideally intended as an effective means to learn, have transformed into a goal in itself. Grades force students to rote-learn to pass the exam, often disregarding true comprehension of the subject matter. The one-dimensional character of grades does not measure the multidimensional character of students.

Grading is about standards. Standards imply judgement. Grading is a perpetually thorny issue. No one can assign perfect grades, but everyone acknowledges the necessity of doing so. Maybe this predicament is caused not by the standards but by the way we apply them, or fail to apply them.

Promoting a student who should rightly fail — I call it “fixing”. We often “fix” their grades so easily and, that too, with such high marks! We are creating “masters” without any expertise. Unfortunately, teachers nowadays are helpless as their jobs are at stake. No one wants to step on the toes of their students and college management.

Teaching is a noble profession that shapes the character, calibre, and future of an individual. Teachers are expected to be highly responsible because their efforts affect everyone. We, as teachers, are supposed to shape these rough stones into polished diamonds, rather than unleash qualified quacks on an unsuspecting public.
A good teacher makes a poor student good and a good student better.

“Nobody fails in my class!” — all teachers have heard this at one time or another. Changing grades is the most undermining contribution to a student’s failure, but above all else, it invalidates you. How easy is it to upgrade or how nonchalantly a peer might say ‘Let’s just give him a 65 and get him out of here”! This is “business”.

I am not suggesting that we fire every teacher who has ever changed a grade, or criminally prosecute them. Report cards are legal documents. If you are a teacher who has altered one or one hundred grades, you get to see yourselves in the mirror of accountability at some point in your career.

Teachers love to say that they “teach all other professions”. This is true. You are the only person who can develop yourself, and the only way is to give accurate grades, set benchmarks and goals, and create strategies.

If a student is failing, let him, on his own. No one knows you or your students better than you. Students are passing their classes, but are performing poorly on their standardised tests such as NEET, SAT, VQE, etc. If students’ quarterly averages were in sync with standardised tests, why are they failing?

By inflating student grades, we are “passing” the student. But we will be “failing” them for the rest of their lives as quacks. By altering a grade, we are changing the face of education.

Less than one-third of high school graduates are “college-ready” and a majority require remedial English and math work. Almost 90% of engineering graduates are not even able to write 10 lines of code. But didn’t they earn sufficient grades to pass their classes? We “graduated” them, didn’t we? Colleges accepted them, didn’t they? So where did it all go wrong?

College authorities want results; parents want results; students want results! And teachers like us are providing these results. So we have a system where there is no reprimand and, thus, no quality control. Adding fuel to the fire, the students who pass with “flying colours” join back as teachers. And the show goes on because the show must go on.

(The writer is former
vice chancellor, Bangalore
University)